The reason data centers are attractive to local governments is that they promise to generate lots of tax revenue, and, in Stafford, that notion is already becoming a reality.
But two county supervisors said Tuesday night that they aren’t interested in data center money for money’s sake.
In a presentation to the board of supervisors, Stafford Commissioner of the Revenue Scott Mayausky said that the Stack Infrastructure limited liability company that’s building a large data center campus on Eskimo Hill Road is already the county’s third-largest taxpayer at $2.8 million annually, behind Amazon’s distribution operation at $3.7 million, and Virginia Electric and Power Company, a subsidiary of Dominion Energy, at $3.2 million.
And Stack is not even finished constructing its project on roughly 500 acres near the Rappahannock Regional Landfill. The property is slated for 19 data centers, facilities that house computer systems used for data storage and processing.
“Even though they don’t have a building, they’re already our third-highest taxpayer based on the value of the land that was rezoned,” Mayausky said.
That means the project should generate even more local revenue in the future, the commissioner said, including taxes on six associated electric substations that will bring in a combined more than $100,000 by themselves.
And the Stack venture, approved by the supervisors about a year ago, is only one example of a data center’s tax revenue. Stafford’s entire commercial tax base is only about $12.5 million, Mayausky said.
“So it would take a lot from other industries to make up that volume of revenue that data centers do,” he said.
However, board Chairman Deuntay Diggs said that the notion that he and his colleagues are worried only about money isn’t true.
Some data center opponents say that generating revenue shouldn’t come at the expense of what they see as downsides, including concerns over the noise data centers create as well as their potential to overuse water for cooling.
“But revenue is a part of the conversation,” Diggs said. “And so, you know, from my perspective, no one business is going to be the answer to all of our challenges. But we have to have some real conversations in terms of, yes, we want to protect the environment. Yes, we want to protect people’s homes.
“But we also want people to be able to stay in the homes that they’ve lived in for 20-plus years, and so there’s a lot to this.”
Aquia District Supervisor Monica Gary also said it’s easy to get distracted by the argument that data centers are all about money.
“You know, I was sitting here reflecting, and I do like to look at a budget as a moral document, not just a fiscal document,” Gary said. “And, if we were broke, we couldn’t do anything for the people that we were elected to serve and that we care about, which is why we ran for office in the first place.”
After Tuesday’s meeting, though, members of the data center watchdog group Protect Stafford talked about the issue in the county government center parking lot, and they clearly weren’t swayed by the supervisors’ comments.
Group member Abby Carter said she felt like county staff were told to come to the meeting and “completely negate” what a county Planning Commission subcommittee recommended as environmental protections from data centers.
And the money part?
“It’s all about the money,” Carter said.
