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This past week, the lead outside consultant for developing Staunton Crossing finally said the quiet part out loud.
Appearing before the Economic Development Authority at its monthly meeting, Tim Davey of the Timmons Group rattled through a long-awaited 30-minute update of the industrial park’s master and marketing plans, first promised this past spring. There were Power Point slides and lots of numbers that have yet to be made publicly available. Different scenarios were mentioned, mixing and matching various combinations of land uses. Pharmaceutical centers, first flagged by Davey for the city council in April, got prominent mention as the next big thing, with nods to recent multi-billion-dollar projects in Albemarle, Richmond and Elkton.
It was all a bit breathless. Davey speaks in complete sentences and unbroken paragraphs, without pause or verbal tics, information pouring out of him in an unbroken stream. Let your mind drift and you’ll suddenly find yourself several miles downriver, struggling to get reoriented. Through it all, however, one thread became discernible: In the central tension between Staunton Crossing as a generator of good jobs vs. Staunton Crossing as a contributor to the city’s tax base, the balance clearly has shifted—at least in Davey’s mind—toward the latter.
Whereas the original plan called for 1.9 million square feet of development to provide up to 3,250 quality jobs, generating more than $4 million in annual tax revenues, the revision calls for 1.2 million square feet with 2,900 quality jobs and $9.8 million in tax revenues. Less land used and 11% fewer jobs created, but with more than twice as much money for the city’s coffers.
Key to that shift, aside from the possibility of capital-intensive drug manufacturing, remains (of course!) the holy grail of a data center. Mentioned almost tangentially at several points in Davey’s firehose of a presentation, a data center was listed as one of five recruitment targets and as a “nice revenue generator.” At more than $200,000 an acre in tax returns, a data center occupying the entirety of the Staunton Crossing site would provide the city with more than $26 million in taxes a year—not something Davey was recommending, he stressed, just something he was mentioning to show what was possible.
Uh-huh.
But then came the quiet part. The Economic Development Authority and the City Council should “decide on terms to include data centers as a target use going forward,” Davey’s presentation advised. Among other things that includes the advice to “update zoning to allow all target land uses ‘by right’” because, quite frankly, potential prospects “want to avoid public hearings.” Of course they do—and none more than developers of data centers, which are now opposed by 70% or more of the American public.
Here’s the scary part. The six other members of the Economic Development Authority, as frozen by Davey’s rat-a-tat presentation as deer in an illegal hunter’s headlights, sat without a response to authority chairman Billy Vaughn’s “any questions?” prompting. Instead, the silence dragged on after Davey finished his presentation, the members looking back and forth at each other as if to say, what now? And then, at what might have been the last possible moment before Davey folded up his tent and went away, City Council member Jeff Overholzer—there not as an EDA representative but as the council’s liaison—piped up. Would Davey give a more specific explanation of the bullet-point about “data centers as a targeted use.” What, exactly, was Davey looking for?
“Yes or no,” came the succinct reply.
Which was to say, is Staunton serious about pursuing a data center or not? And if it is, what would that entail?
That opened up the flood gates a wee bit, resulting in another 20 minutes of back and forth about the vision and also its dark side. Noise, air pollution, water and power consumption were all mentioned, as was the inevitability of on-site back-up generators that would further exacerbate the noise and air pollution produced by this otherwise “clean” industry. Were the city to finally get serious about data center recruitment, the EDA should probably put out a summary of what it wants to see and follow that up with an on-line survey. Davey counseled against public information sessions or hearings, warning they would simply result in people saying the same four things over and over again.
A survey, on the other hand, would be “easy, quick and nimble.”
No mention was made of the long-promised need to amend the city’s zoning code to actually permit data centers, “by right” or otherwise—and that would involve public hearings, yes, and people saying the same four things over and over. But that would be a cross for the Staunton planning commission to bear, and then the city council, and the EDA members would be out of the firing line.
And that apparently suits the EDA just fine. As EDA member Terry Holmes explained at the tail end of the discussion, there’s a lot of public misunderstanding about data centers. The only thing that’s really changed about data centers since 2019 is people’s opinions about them.
Uh-huh.
