Tag: Beth Macy

The data center runaround continues

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Just one week after the chairman of Staunton’s Economic Development Authority tried to assure city residents that when it comes to data centers they have nothing to worry about, Staunton’s mayor followed suit. Michele Edwards’s three-page calming of the waters, read into the record (see here, starting around the 49-minute mark) at the Sept. 10 city council meeting, was considerably longer than the brief remarks offered Sept. 3 by Billy Vaughn, but otherwise covered the same ground:

  • There is no data center being built at Staunton Crossing, nor has an application for such a center been received;
  • The idea of recruiting a data center for Staunton Crossing dates back to 2019 (in reality, 2018), when it became part of the city’s marketing plan for the industrial park;
  • Despite the marketing plan, the city’s zoning code does not permit data centers and would have to be amended to allow such a project;
  • Any necessary changes to the zoning ordinance would have to go through an appropriate review process, including public hearings—so, in essence, no need for Staunton residents to be concerned about a data center sneaking into town.

If only it were so simple.

In addition to the above similarities, Vaughn’s and Edwards’s assurances both ignored the fundamental question of why a data center is being pursued in the first place—thereby raising all the angst to which they have half-heartedly responded. It’s as though the two of them were poking at an ant hill while simultaneously saying “Don’t worry—they won’t bite. Look at the length of my stick!” But why poke it in the first place?

The “stick” in this analogy is the city’s zoning code, which is more of a slender reed than either Vaughn or Edwards will admit. Staunton Crossing is zoned partially B-2, General Business District, and partially I-2, Heavy Industrial District. Both classifications incorporate the permitted uses of their more restrictive counterparts, which means that any use permitted in I-1, Light Industrial District, is also permitted in I-2. None of these district ordinances make any reference whatsoever to data centers. Indeed, Staunton’s entire zoning code is silent on the subject, presumably because such centers were never envisioned as a possibility.

That’s important to remember when Vaughn states that Staunton Crossing’s zoning “does not permit data centers,” or when Edwards echoes with the assertion that “data centers were not, and still are not, a permitted use in the City of Staunton.” The agnostic zoning code neither allows nor disallows such centers. It simply turns a blind eye to the very idea, leaving the whole thing open to speculation and wild-assed interpretation.

By comparison, Staunton has had no problem articulating just what kinds of industries it does not want. The I-2 zoning description includes 53 prohibited uses, much of it reading like a century-old inventory of industrial processes, from candle and gunpowder manufacture to fat rendering and leather tanning. Yet for all that specificity, there is not one prohibited use that can be associated with high tech, such as semiconductor manufacturing. In most respects, the zoning ordinance is an antiquated tool that hasn’t kept up with the times.

(As an aside that speaks to the sensibilities of those who crafted these rules: among the permitted uses in the I-1 district are “adult businesses,” which receive a page-and-a-half of rules micromanaging their operations—far more than for any other endeavor.)

There also are various loopholes carved out for the heavy industrial district, starting with the caveat that its “regulations are designed to permit the development of the district for almost any industrial uses”—a invitation so broad that it presumably led to the highly specific list of exceptions. The industrial ordinance also asserts that, after review, “other uses of the same general character and compatible with those uses” already permitted in the ordinance also may be allowed. It’s worth noting, therefore, that those permitted uses include public utility service yards or electrical receiving or transforming stations—uses one could claim are analogous to a building full of electrical switches, which is one definition of a data center. Other potentially analogous permitted uses include warehouses and solar energy facilities (a rare contemporary note).

A general business district, meanwhile, allows “processing and manufacturing establishments that are not objectionable because of smoke, odor, dust or noise when the processing and manufacturing activity is conducted entirely within a completely enclosed building and where there is no storage or supplies or equipment on the premises outside the building.” It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how that passage alone could undergird an argument about processing establishments—data centers—that are never mentioned by name or specific function within the city’s guidelines.

The point here is not to provide a road map for someone seeking to build a data center in Staunton, but simply to point out the hollow nature of the reassurances our local officials are providing. In doing so, they frittered away an opportunity for leadership on an increasingly contentious issue—one so of the moment that Congressional candidate Beth Macy, for example, recently pledged to work toward a moratorium on new data centers until new guardrails can be built around their development.

“Up and down the Shenandoah Valley, big tech developers are coming into rural communities, getting local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements, and steamrolling local opposition,” she wrote on her campaign Facebook page following a visit to Shenandoah County, where a hotly contested 2-million-square-foot data center has been approved for construction by the Strasburg town council. That project is being planned for the town’s 80-acre industrial park, which is a third the size of Staunton Crossing.

Our local officials can tell us until they’re blue in the face that we don’t need to worry about that sort of thing happening in Staunton because our zoning ordinances protect us. But that claim becomes at least questionable to anyone who reads the ordinances, and it becomes farcical in the context of a Staunton Crossing marketing plan that promotes itself as “the perfect destination for businesses in a range of industries, including . . .  data centers.”

That’s perfect, all right. Just perfect.

Looks like Cline won’t have to worry

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

Would-be politician Beth Macy spoke before a packed and supportive Staunton audience last night, in what should have been a rousing call to arms to unhorse the horse’s ass currently representing Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District. Unfortunately, the former journalist seems to have forgotten one of the prime directives drilled into all cub reporters, “Show, don’t tell.” In doing so, she foreshadowed yet another easy win for MAGA Republican Ben Cline.

Holding forth at The Frenchmen restaurant in Staunton’s old railroad station at an event hosted by the Staunton Democratic Committee, Macy appeared not to have received the news that she has no primary opponents—that a May 15 U.S. Supreme Court decision had put a last nail into Virginia Democrats’ redistricting efforts. That ended any chance the Sixth District would be reconfigured this year to make it less of a red swamp, resulting in an exodus of potential contenders. And, just like that, Macy became the last Democratic candidate standing in a district that Cline has carried by 60% or more in four consecutive elections.

So why is Macy still so intent on introducing herself as if this were last November? Given an opportunity to rally several dozen potential shock troops with an impassioned denouncement of her only opponent, Macy instead chose once again to put her major focus on burnishing her working-class credentials, while also—yet again—recounting her risk-taking journalism in going after Big Pharma. She had grown up Appalachian-poor in a small Ohio town. Her dad was a military vet, her husband a schoolteacher. She had raised one child who is trans and another who is gay. All her life and that of her family has been a struggle, Macy kept repeating, and that’s why she’s a fighter and that’s why she’ll be a fighter on behalf of the rest of us.

But someone else wrote Hillbilly Elegy first, and it’s all old news by now, anyway. And for all her talk of being a fighter, Macy landed only a single, glancing blow against her opponent, in lambasting him for taking corporate campaign funding.

That’s not to say that Macy didn’t offer the expected round of complaints about the abysmal state of the union, from cuts to Medicaid and food stamps to the diminished helpfulness of Pell grants to the evisceration of the Veterans Administration and its medical resources. But it was all rather bloodless, with few connections linking such carnage to Cline. Where was the itemization of particularly callous Cline votes, the recitation of Cline’s dismissive statements about the very real needs of his constituents, the detailed condemnation of Cline’s coziness with political and religious extremists and zealots?  And on other pressing issues of direct importance to a largely rural, agricultural district, there was barely a murmur. What, for example, has Cline done for farmers battered by soaring costs of fuel oil and fertilizer—or just as much to the point, what would Macy do in his stead?

We’re past the point of introducing ourselves to voters. With less than five months until the election, it’s time to re-introduce Cline to his constituents, and in such a way that even his most ardent supporters understand just how much he has waged war on their best interests.

In failing to unleash the dogs of war and taking the battle to Cline, Macy lost an opportunity this week to hone that message with a much friendlier audience than the ones she’ll confront this summer in huge swaths of the Sixth. Out in the rural precincts, where the Stars and Bars are still more prevalent than the Stars and Stripes and MAGA’s stench has yet to penetrate, Macy’s “I’m one of y’all” pitch will come across merely as Cline-lite. Unless, of course, she comes out swinging and shows herself to be the fighter she claimed to be this week. Unless, that is, she does more than merely ask us to take her word for it.

Macy’s ‘tough crowd’ was just rude

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

Crystal Graham’s article in the Augusta Free Press today, about the curtain-raiser on the most promising effort to date to depose Rep. Ben Cline, ran under a curious headline: “Beth Macy faces tough crowd in Waynesboro, first stop on listening tour.” I didn’t think so—and have to hope Macy didn’t, either.

A Roanoke resident, former reporter for the Roanoke Times & World News and author of several books on contemporary social issues, Macy last week became the third Democrat to announce a bid to challenge Cline in next year’s mid-terms. This is her first foray into politics, so give Macy credit for skipping the easy stuff and plunging right into the belly of the beast: the Congressional Sixth District, despite embracing a handful of Democratic cities, is as reliably red-meat MAGA country as you can find, and the oleaginous Cline has oozed into every one of its Republican crevices. Since winning his seat in 2018 by thumping a hapless Jennifer Lewis, 59.7% to 40.2%, Cline has not had a lower margin in three subsequent elections.

So Macy’s appearance Monday night at the Faded Poppy, on East Main Street, can be fairly characterized as only the most tentative testing of the waters. A “tough crowd” it was not. While Waynesboro has been a reliably red city, it broke blue in this year’s election for the first time, even as it recorded the state’s highest percentage increase in new voter registrations. Perhaps the color switch was thanks to all those new voters, especially as Waynesboro increasingly becomes a bedroom community for notably progressive—and expensive—Albemarle County’s employees. Perhaps it was because of Trump fatigue. Or both. In any case, Macy’s day of reckoning with a salivating MAGA crowd still lies ahead.

But with Graham conceding that “the 40 or so people in attendance were a friendly audience and mostly fellow Democrats,” what prompted the headline assertion about a “tough crowd”? She didn’t explicitly say, but presumably that was a nod to the two audience members who demanded to know why they should expect Macy not to become yet another Washington insider, more intent on satisfying industry lobbyists than on serving her constituents—just another version of Cline, in other words. Macy’s response, which essentially amounted to “trust me,” drew disbelieving sneers. “I’m old enough to have heard that one too many times in my life,” one responded.

Indeed, there is no conceivable answer Macy or any other candidate can provide to such a hypothetical that would satisfy a determined skeptic, given how debased all political discourse has become. No one can predict the future. All we can do is assess a candidate’s character by what he or she has done and hope it’s rooted deeply enough to stand up to future challenges and temptations, and in that regard Macy seems to tick all the boxes. She’s wicked smart, articulate and poised. Her published work is a testament to deeply held concerns and compassion for those who are poor, downtrodden and exploited, affirming a fixed moral compass that is so notably lacking in her putative Republican opponent.

At the end of the day, all any of us can do can do is look at a candidate and trust our ability to take that person’s measure—to trust ourselves, in other words, more than we trust someone else. Without that trust, no assurances of the other person’s merit or integrity will ever fully satisfy.

How well Macy will conduct herself when venturing deeper into the MAGA waters remains to be seen, of course, but her courage in deciding to do so requires at least the benefit of the doubt, if not full-throated endorsement. That can come later. At this point, however, Macy has done or said nothing to merit the skepticism she encountered yesterday—although I don’t think as much can be said of her second interrogator. Holding a cell phone in front of her face throughout the entire “exchange,” apparently so she could record her insightful analysis, the second skeptic speechified for several minutes and was noticeably more interested in how she sounded than in recording the little bit of Macy’s response she grudgingly allowed.

That’s not a tough crowd. It’s an immature, rude crowd of one.