Fredericksburg’s Metropolis Council voted early Wednesday morning to create a Expertise Overlay District, ushering in by-right knowledge heart improvement in a portion of town often known as Rejoice Virginia South.
The votes, which had been unanimous, adopted a five-and-a-half-hour assembly that stuffed council chambers to capability, prompting Fredericksburg Hearth Chief Mike Jones to declare that nobody else might enter except somebody left.
The marathon assembly got here lower than every week after town’s planning fee recommended denying approval of the TOD in a 4-3 vote, which got here after a movement to suggest approval failed 4-2, with one abstention.
“Everybody right here mentioned we didn’t take heed to the planning fee. That’s not true,” mentioned Vice Mayor Chuck Frye (Ward 1). “The suggestions they made are in right here. We took the [planning commission’s input, and it’s within this document right here… The document will be available to the public tomorrow.”
“Today,” corrected Mayor Kerry Devine, referring to the late, er, early hour.
Tuesday’s meeting also featured the first public mention of a so-called “end user” for the TOD. Attorney Charlie Payne, who represents an applicant who owns the 63-acre NEON property, told councilors that “my client is working with Stack [Infrastructure] for the needs of working collectively to develop a knowledge heart campus.”
A number of residents who attended Tuesday’s assembly held up indicators decrying the environmental and noise air pollution results of information heart improvement, issues that had been voiced repeatedly on the dais.
Nonetheless, longtime faculty board member Jarvis Bailey advised councilors that the income from knowledge facilities “would have a transformative influence in your finances, which can have a transformative influence on the colleges’ finances.”
Throughout discussions previous to voting, Councilor Will Waterproof coat (at-large) requested Financial and Tourism Growth Director Josh Summits to supply a way of scale concerning knowledge heart improvement elsewhere within the area.
In keeping with Summits, roughly 50 million sq. ft of information facilities have both been authorized or are in some unspecified time in the future alongside the entitlement course of region-wide. Against this, Fredericksburg’s TOD might accommodate at most 2.5 million sq. ft of information heart campuses, Summits mentioned.
“It doesn’t matter what, the residents of Fredericksburg are going to be bearing the environmental and financial prices of information facilities in our area,” Waterproof coat mentioned. “If we vote no this night, what we’re saying to our residents is that we don’t assume it is best to have the upsides of this. We predict it is best to shoulder the downsides, however not get any of the upsides that include the income.”
