Quiet coming week for public meetings; Supervisors ok incentives for AWS; BOS Roundup: Board endorses Firefly grant application, approves legislative priorities
Engage Louisa is a nonpartisan newsletter that keeps folks informed about Louisa County government. We believe our community is stronger and our government serves us better when we increase transparency, accessibility, and engagement.
Quiet coming week for county meetings
For the latest information on county meetings including public meetings of boards, commissions, authorities, work groups, and internal county committees, click here. (Note: Louisa County occasionally schedules internal committee/work group meetings after publication time. Check the county’s website for the most updated information).
According to Louisa County’s website, there are no public meetings scheduled for the week of November 27 through December 2.
Additional information about Louisa County’s upcoming public meetings is available here.
Interested in taking your talents to one of the county’s numerous boards and commissions? Find out more here including which boards have vacancies and how to apply.
Supervisors ok incentives for AWS
The Louisa County Board of Supervisors on Monday night unanimously approved more incentives for Amazon Web Services as the tech giant prepares to build a pair of data center campuses in the county’s Technology Overlay District (TOD). (agenda packet, video)
As part of an update to a performance agreement approved by the board in early September, supervisors agreed to supply Amazon with infrastructure and performance grants for up to 25 years, provided the company meets certain capital investment benchmarks.
Economic Development Director Andy Wade said that the grants would be drawn from tax revenue that’s directly generated by AWS and wouldn’t come from taxes already paid to the county.
“This is net new revenue to the county. So, this is revenue that we do not currently receive. This is revenue that is billed to and paid by AWS to the County of Louisa,” Wade said.
In late August, the county announced that AWS plans to invest at least $11 billion to build two data center campuses in its newly created TOD, a special zoning designation approved by the Board of Supervisors in April that’s designed to attract lucrative tech sector development. The project is part of the company’s plan to invest at least $35 billion to build data center campuses across the state over the next 15 years.
One of the campuses—dubbed the Lake Anna Technology Campus (LATC)—is slated for 146 acres at the corner of Kentucky Springs Road and Haley Drive adjacent to the North Anna Nuclear Power Station. The other—the North Creek Technology Campus (NCTC)—is planned for 1,444 acres south of Route 33 and east of Mount Airy Road across from the Northeast Creek Reservoir.
While the company has committed to make an $11 billion capital investment in the county by July 1, 2040—a figure that roughly equates to building 11 data centers, according to Wade—and pay for all offsite infrastructure to support the sites, the incentive package is designed to both reimburse AWS for some of its infrastructure costs and spur investment beyond $11 billion. It aims to accomplish the latter by offering the company escalating grants based on its level of investment.
“The initial $11 billion capital investment commitment is roughly for 11 shells. There is potential for them to build many more than 11 data center shells on both of those campuses,” Wade said. “They have until 2040 to meet (the $11 billion threshold). If they exceed that before then, we would move to the next tier…It’s structured to incentivize them, not disincentivize them, to continue to invest in Louisa County.”
Incentives and tax revenue
According to the updated agreement, the county would return to AWS, in the form of annual infrastructure grants, 15 percent of the incremental tax revenue it receives on capital investment between $150 million and $11 billion. For capital investment between $11 billion and $20 billion, AWS would receive 20 percent of the incremental tax revenue. That figure rises to 25 percent for capital investment between $20 and $30 billion and 30 percent if the company’s capital investment reaches $30 billion and beyond. The county would pay the grants from 2026 through 2046.
As Wade explained it, if the company pays $100 in taxes, it would receive $15 back in the form of a grant based on the first investment tier. He noted that AWS would pay its full tax bill annually with the percentage it receives in grant funding returned to it via the Louisa County Industrial Development Authority.
With respect to the performance grants, which would run from 2047 to 2051, the county would return to AWS 17 percent of incremental tax revenue annually on capital investment between $11 billion and $20 billion and 20 percent on anything beyond that.
Wade said that if the company didn’t reach the $11 billion capital investment threshold by July 1, 2040, the county wouldn’t be obligated to make any more grant payments.
The performance agreement runs through 2050 and works in concert with a state incentives package. The General Assembly last session approved a $140 million “Cloud Computing Cluster Infrastructure Grant Fund,” which will provide state grants to AWS to entice the company to build data center campuses in rural areas that don’t currently have the infrastructure to support them. The state grant program requires that localities where AWS invests provide two dollars in matching funds for every one dollar in state funding. The state also exempts most data center operators from paying its sales and use tax.
Beyond the grant money, supervisors have already approved other perks for AWS. In September, the board set the Business Personal Property (BPP) tax rate for data center equipment at $1.25 per $100 of assessed value—down from the current $1.90 rate paid by businesses—and adopted an accelerated depreciation schedule that rapidly decreases the equipment’s taxable value. Data center operators will be taxed at 50 percent of their equipment’s original cost when its new, 35 percent in year two, 20 percent in year three, 10 percent in year four and five percent in year five and every year thereafter until the equipment is replaced.
On Monday, the board adopted another amendment to the performance agreement that essentially locks in the reduced BPP and accelerated depreciation schedule for AWS over the life of the agreement. If the county raises the rate or tweaks the depreciation schedule prior to 2050, it would be obligated to return to Amazon any additional revenue it received from the company that’s a result of the changes.
Since the county would derive its direct revenue from AWS from both real estate taxes and the BPP, the amount of tax revenue it pulls in is largely dependent on how many data centers the company builds and how often it replaces the pricey computer equipment inside.
Just after the county announced AWS’s plan to set up shop in Louisa, county officials said that the company had essentially committed to build 11 data centers and those facilities would generate about $25 million in tax revenue annually at full buildout. That figure, which accounts for the reduced BPP, is more than double the taxes paid by Dominion Energy for the North Anna Power Station last year. Dominion is Louisa’s largest taxpayer.
But AWS’s plans could be far bigger. Wade said Monday night that the company could build as many as 25 data centers across the sites while an AWS official told the Planning Commission at its November 9 meeting that his company could build 20 to 25 data centers at the North Creek Tech Campus alone, characterizing that as a conservative estimate and noting that there’s still “a fair amount of flexibility” as to what the final number would be.
According to a representative from Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, who also spoke at the Planning Commission meeting, the utility could provide as much as 3 gigawatts (GW) of power to the North Creek campus, an indication of the potentially massive scale of AWS’s development plans. It’s unclear how much power the campus would actually use.
A conceptual plan for the Lake Anna campus submitted by AWS as part of an application to the Army Corps of Engineers shows seven standard data centers and two smaller “specialty data centers” on the 146-acre site, covering more than 1.7 million square feet. The application says that the campus, as currently proposed, would provide 420 MW of data center capacity at full buildout.
Wade said that each data center the company builds could generate about $32 million in tax revenue over 15 years with about half of that derived from real estate taxes based on the current tax rate. The remainder would come from the BPP though Wade acknowledged that that figure is dependent on how often AWS replaces its equipment. He said that the company typically replaces its servers and related equipment every six to seven years, but that’s “subject to change” as technology changes.
If the company delayed replacing its equipment, it could significantly impact county coffers, a lesson that localities heavily dependent on data center revenue have already learned. Loudoun County, the global epicenter of the data center industry, is home to some 25 million square feet of the warehouse-like facilities, which contributed more than $600 million in local tax revenue last year. But, according to media reports, in tax year 2021, Loudoun faced a $60 million shortfall in its projected data center revenue because companies didn’t replace their servers after the pandemic. Loudoun is considering setting up a stabilization fund to protect itself against future shortfalls.
Beyond tax revenue, Wade estimates that the campuses would directly employ about 25 people per shell and those jobs would come with an average salary of $105,000 a year. He also noted that AWS would donate 380 acres of the North Creek site to the county, which could potentially be developed as a public park.
Community concerns
While supervisors emphasized the potential for significant revenue for the county when approving the incentives package, three residents spoke during the meeting’s public comment period, urging the board to carefully consider the ramifications of large-scale data center development.
Joanna Hickman, who lives adjacent to the North Creek campus, voiced concern about potential noise pollution, citing problems with noise from the facilities in Northern Virginia. She also said data centers are detrimental to the environment, noting their intense demand for both power and water.
“I think this is very ill-considered and lots of it has been done in secret. I don’t know if you guys have done your research on the environmental impacts and the negative possibilities here,” Hickman said. “You either need a science advisor to advise you on the repercussions or you need to do more homework.”
With respect to data centers’ water use, Wade said that both campuses would rely on the county’s 187-acre Northeast Creek Reservoir for water to cool the servers inside. He has said that the campuses would draw, on average, 630,000 gallons of water per day from the reservoir at full buildout though it’s unclear how that figure was reached since development plans haven’t been finalized. Wade said that the reservoir has a safe yield capacity of 3.2 million gpd based on a recent analysis. Louisa County Water Authority General Manager Pam Baughman said in September that, from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, the average daily withdraw from the reservoir was 277,000 gallons.
Amazon will pay for the water infrastructure to support the campuses including a miles-long raw water line to the Lake Anna site with a portion of the cost offset by the county and state grants. While it awaits completion of the water line, AWS intends to rely on ground water at the Lake Anna campus for the first phase of the project, which is expected to include one or two data centers, Wade said earlier this month. Construction at the site could begin next year.
Regarding noise, county officials have said that its Technology Overlay District implements development standards designed to protect neighbors including 300-foot buffers along boundaries with agriculturally zoned property and noise limits that are only slightly higher than what’s already permitted in agricultural zoning.
BOS Roundup: Board endorses Firefly grant application, approves legislative priorities
The Louisa County Board of Supervisors held a wide-ranging meeting last Monday night. Aside from okaying an updated performance agreement with Amazon Web Services, the board endorsed Firefly Fiber Broadband’s latest application for grant funding to bring universal broadband access to Louisa County, approved its 2024 legislative priorities, okayed a two percent raise for county employees and more.
Firefly updates board on plan to bring universal broadband access to Louisa County
Firefly Fiber Broadband CEO Gary Wood briefed the board on his company’s plan to bring universal high-speed internet access to the county by 2025, focusing specifically on Firefly’s effort to extend fiber access to hundreds of homes that were left out of its initial plan.
Wood said that the company had “scoured the county” to identify homes that weren’t included in the company’s Regional Internet Expansion Project (RISE), a partnership between Firefly, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Central Virginia Electric Cooperative, and other major electric providers to bring fiber access to unserved areas in all or part of 13 Central Virginia localities.
Because the project is heavily reliant on state and federal grants aimed at reaching unserved locations, areas served by other high-speed internet providers didn’t qualify for inclusion nor did areas that had previously received federal money for internet expansion. That meant that hundreds of homes that don’t have high-speed internet fell through the cracks. Wood noted that some of the residences are at the end of long driveways, making it cost-prohibitive for other internet providers to reach them. Many are located near the Towns of Louisa and Mineral with some scattered around Lake Anna and the Blue Ridge Shores community.
Wood said that Firefly used improved maps from the Federal Communications Commission and other tools to identify 441 homes in need of service and the company now intends to apply for another round of grant funding, targeted at reaching underserved areas, to extend fiber access to everyone. The plan is expected to cost $1.6 million and Firefly isn’t asking the county for any money. Supervisors previously committed $9 million to the RISE project.
“This picks up every (unserved) location left. Every single one of them. if we find another one, we’re going to put that in because we want to make sure everybody has access to broadband,” Wood said.
In 2021, Louisa County partnered with Firefly and the area’s two other electric providers—Dominion and Rappahannock Electric Cooperative—to expand broadband access to the county’s unserved areas. Firefly is serving as the internet service provider and, outside of CVEC territory, connecting to infrastructure owned by its partners.
As part of the board’s consent agenda—a group of resolutions typically passed without discussion in a block vote—supervisors pledged their support for Firefly’s grant application.
Several supervisors thanked Wood for Firefly’s work to ensure that everyone in Louisa has access to high-speed internet.
“You said that because of the way the grant was structured, you were going to hit certain areas of the county first, but you were not going to ignore those places even though they weren’t technically part of the initial criteria that went into the grant…This is a physical manifestation of that commitment you made to us in real time,” said Louisa District Supervisor Eric Purcell, whose district includes many of the homes that were left out of the first round of grant funding.
For more information about Firefly including estimated connection timelines for specific areas, click here.
Supervisors ok local, regional legislative priorities, meet with General Assembly delegation
Supervisors voted unanimously to approve the county’s legislative platform for the 2024 General Assembly session. Prior to approving the document, the board held a pre-meeting work session to discuss its legislative wish list with the county’s newly elected representatives in the state legislature.
Three of the delegation’s four members attended the work session: Senator Creigh Deeds (D-SD11); Delegate Buddy Fowler (R-HD59); and Delegate-Elect Amy Laufer (D-HD55). Delegate and Senator-Elect John McGuire (R-SD10) missed the meeting. His legislative aide, Archer McGiffin, attended on his behalf.
All 140 seats in the General Assembly were up for grabs in November’s election in new districts reshaped by the once-a-decade redistricting process. Redistricting split Louisa County into two new state Senate and House of Delegates districts with most of the county in McGuire’s 10th state Senate District and Fowler’s 59th House District and a slice of western Louisa in Deeds’ 11th District and Laufer’s 55th. McGuire is the only member of the delegation that previously represented the county, serving three terms as its representative in the House before winning a Senate seat.
The work session served as a chance for the new legislators to introduce themselves to county officials and for the board to familiarize them with its key policy concerns and priorities.
A lawyer by trade, Deeds was just elected to the Senate for the seventh time and returns to Richmond with his party holding a narrow 21-19 majority. The Charlottesville resident is expected to wield significant power as one of the chamber’s longest serving members. He’ll chair the Commerce and Labor Committee and is a high-ranking member of the Finance and Appropriations Committee, a panel that plays a key role in crafting the state budget.
A Hanover resident and five-term incumbent, Fowler has plenty of experience in Richmond as well. Prior to joining the legislature, he served as a legislative aide to former Delegates Frank Hargrove and John Cox. Fowler’s party lost its narrow hold on the House in November’s election, so he’ll return to Richmond in the minority. Last session, he served as vice chair of the House Finance Committee.
Laufer, a former teacher who spent seven years on the Charlottesville City School Board, is a newcomer to state office. The Albemarle County resident grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and began her career as a water chemist for the State of Wisconsin before becoming a middle school teacher. She left teaching to raise her three children including a son with special needs.
McGuire joins the Senate with six years in the House of Delegates under his belt and strong political ties in Louisa. He represented the county when it was part of the 56th House District prior to redistricting and his brother, Rusty, just won his fourth term as Louisa’s commonwealth’s attorney. Though he was just elected to the Senate, McGuire announced in mid-November that he's challenging Rep. Bob Good for the Republican nomination in the 5th Congressional District next year.
Check out supervisors’ nine legislative priorities below, most of which they’ve advocated for in the past.
Undergrounding: The county asks state lawmakers to support “undergrounding,” meaning placing overhead power lines underground. The county argues that while undergrounding is expensive and can lead to higher bills for ratepayers, placing even a small portion of overhead lines underground could significantly increase grid resilience.
Supervisors opted to prioritize grid improvements after Winter Storm Frida walloped the county in January 2022, leaving some residents without power for more than a week.
Broadband: A perennial plank in the county’s legislative platform, the county supports continued state and federal aid to localities for broadband deployment and efforts to bolster cooperation among utility providers and other entities in expanding connectivity.
Thanks to an influx of federal pandemic relief from the American Rescue Plan Act, the General Assembly, in 2021, made a historic investment in rural broadband, allocating about $700 million to the Virginia Telecommunications Initiative to provide grants for broadband expansion in unserved areas.
Louisa County, via its partnership with Firefly Fiber Broadband, is directly benefiting from more than $20 million in VATI funds. Firefly has pledged to deliver fiber access to every unserved resident in Louisa by 2025. Supervisors committed $9 million in local funds toward the effort.
State funding flexibility: In another priority that regularly appears on the county’s legislative agenda, supervisors support allowing localities flexibility in the use of state revenues to compensate employees. The platform notes that when the state funds a compensation increase for employees, it occasionally compels localities to provide the same increase for staffers whose salaries it doesn’t fund. The county calls this an “unfunded mandate” and asks for the power to make its own decisions on how compensation funding is dispersed.
Freshwater Harmful Algal Blooms: Supervisors request that lawmakers continue to support efforts to mitigate freshwater Harmful Algal Blooms, a persistent problem in the upper end of Lake Anna and other waterways. The biennial state budget includes $3.5 million to develop long-term HAB mitigation plans for Lake Anna and the Shenandoah River and $1 million for immediate mitigation efforts at the lake.
The blooms, composed of toxin-producing cyanobacteria that can be detrimental to human health, prompted the Virginia Department of Health to issue no swim advisories for parts of Lake Anna in each of the last six summers and landed the lake on the Department of Environmental Quality’s list of impaired waterways.
Mineral District Supervisor Duane Adams and Cuckoo District Supervisor-Elect Chris McCotter emphasized the need for more money aimed at immediate mitigation efforts, noting that it could take $20 million to pay for a three-year mitigation plan. Adams has repeatedly sounded the alarm about the need for state aid, emphasizing that tourism at the lake is a critical part of Louisa’s economy.
Buoy maintenance and hydrilla treatment on public waters: The board advocates for state support for buoy and hydrilla management at Lake Anna. Its legislative platform states that the Lake Anna Advisory Committee, a multijurisdictional panel funded by Louisa, Spotsylvania and Orange counties, spends, on average, about $9,300 a year maintaining buoys on the public side of the lake and managing hydrilla, an aquatic weed that can clog waterways and damage infrastructure. The board asks for funding to aid both efforts, noting that buoys in public waters are regulated through the Department of Wildlife Resources and hydrilla is a statewide issue.
Small modular reactors: In a second priority related to the energy sector, supervisors express support for the study and promotion of small modular nuclear reactors (SMR).
Still years away from commercial viability, the reactors are fabricated in factories and designed to produce between 50 MW to 300 MW of power. Proponents tout the technology as safe, cost effective, and scalable, contending that SMRs could play a key role in Virginia’s transition to a carbon-free grid. They also argue that their development could lead to new economic development opportunities across the state.
Though Governor Glenn Youngkin has prioritized placing an SMR in Southwest Virginia, county officials contend that Louisa is a good location, given that it’s home to the North Anna Nuclear Power Station and its residents are familiar with nuclear generation.
Stability for state funding for low-income families: The board supports “stable, predictable” state funding for Virginia’s CHIP home visiting program. The program connects pregnant people and families with young children to registered nurses and trained family support professionals who provide coaching and support through pregnancy and early childhood. The platform notes that Louisa has a successful CHIP program, serving 40 children in 26 local families last year, but the program faces uncertain funding because of a decline in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) balance over the last two fiscal years.
Jail costs: The county again advocates for more state support for regional jails. The platform notes that the Central Virginia Regional Jail’s member localities, including Louisa, pay 56.44 percent of the actual operating cost of the jail per inmate while the state pays just 35.22 percent.
Equal revenue authority: The board supports granting counties the same taxing authorities as cities.
Board oks regional priorities: After approving the county’s legislative platform, supervisors voted 7-0 to greenlight a set of regional priorities presented by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, some of which mirror the county’s wish list. TJPDC legislative liaison David Blount told the board that the commission’s platform prioritizes three main policy areas: public education funding; budgets and funding; and land use and growth management.
With respect to funding for public education, Blount said that the platform advocates for more state support for local schools, noting that a recent study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission gave the goal “a little bit of a push” by “telling us what we already knew—that the state is underfunding K-12 education.”
Blount described the “budgets and funding” plank as “the catchall for no unfunded mandates, don’t mess with our revenue authorities, fund those state programs that are carried out locally.”
Regarding land use and growth management, Blount said that, given all the new faces joining the General Assembly in January, he wanted to highlight the importance of retaining local control over land use decisions. About a third of the House of Delegates is newly elected and nearly half of the state Senate.
“Every year, localities are concerned about the bills that we see that would undo or restrict your authority with regard to local land use. I thought it would be good to give that a little higher profile this year,” he said. (Check out the TJPDC’s legislative priorities here).
The 2024 General Assembly session kicks off in early January and spans 60 days.
Board approves two percent raise for full-time county employees
As part of its consent agenda, supervisors unanimously approved a $261,770 supplemental appropriation to cover a two percent raise for full-time county employees. Of that, roughly $141,770 will come from state sources while the rest comes from local funds.
The FY24 budget included a five percent pay hike for full-time staff, but the board tacked on another two percent after state legislators included the raises in amendments to the state budget that weren’t approved until September.
While the state funding covers raises for constitutional officers, general registrars, members of local electoral boards and state-supported county employees, the board’s finance committee recommended that the county fund raises for all full-time county staff, according to the approved resolution. The county’s portion of the funding will also cover required pay adjustments for local employees who fall below state-mandated salary levels.
Board passes resolution in support of E. Green Springs Road bridge replacement
Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution in support of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s plan to replace a bridge across Wheeler Creek on E. Green Springs Road (Route 617).
As part of the resolution, supervisors also concurred with the department’s plan to replace the bridge with “a structure width that is less than that designated by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets manual.” The board’s concurrence was required for the project to move forward.
According to the meeting materials, VDOT intends to replace the bridge, which has a 12-ton weight limit, with a new steel beam, timber deck superstructure. Work is expected to begin in the spring of 2025, closing the bridge for about four weeks. VDOT plans to use money earmarked for state maintenance to fund the project.
Supervisors approve supplemental appropriation for FEMS Department
Supervisors okayed a $70,000 appropriation to the county’s Fire and EMS Department to cover the rising cost of compressed gases.
The approved resolution notes that the cost of compressed gases continues to climb and, with the recent opening of the New Bridge Fire and EMS station, “the department's needs in this area continue to grow.”
The county plans to draw the additional funding, which wasn’t included in the Fiscal Year 2024 budget, from money reserved for contingencies.
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