History was made Tuesday night at the Stafford County Board of Supervisors meeting.
In a 6-to-1 vote, the supervisors approved the county’s largest data center project to date.
Hirschler Fleischer attorney Charlie Payne, representing Stafford Technology LC, proclaimed it the “largest private economic development project” in Stafford’s history.
The board voted to allow 504 acres on both sides of Eskimo Hill Road to be rezoned from agricultural to light industrial with the intent that the property become a data center campus with 23 buildings and six electric substations. The campus itself is estimated at approximately 5.5 million square feet.
The campus is sited near the Rappahannock Regional Landfill, a former penitentiary and the sheriff’s office firing range.
“This checks about every box that the county envisioned in its comprehensive plan,” Payne said.
The project includes the construction of a connector road between Richmond Highway and Eskimo Hill Road. A late proffer also includes about four acres of land for a new fire station on State Shop Road.
The developer, Peterson Cos., has also agreed to fund $58 million in capital improvement projects for the county, including a bridging project that would bring water and sewer infrastructure into the central part of the county.
“Because we do not have water in that general area, we are working on connecting Lake Mooney and Smith Lake, so we have some redundancy in the system,” said Stafford Deputy County Administrator Mike Morris. “To get the water to this general area, we had in our CIP to construct improvements of the next three to four years. Now these improvements will be taken care of by the applicant at no cost to us.”
The amount of water required to cool the equipment inside data centers has been a concern for residents and officials at every turn, as they wonder where that water comes from and where it ends up. Tapping into an existing water supply can lead to groundwater depletion or potential contamination. Some companies are turning to liquid cooling or solid-state cooling technologies to avoid the issue altogether.
Supervisor Crystal Vanuch (Rock Hill District) was the only vote against the project. Vanuch stated that she was still concerned about the phasing of the project and the use of potable water during the construction of a water reuse system, sometimes called a “purple pipe system,” being built by Amazon for its Potomac Church Road facility.
“It was never the county’s intent to give access to our drinking water to data centers in perpetuity,” Vanuch said.
Payne replied that the conditions agreed to are outlined in the water service agreement created for the project despite not appearing in the proffers. “We think it’s more appropriate in the WSA,” he said.
“We are not taking capacity away from Stafford citizens with the infrastructure we are building for temporary bridging water,” Payne added. “And as for power concerns, Dominion controls the transmission corridor in the Commonwealth. We are all part of the PJM market (the regional transmission organization) … we are all impacted by the power supply in that market.”
In other board action, the board passed a resolution denying the formation of a Regional Transporation Authority, 4 to 3 with Supervisors Monica Gary, Deuntay Diggs and Pamela Yeung voting against. Supervisors noted that, due to other localities backing out of the arrangement, it made little sense for Stafford to expend energy and money for the time being.
A resolution to acquire a minimum of 80 acres of land for a multi-department central services complex was unanimously approved. The site is intended to house the utility field operations facility, plus space for capital projects, sheriff’s office, fire and rescue, parks and recreation and school uses.
Charlie Payne, a person central to this article, is an attorney for Hirschler Fleischer, a major donor to the Free Press.
