Data center development is driving residents around Virginia to organize — and make full use of open government laws.
When Franklin County embarked on a large-scale effort to update its zoning ordinance, residents reacted with some wariness.
The county is split between zoned and unzoned areas, stemming from the decision in the late 1980s to apply zoning only to the county’s more populated areas. It’s a touchy subject.
Laura Carter started attending meetings out of a concern about selling farm goods to neighbors. She submitted Freedom of Information Act requests about the zoning overhaul, and ran across a mention of “Project Flash” and talks with Appalachian Power.
“That’s when I’m like,'Huh, what’s Project Flash?' and decided to then FOIA about Project Flash," Carter says.
It turns out Project Flash was a data center proposed for Summit View Business Park, just north of Rocky Mount. Community opposition ramped up quickly, until mid-August, when a supervisor announced the project was no longer moving forward.
“It all stems from a lack of transparency in the government," says Christine Sizemore is a county resident and co-chair of the Franklin County Community Coalition. "Hadn’t it been necessary to do a lot of FOIAs, Laura would have never discovered that Project Flash even exists.”
In Roanoke County, the Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance is also using FOIA. Organizer and co-founder Ben Verschoor used emails, documents and meeting minutes to track what appears to be a deal to bring a potential data center to Wood Haven Technology Park in Roanoke County, which eventually fell through.
“It’s a helpful illustration of how some of these deals can come together, but is also a case where we got lucky this time," Verschoor says. "We should be taking measure to ensure it doesn’t happen.”
Verschoor says that when government bodies move freely behind closed doors, residents get what happened in Botetourt County – where Google will build a sizeable data center. And once the deal is cut, he says, it’s harder to for residents to convince their local government to turn back.
