Dozens of residents filled the Board of Supervisors meeting room in the Harberer Building in Rustburg to oppose a request to rezone 57 acres of heavily wooded land near the corner of U.S. 460 and Cabin Field Road.
CAMPBELL COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS
At the meeting, Concord District Supervisor Matt Cline introduced a motion to deny the rezoning request that would have removed certain conditions placed on the property 25 years ago. The motion was met with loud applause from the audience.
“I’ve done a ton of research not only on this site but on data centers,” Cline said. “I’ve spent the past month getting extremely well-versed in all things.”
A previous owner of the property had placed protective conditions on the property called proffers that would ensure no industry built on the land would negatively affect residents who live near it, Cline explained.
Prior to introducing the motion, Cline asked the people who had organized petitions against the rezoning request to present the list of names to him. Hundreds of residents had signed the two petitions against a data center, one of which was an online petition and the other a paper petition.
Cline then asked people in the audience who opposed the rezoning request to stand. Dozens of people stood up in opposition to the request.
SITE OF POSSIBLE DATA CENTER IN CAMPBELL COUNTY
Owners of this property near the corner of U.S. 460 and Cabin Field Road filed a rezoning application with Campbell County to allow the company to market the site to data center developers.
MESH Capital LLC, owner of the land, requested permission from the county to remove the conditions that were placed on the property in 2000. The company said the rezoning would make the property financially feasible for the construction and operation of three data centers.
At its September meeting, the Board of Supervisors voted to delay consideration of the rezoning request to allow Cline, who was away on vacation, to be present for the vote. Concord District residents told the board at the meeting that they felt unrepresented by Cline’s absence.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Altavista District Supervisor Tom Lawton and Sunburst District Supervisor Paul Dowdy were the only two to vote against Cline’s motion.
Rustburg District Supervisor Jon Hardie, who supported Cline’s motion, said residents want to make sure their property is protected from the potential negative effects of a data center at the site.
Data centers are warehouse-like buildings that house computers and networking equipment used to store and send data. Campbell County currently does not have a data center.
Virginia is home to the largest number of data centers in the world, with Northern Virginia accounting for the vast majority of them. Other areas of Virginia also are starting to see data center development. The current boom in data centers is being driven in part by artificial intelligence services, which require enormous amounts of computing power and data storage.
Timberlake District Supervisor Justin Carwile, who serves as chairman of the board, voted in favor of Cline’s motion. But he also called for future discussions on how conditions placed on the property owned by MESH Capital could be changed or removed to attract a business that neighbors would find acceptable.
Carwile said he does not want to “hold the property hostage” to the conditions that were placed on it 25 years ago.
Later in the meeting, during a discussion by supervisors on code updates in the county, Hardie proposed changing the code so that the development of data centers would no longer be a by-right activity in areas zoned as “industrial heavy.”
By-right approval is granted when a proposal strictly conforms to zoning and building codes, and therefore qualifies for construction without requiring discretionary approval.
Hardie said developers of data centers should be required to get special use permits so each project can be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. The supervisor argued that removing the construction of data centers as a by-right activity would add an “extra layer of protection” to residents who live near a proposed site.
Brookneal District Supervisor Charlie Watts, who opposed Hardie’s motion, said removing the by-right designation would add an “extra layer of burden” on data center developers.
Hardie’s substitute motion failed to pass in a 6-1 vote.
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