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Staunton has a coming-of-age problem. Like a teenager who desires to be one of the cool kids by hanging out with a fast crowd, while simultaneously being repelled or frightened by what that might entail, city leaders are tying themselves up in knots over just what they should do about data centers. And as anyone familiar with teenage angst can tell you, getting all wobbly about core values usually doesn’t end well.
Here’s where we are right now:
Just shy of eight years ago—on Nov. 8, 2018—a group of 30 city and business leaders was convened by the Timmons Group, a civil engineering consulting firm, to come up with a plan for developing a 300-acre economic development site on the east end of Staunton. After a second, similar meeting that tweaked the results of the first, a resulting master plan for Staunton Crossing was approved by city council. The plan envisioned a mix of advanced manufacturing, office, and small retail use—and, yes, a data center.
Eight years later, the master plan remains unchanged even as data centers have fallen into public disfavor, their size and numbers exploding across the American landscape. As loud, voracious consumers of electricity and water, such centers have become widely stigmatized as an environmental burden that exists primarily to serve an artificial intelligence industry viewed with even greater public apprehension. And while the primary purpose of Staunton Crossing ostensibly is to create well-paying jobs, data centers require shockingly few employees once they’re up and running, which begs the question of why the city is pursuing them in the first place.
To be fair, little of that was understood in 2018, when data centers still enjoyed a reputation as a clean industry. But as they’ve proliferated and their hidden costs have become better understood, public concern and opposition have grown nationally and locally. Alarms have sounded, red flags raised. Although the plan for Staunton Crossing contemplates a data center of less than a million square feet, or just a fraction of the size of hyperscale centers capturing today’s headlines elsewhere, that’s still a lot of stress on a city with an aging water infrastructure and on an electric utility with dependability problems. (See here for a good overview of Dominion Energy.) So why even go there?
Moreover, this isn’t a one-and-done. Newly recognized problems associated with data centers keep cropping up, such as the recently announced results of an Arizona State University study that found that the cooling plumes emitted by data centers can raise surrounding community temperatures by four degrees. Or consider industry efforts to deal with the cooling issue by going to two-stage heat exchangers that use far less water—by relying on Pfas “forever chemical” gases. Although the gases are contained in closed-loop systems with no direct emissions, fugitive emissions and the possibility of industrial accidents resulting in environmental releases are raising numerous legal challenges.
Within that context, Staunton’s approach to data centers has been downright two-faced. On the one hand, the city’s marketing materials continue to promote Staunton Crossing as “a prime location for data centers” because of the city’s low risk of natural disasters, as well as the availability of “low-cost and reliable electrical service” from Dominion Energy”—which may come as a surprise to the folks at the Central Shenandoah Planning District, who recently updated the local hazard mitigation plan and noted just how unreliable electric service has become in our area.
On the other hand, city officials repeatedly try to soothe public concerns by observing—correctly, but misleadingly—that the city’s zoning code doesn’t include data centers as a permissible use in its light industrial and general business areas, which is how Staunton Crossing is zoned. So, for all you nervous nellies out there—no reason to worry. Right?
How weirdly passive-aggressive is that? The city recruits data centers for Staunton Crossing—but placates local concerns about data centers by noting that such uses aren’t allowed at Staunton Crossing.
Such reassurances are obviously superficial, since zoning limitations can be undone by amending the code or via a special use variance. But by clinging to such a hollow rationale for maintaining the status quo, city leaders maintain a “having our cake and eating it, too” position, leaving open the possibility that a data center might fall into their laps without their having to take a position on whether that’s actually a good idea. Were that to happen the zoning issue would then have to be addressed, of course, which would mean public hearings and passionate arguments and lots of hard feelings, but with all that sturm und drang overshadowed by the dangling bait of a multi-million-dollar development proposal that the city itself had solicited.
That sounds an awful lot like a strategy ripped from a teenager’s playbook—the one about begging for forgiveness rather than asking for permission,.
Just such juggling was on display at this past Thursday’s meeting of the Economic Development Authority, which had been expected to include a presentation by the Timmons Group of an updated Staunton Crossing business plan. Such an update was teased in early April, when Tim Davey, the group’s director of economic development, conceded to city council that much had changed since the plan was first approved and that it was long overdue for a face lift. But while he acknowledged that data centers have become enormously controversial, Davey nevertheless urged city leaders to leave the basic marketing mix unchanged, suggesting that there are workarounds for perceived problems—workarounds like, say, a small nuclear reactor to meet data center energy needs.
Davey also assured the city council that a refreshed business plan could be ready in as little as 90 days. Five months later, however, the update won’t be aired before the EDA’s next meeting, on Oct. 8, ostensibly because the Sept. 3 meeting had an overly subscribed agenda. Indeed, the data center question would not have arisen at the meeting at all if not for a short statement read at the end of the public session by authority chairman Billy Vaughn, who opened by acknowledging that there have been “numerous inquiries, comments, and questions regarding the current or potential siting of a data center in Staunton Crossing.”
Without describing those concerns, Vaughn went on to claim that since the business plan and its inclusion of a data center “was prepared after public input, the document should not change until public input has been provided.” Repeating the rationale that Staunton Crossing’s zoning is industrial, “which does not permit data centers,” Vaugh concluded that any zoning change would require “public hearings by the Planning Commission with final decision by City Council.”
In other words, let’s kick this can down the road just a wee bit more.
That this kind of temporizing unnecessarily increases stress and anxiety among those paying attention to such things should be obvious, so here’s an idea: why not seek an amendment to the city’s zoning code now, before civic sensibilities get clouded by high-pressure utility and AI lobbyists promoting a data center already recruited by the city’s economic development staff? Why not make the Staunton Crossing pitch for data centers meaningful by holding public hearings to remove the chief regulatory hurdle such a center must clear before one gets enticed to the city? And if those hearings instead unleash widespread and vociferous opposition to making data centers a permitted use, in business or industrial zones or anywhere else, why not amend Staunton Crossing’s marketing plans accordingly? And. Stop. Wasting. Everyone’s. Time.
Such a preemptive move might require political courage and leadership, but one developmental benchmark that marks the transition from bewildered adolescence to adult maturity is the recognition that everything has a price. That there is no free ride. That a crucial trick to living well comes from divining, as best we can, the true cost of something before taking it on.
Looking askance 