Fredericksburg’s City Council voted early Wednesday morning to create a Technology Overlay District, ushering in by-right data center development in a portion of the city known as Celebrate Virginia South.
The votes, which were unanimous, followed a five-and-a-half-hour meeting that filled council chambers to capacity, prompting Fredericksburg Fire Chief Mike Jones to declare that no one else could enter unless someone left.
The marathon meeting came less than a week after the city’s planning commission recommended denying approval of the TOD in a 4-3 vote, which came after a motion to recommend approval failed 4-2, with one abstention.
“Everyone here said we didn’t listen to the planning commission. That’s not true,” said Vice Mayor Chuck Frye (Ward 1). “The recommendations they made are in here. We took the [planning commission’s] input, and it’s within this document right here… The document will be available to the public tomorrow.”
“Today,” corrected Mayor Kerry Devine, referring to the late, er, early hour.
Tuesday’s meeting also featured the first public mention of a so-called “end user” for the TOD. Attorney Charlie Payne, who represents an applicant who owns the 63-acre NEON property, told councilors that “my client is working with STACK [Infrastructure] for the purposes of working together to develop a data center campus.”
Several residents who attended Tuesday’s meeting held up signs decrying the environmental and noise pollution effects of data center development, concerns that were voiced repeatedly at the dais. In total, 36 people spoke during public comment with an additional 38 submitting letters that were read aloud. A majority of commenters opposed approval of the project.
However, longtime school board member Jarvis Bailey told councilors that the revenue from data centers “would have a transformative impact on your budget, which will have a transformative impact on the schools’ budget.”
During discussions prior to voting, Councilor Will Mackintosh (at-large) asked Economic and Tourism Development Director Josh Summits to provide a sense of scale regarding data center development elsewhere in the region.
According to Summits, approximately 50 million square feet of data centers have either been approved or are at some point along the entitlement process region-wide. By contrast, Fredericksburg’s TOD could accommodate at most 2.5 million square feet of data center campuses, Summits said.
“No matter what, the citizens of Fredericksburg are going to be bearing the environmental and economic costs of data centers in our region,” Mackintosh said. “If we vote no this evening, what we’re saying to our residents is that we don’t think you should have the upsides of this. We think you should shoulder the downsides, but not get any of the upsides that come with the revenue.”
