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Much of tomorrow’s (April 9) Staunton city council meeting, which starts at 7 p.m., will be focused on next year’s budget and proposed increases in utility fees, neither of which is insignificant. But an even weightier matter, because of its long-term repercussions, will be taken up by council members at their work session preceding the regular meeting, when they will be presented with a long overdue “business plan update” for Staunton Crossing. What’s unclear is whether the “update” will include a reexamination of what should be built on this rather expensive chunk of real estate.
For the uninitiated, Staunton Crossing is a 300-acre site at the intersection of I-81 and U.S. 250 that is readily identified by its million-gallon water storage tank, perched on a concrete pillar abutting the interstate. The city purchased this acreage back in 2009 and spent nearly a decade figuring out what to do with it. A comprehensive design was finally prepared by the end of 2018, and millions of dollars have been spent before and since to pave the way for . . . well, that’s the question. Because while this project inched along, the world was hurtling into a once unimaginable future.
Case in point: one of the four core businesses envisioned for Staunton Crossing was, and is, a data center of the sort that has exploded across the country generally, and in Virginia most notably—indeed, the state now leads the nation with 579 such centers. As originally designed, Staunton Crossing’s data center would total more than 800,000 square feet, far exceeding the square footage occupied by offices (375,000), retail (162,300) or advanced manufacturing (a paltry 13,000 square feet). Various alternative options were also advanced, but in all of them the data center component remained unchanged—and, apparently unchallenged.
There are several problems with this, not so much because of bad planning but because what seemed reasonable in 2018 is at least questionable today. Less than a million square feet of data center space might have seemed ambitious eight years ago, but today it’s quite a bit on the small side. The proliferation of data centers, primarily in northern Virginia but in other parts of the state as well, not only makes the Staunton site unremarkable but puts the city at a disadvantage for an industry that tends toward clustering. Most significantly, the explosion of data centers has highlighted just how environmentally taxing and destructive they are, driving up electricity and water consumption—and rates—while threatening air quality with their reliance on fossil fuel generators for back-up power.
The precarious state of Staunton’s water supply has been widely chronicled, due both to the aging-out of its supply infrastructure and because of our repeated drought threats. Local electricity rates, meanwhile, have started climbing after years of being noticeably below those of other states, with Dominion Energy’s overall prices growing 11.6% over the past year and the generation portion of its bill increasing 16.8% over the same period, largely due to rising demand from all those data centers. Over the next year, Dominion ratepayers can expect to see another rate hike of around $11 a month.
There are, in other words, so many red flags popping up around the data center explosion that state lawmakers are mulling a slew of proposed regulatory and legislative constraints, making Virginia an increasingly unattractive option for the industry. The feeling in Staunton should be mutual, but whether tomorrow’s business plan update will go in that direction remains to be seen. One line in the power-point presentation prepared by the Timmons Group at least raises the possibility: on the “Current Trends” slide, item 4 is “AI Site Elimination vs Site Selection.” My vote would be for the first half of that equation.
One final note, sparked by that same slide. No. 6 on the list of current trends is the perennial question, “Where will my employees live?” Ironically, the original discussion of what should go into Staunton Crossing included the possibility of workforce housing—a possibility that was inexplicably dropped, with no known record of the thinking behind the exclusion. Eight years later, that looks remarkably short-sighted.
Looking askance 