Hundreds came out for Western Henrico Neighbors’ meeting Monday to discuss potential Goochland data center development. (Jackie DiBartolomeo photo)
After speaking out at a Monday evening anti-data center community meeting in western Henrico, Cynthia Haas was in Goochland the next morning putting up a related fight in the county courthouse.
Haas, one of four plaintiffs suing Goochland County over its controversial data center-friendly tech overlay district, or TOD, was present at a hearing Tuesday addressing the county’s motion to dismiss the residents’ lawsuit.
Among allegations in the lawsuit are claims that county supervisors and planning commissioners failed to clearly and lawfully explain their adoption of the TOD that was approved last November.
After three hours of arguments from lawyers from both sides, Circuit Judge Timothy Sanner ultimately took the county’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit under advisement, postponing a decision for now.
The demurrer hearing came less than 24 hours after several hundred Henrico and Goochland residents gathered at Christ Church Episcopal in Glen Allen to discuss four potential data center campuses proposed for the eastern portion of Goochland. The meeting was hosted by community group Western Henrico Neighbors.
Projects discussed included the 900-megawatt Tuckahoe Technology Park from developer Tract, which would be located within TOD West, a 900-acre western portion of the overall TOD. Also discussed were three other potential data center developments east and west along Route 288, two near the West Creek loop and one bordering Interstate 64 to the south.
Those other three are all located in the larger TOD and an accompanying technology zone, which together span about 5 miles along Route 288, from I-64 south to Patterson Avenue. The TOD area is bordered to the west by Hockett Road and spans roughly 4,400 acres, with about 3,500 of those acres within West Creek Business Park, controlled by Pruitt Associates.
A map of Goochland’s TOD district. (Courtesy Goochland County)
The new district allows for by-right uses such as pharmaceutical plants, biomedical researchers and data centers, and will permit, via conditional use permits within the district, a “utility generating facility” – either a small modular nuclear reactor or a natural gas peaking plant.
According to a State Corporation Commission regulatory filing from July 14, and as discussed at the Monday community meeting, the three data center developments proposed within the main TOD area are a 1,200-megawatt project that would bisect Route 288 south of West Creek Medical Park, a 600-megawatt project that would rise on roughly 150 acres off Ashland Road and a 200-megawatt project east of Route 288 and north of Patterson Avenue.
The July 14 filing was related to a hearing over Dominion’s recently approved, approximately $98 million transmission line and substation project that would run 6.5 miles from near Interstate 64 to the north and follow the eastern side of Route 288 southward. The transmission line would bring power to Eli Lilly’s planned $5 billion pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in West Creek, and, potentially, data center developments in the area.
According to the July filing, the unidentified customer for the 1,200-megawatt data center campus has “executed four ELOAs,” or engineering letters of authorization, with Dominion for the project. After an ELOA is issued, projects are placed in a queue for Dominion, where a project can sit for years before a feasibility study is done on a site and a construction letter of authorization, or CLOA, is executed.
For the potential 600-megawatt campus off Ashland Road, a representative of the property landowner, Rockville/H2 LLC, testified in the filing that “one company has expressed confidence that these properties could be a three building, 600 MW data center site.”
For the potential 200-megawatt facility, just south of the 1,200-megawatt facility, an ELOA had been issued by Dominion, but not yet executed, per the filing.
According to property records, the majority of the parcels within what would be the 1,200-megawatt data center campus and the 200-megawatt campus are owned by West Creek Associates LLC, a joint affiliate of the Pruitt Cos. and Riverstone Group.
No additional details were available about the parties behind those three projects.
The filing added that for Tuckahoe Technology Park, an ELOA has also been executed, but a CLOA has not. Tract is under contract to purchase the 11 parcels that make up the project site.
In his testimony in the July filing, one Dominion employee said he “did not know” where in the load queue the potential 1,200 and 200-megawatt data center developments are, but “agreed they are likely near the back of the queue.”
As of this past March, Dominion’s load queue contained “approximately 15 years of projects,” per the filing.
Left: a map of three of four potential data center developments in Goochland County. Right: a map of the subject property for a potential 1,200-megawatt development within the TOD. (Courtesy State Corporation Commission filings)
While Tuckahoe Technology Park would be located in TOD West, where data centers require a conditional use permit, the other three data centers would be located within the rest of the TOD, where data centers are a by-right use.
In August, a formal application was submitted by Tract for Tuckahoe Technology Park. The application would next be considered by the Goochland Planning Commission, which has not yet publicly put it on an agenda. The commission would either recommend the project for approval or denial and then pass it on to the Goochland Board of Supervisors for final consideration.
A map of each of those four projects was projected during the Western Henrico Neighbors’ meeting Monday. One group organizer noted that the 1,200-megawatt data center campus would run along the Henrico County line, near Henrico’s Fox Hall, Milhaven and Colonies neighborhoods.
“As you can see, there could one day be a massive, hyperscale data center hub right against our property lines,” said a community group representative.
Dozens of residents from Henrico and Goochland spoke out at the meeting, noting their concerns regarding noise, property values, and health, among other issues.
Also speaking at the meeting was Cynthia Haas, who told the crowd that she was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Goochland County regarding the TOD. She was met with applause.
A map made by Western Henrico Neighbors showing the acreage for each of the four data center developments mentioned in the SCC’s July filing. (Courtesy Western Henrico Neighbors)
“I am as angry as you all are about this. To me, it’s absolutely disgusting, and there are many reasons for that,” Haas told the gathered crowd. “The 900-megawatt (project) that Tract is working on is a 12-building data center campus. It will be at least five to seven years from beginning to end.”
Following her comments at the meeting, Haas was back in the courtroom Tuesday morning for the demurrer hearing.
Tuesday’s hearing was the second in the case. In May, the same judge ordered the county to pare down the 8,500 pages of documents it filed with the court in response to the lawsuit.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Philip Strother of Strother Law Offices, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, asked the court to nonsuit, or dismiss, some of the latter counts in the lawsuit. He asked to leave the first three counts, which allege that the county violated advertisement, notice and public hearing requirements regarding the TOD, as well as claims related to a lack of uniformity among the TOD regulations and a violation of the Goochland County zoning ordinance.
“The nonsuiting helped our case. Several recent rulings made the counts nonstarters,” Haas said when asked for comment on the nonsuits.
Yet law firm Gentry Locke, which is representing the county, said at the hearing they “dispute particularized harm” for the plaintiffs specifically caused by the enactment of the TOD. The county filed its demurrer soon after the plaintiffs’ original filing last December.
A brief from the plaintiffs opposing Goochland County’s demurrer, filed in July, disagreed with the allegation that the residents couldn’t prove particularized harm.
“Plaintiffs are Goochland County residents, taxpayers, and property owners adjacent to or in close proximity to land the TOD affects. They allege particularized harms tied to the TOD’s specific by-right and conditional uses – diminished property values, noise, pollution, traffic, and the risk of intensive industrial development immediately adjacent to their land,” the plaintiffs’ opposition brief reads.
In the reply brief, filed in August, Goochland County’s counsel, including lawyers from Gentry Locke and county attorney Tara McGee, stated the plaintiffs’ opposition brief was a “sea of contradictions.”
“Because Plaintiffs allege vague, generalized complaints – some of which relate only to harms others may experience – they do not establish their standing to bring this action,” the reply brief reads.
Conversations around these points were discussed at length during the three-hour proceedings Tuesday.
Sanner, the judge, noted at the beginning of the proceedings that he was “highly unlikely” to make a decision on the demurrer at the hearing. Keeping to his word, the judge said at the end he would be taking the motion to dismiss under advisement, adding that he will look to issue a decision soon on whether to dismiss the case, though no exact timeline was specified.
After the hearing, Haas told BizSense she and her fellow plaintiffs were “very pleased” with the arguments their attorney made Tuesday.
“We remain optimistic that the judge will rule in our favor and schedule the case for trial,” she said in a statement to BizSense. “We look forward to having our day in court.”
When reached with a request for comment by BizSense regarding the demurrer, Goochland County primarily restated the events of the hearing.
“The hearing opened with plaintiffs dropping an additional 4 of the 9 claims originally included in their lawsuit. Several months ago, plaintiffs had already dropped their claim that the Board acted in an arbitrary and capricious
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