The Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors and planning commission went back to the drawing board Tuesday night, holding a joint work session to again discuss design standards for data centers on land zoned Industrial.
The board previously agreed to advertise 1,000-foot setbacks for the industry, but two board members said at a meeting two weeks ago that they’d had a change of heart.
When the boards gathered on Tuesday, the supervisors did most of the talking. In the end, the supervisors voted 4-3 to advertise 300-foot vegetated buffers and 400-foot setbacks from residential property lines. They later added hospitals, daycares, parks, places of worship, and public and private schools to the proposed ordinance.
The series of votes made by the board also includes data centers across the street from those facilities, except parks. The actions are not final. The design standards must go through the planning commission and board of supervisors for public hearings.
Supervisor Drew Mullins of the Courtland District made the motion for the setback requirement. The motion was supported by Gerald Childress of the Chancellor District, Deborah Frazier of the Salem District, and Kevin Marshall of the Berkeley District.
Board Chair Chris Yakabouski (Battlefield District), Lori Hayes (Lee Hill District) and Jacob Lane (Livingston District) voted against the motion.
The three dissenters prefer a special-use permit for all data centers, but when that vote failed earlier this year, they favored 1000-foot setbacks.
Lane began the meeting by introducing the prospect of a 750-foot setback, noting that last week the Stafford County Board of Supervisors had settled on that amount.
After Lane was rebuffed, Childress proposed going with the planning commission’s original recommendation of 100-foot buffers and 300-foot setbacks. Mullins made a friendly amendment to slightly increase the distances.
Both Childress and Marshall lamented that the board never seriously considered the planning commission’s recommendation.
“When this planning commission recommendation was sent to us, and all seven of us are guilty of it, we never gave it a fair shake,” Marshall said. “We went into discussion on SUPs. We never went line-by-line to discuss … We went back and forth over SUPs and 1,000-foot setbacks and we never really got nothing accomplished.”
Hayes disagreed with that sentiment, saying that she watched the planning commission meeting, knew what their recommendations were, and still vehemently opposed them.
“I do pay attention,” Hayes said … “I already knew what I wanted to do from that point. What I wanted to do was an SUP because it was the best way to move forward.”
