OPINION: Making Responsible Data Center Decisions
City Council member Will Mackintosh, At Large, on the current state of the data center discussion.
By Will Mackintosh
Last week, the City of Fredericksburg’s Planning Commission held a marathon five-hour meeting discussing the proposed Technology Overlay District (TOD) that would enable a data center campus in the Celebrate Virginia South area of the city.
The meeting ended with a somewhat head-scratching result: the Planning Commission voted 4-3 against moving the TOD ordinance forward, but they also adopted a set of recommended changes to the ordinance that they voted against.
I cannot blame them for reaching this ambiguous result; as I have been arguing for the past month, our decision on the TOD is a tough one that requires weighing pros and cons to arrive at what’s best for the city. The members of our Planning Commission deliberated seriously and in good faith over this question, and the ambiguous implication of their final vote reflects how truly difficult this decision is.
Regardless, the decision is now on City Council’s agenda, to be taken up at our meeting on February 25. We are charged with taking the Planning Commission’s recommendation into consideration, but the decision before us contains a much broader array of factors than theirs did.
The Planning Commission exists to advise City Council on matters of land use, so they considered the TOD ordinance as a question of land use. Council must consider data centers as a land use issue, to be sure, but we also must consider them as an economic development opportunity and as an investment that will have a significant impact on the city’s budget. In other words, we must consider it as a land use issue, but we cannot consider it solely as a land use issue.
As a pure land use matter, a data center campus is a questionable idea. But considered as a land use matter that will have a potentially transformative impact on our city budget and therefore all the things we can do as a community, it becomes a tougher call. Ultimately, if we arrive at a different decision than the Planning Commission, it is because we must consider a much larger universe of issues when making our decision.
Of course, we cannot ignore the land use concerns; as I have said repeatedly, if we’re going to have a data center campus, we must do so in a way that maximizes the upsides and minimizes the downsides. Thus, we must take the second half of the Planning Commission’s vote—their suggestions for amendments to the ordinance—seriously.
Several of those recommendations call for clarification of policies that already have consensus on City Council, like requiring the use of wastewater effluent (“purple pipe water”) for cooling; requiring any onsite water treatment capacity to discharge back to the city’s wastewater treatment plant rather than to the river; and clarifying that not only the data centers but also accessory buildings be invisible from the river. These requirements were part of our discussions on the ordinance already, but suggestions for clarification and tighter language are always welcome.
The Planning Commission also recommended changes to the parts of the ordinance that regulate noise. They suggested that “daytime” be defined as 7 AM to 9 PM for noise purposes, that noise limitations should be met at the property line as well as at any point on adjacent parcels, and that generator testing should not get an exemption from noise regulation.
They recommended tweaking setbacks and height limits, including increasing the setback from adjoining residential uses while decreasing the setback from nonresidential uses like streets, and decreasing the height limit to 70 feet, enough to accommodate a 2-story facility rather than a 3-story one. They called for removing the minimum campus size for data centers within the TOD, and for the data center campus to minimize impact on existing trails and provide new trail access where possible.
Finally, the Planning Commission recommended some policies that likely fall outside of the scope of the TOD ordinance itself, including calling for a comprehensive water services agreement that addresses both temporary “bridging” use of potable water and the development of a water reuse system in the same agreement, and making that agreement subject to a public hearing. They also specified that the developer should purchase 100% clean energy for the facility.
These recommendations all strike me as worthy of consideration. Some are no-brainers, while others will require further consideration. I am particularly concerned that removing the minimum campus size will saddle the city with a bunch of smaller data centers rather than one integrated campus, which will both require more infrastructure and will also generate less revenue. It’s clearly in the city’s best interest that the TOD be developed as a single integrated campus, so we need to carefully craft a policy that will achieve that objective.
Regardless of the final outcome, the Planning Commission’s recommendations are all serious, thoughtful suggestions that will shape the TOD going forward, even if Council’s broader scope of consideration ultimately leads us to a different conclusion.
As the Planning Commission highlighted last week, the proposed ordinance makes data centers a by-right use in the TOD as long as those data centers meet all the requirements we lay out in the ordinance. The overlay district allows us to achieve the same outcome as a special use permit—allowing a data center only under the conditions we set—but in a slower, more thoughtful, more community-oriented way.
If we were to use a special use permit, we would be crafting those conditions in response to a developer’s specific proposal. Using an overlay district, we can achieve the same effect while having that community deliberation on our own terms.
Through this ongoing dialogue among elected leaders, appointed officials, and members of the community, the city is crafting the details of a potential data center campus on its own terms, according to our own best judgment about maximizing upsides and minimizing downsides. In preparation for the Council meeting next week, city staff have put together a long memo outlining all the twists and turns of this community conversation; I would strongly urge you to read through it to see how we have worked to achieve consensus over the past few months.
Personally, I have spent many hours this winter talking about data centers with hundreds of Fredericksburg residents, at community meetings, on social media, at street-corner protests, and over coffee dates set up for the purpose. I am extremely proud of the care and thoughtfulness with which the community has approached the challenge of weighing pros and cons of this serious decision.
Will Mackintosh is a member of Fredericksburg City Council. He can be reached at wbmackintosh@fredericksburgva.gov.
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