King George County residents came out in droves for a public hearing to discuss a proposed data center during the most recent board of supervisors meeting.
Residents spoke from the podium at the Revercomb Building, where the meeting was held. They also called in to express their concerns and had their emails read by board members.
They discussed every potential pitfall of data centers, from electricity and water use to noise disturbances.
“I have some questions,” said Anna Beth Tanner, a lifelong resident who returned to the county to teach sixth-grade science at King George Middle School. “What happens when the technology is outdated or the tech companies have created better ways of storing data? … To quote the Sierra Club, they will live as a giant hunk of concrete long after its tech company occupants have decamped.”
The supervisors voted unanimously to defer a vote on the Green Energy Ventures project until their meeting on Feb. 17. GEV is requesting a rezoning from Agricultural to Industrial in order to construct the 13-building data center campus, which will span approximately 300 acres at the northwest intersection of Kings Highway and Bloomsbury Road.
The company held a second public hearing to address a special-exception permit request to allow the buildings to exceed 50 feet in height. That request is contingent on the rezoning ruling.
Supervisors Ken Stroud of the James Madison District and William Davis of the Dahlgren District said they understand the desire of the residents to maintain agriculturally-zoned land, but each added that the county has many expenses that will require tax revenue from projects like data centers.
“A lot of the people who are against [expressed] environmental concerns, affecting the birds, the bees, stuff like that — animals, reproducing, all that stuff,” Stroud said … “If you listen to them and go by those comments, there won’t be any data centers anywhere. There won’t be any cars. There won’t be any industrial complex, and they’ll be eating honey, I guess. I don’t know where they’ll get it from. But the thing is, I didn’t hear anybody that came up and spoke against this say how they are going to pay for all the bills that the county has.”
Davis said community members reach out to him to say that firefighters, teachers, and law enforcement officers need to be paid more. County voters also approved a $57 million bond referendum in 2024 to construct a new elementary school. Davis said if the county doesn’t approve major industrial projects, the only way to pay for those needs is to raise taxes.
“Demand, demand, demand, demand,” Davis said. “And when someone comes with an offer to give us a solution to some of those issues, everyone says ‘No, no, no,’ but no one ever says, ‘Well, we should do this instead.’”
Newly elected Supervisor Bryan Metts of the James Monroe District said that when he was on the campaign trail last spring, he began looking into the GEV project, which has been in the works since 2022.
Metts noted that the number of buildings has since dropped from 22 to 13; the height of landscaping berms to mask the facility increased from 12 feet to 16 feet; setbacks went from 200 to 250 feet; and the company pledged to place its 95-foot buildings toward the back of the campus with 65-foot structures in the front.
Metts also said the project is “clearly in the [State] Route 3 West Primary Settlement Area.”
“Nobody is asking to modify that settlement area,” Metts said. “Every other data center project that’s come in here had to ask to change the settlement area.”
Still, county resident Mark Morgan said he’s “bewildered” that an exception to the county’s height limit is being considered.
Morgan criticized the supervisors for not updating the county’s comprehensive plan, which was last revised in 2019.
“Everybody else is dictating a plan for King George County,” Morgan said. “Why do we not have a plan? Because the current board has not done the due diligence to seek guidance from the citizens in putting forth a new comprehensive plan. We are pushing two years behind on a comprehensive plan, and we are being overrun with all these kinds of issues, and this [project] is one of the issues.”
The meeting went on for more than six hours. While the applicants attempted to answer the community’s questions about the project, Board Chair David Sullins encouraged them to return with answers when the supervisors are slated to vote next month.
