Thomas Johnson spent some time working at Hugh Mercer Elementary School, which means he was already familiar with a couple of the proposed transmission line routes for a data center project discussed at Wednesday’s Fredericksburg Planning Commission meeting.
“With what I see, one goes through the car [rider] line and one goes through the play area,” said Johnson, a planning commissioner. “So, both would be very difficult obstacles for that entity.”
Ultimately, concerns surrounding the transmission lines that would be required to feed power to the proposed 2.1 million square foot campus led to the project’s undoing. The planning commission voted 7-0 to recommend disapproval of a zoning map amendment and special-use permit associated with the application, which was brought by Penzance Development and its associated companies.
“The plan itself is actually a pretty good plan,” Planning Commissioner Dugan Caswell said. “But when you just break it down into detriment and benefit columns, there’s just more facts in the detriment columns than the benefits.”
The application, which the Free Press first reported last year, called for four data center buildings to be constructed at 1500 Gateway Boulevard, an area off Cowan Boulevard known as the “Hylton tract.” The roughly 84 acres were previously under consideration for a Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic that was ultimately built in Spotsylvania County.
According to the application, the project would generate up to $50 million in tax revenue annually and create about 240 jobs.
However, as Planning Commission Vice Chair Carey Whitehead noted, adding a data center outside of the recently-approved Technology Overlay District (TOD) would increase the facilities’ physical footprint in the city from 3.8% of land (assuming full buildout of the TOD) to 5%.
“The last word that we had from city council in 2018 was that we’d like 2% of the area in the city to be dedicated to data centers,” Whitehead said. “It’s more than double what city council said in 2018. I’m interested in the cumulative impacts question, particularly for the water resources.”
While several residents submitted written comments about the project, only one person spoke at the public hearing.
David Corbin told commissioners that he lives on Hotchkiss Place, “which is 640 feet or so away from the [proposed] data center,” he said.
Corbin, who recently moved to the area from Prince William County, or as he dubbed it, “the land of data centers,” stressed the need for screening and noise abatements to mitigate impacts on nearby residential developments.
“Progress happens,” Corbin said. “I remember seeing Richard Pryor at Spotsylvania Mall when it was the mall to go to. We’re not going to stop progress, but we can at least make it beautiful.”
