Goochland TOD Passes Despite Fierce Opposition

The Goochland BoS voted to pass the TOD. How did the meeting go?

In the wee hours of Friday 11/7, after a lengthy public hearing where more than eighty speakers shared concerns, frustrations, and requests for a no-vote or deferral, the Goochland Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 in favor of the TOD proposal as amended.

It was clear how people in attendance felt about the TOD because applause erupted after each speaker and absolutely no one spoke in support of the proposal. A speaker who had done an FOIA request to compile all the correspondence that the county received about the issue pointed out that 99.5% of those who reached out are against the proposal. The supervisors all managed to stay awake – but not necessarily engaged – while they waited out the long line of speakers. Well after midnight, Henrico Supervisor Misty Roundtree addressed the board on behalf of Henrico residents who live adjacent to the TOD. She said she had planned to ask for protections for their Henrico neighbors, but as she saw things play out “it occurred to me that if you’re not going to listen to a room full of your own constituents, that you’re probably not going to listen to me or mine.”

Remind me, why does the county government want to put data centers in Eastern Goochland?

Goochland claims the TOD is necessary to attract high-tech ventures like data centers for what they described as much-needed diversification of tax revenue.

This “Eastern Corridor” of the county, which includes West Creek Business Park, has long been identified by Goochland County as the area where they would concentrate commercial growth to keep the rest of the county rural.

So what’s the problem?

The real root of all the trouble is that a previous Board of Supervisors allowed residential development where it shouldn’t have been permitted to begin with.

They did this to bail the county out of major debt left in the wake of Motorola abandoning their chip manufacturing facility in the early 1990s. In short: when your business park is failing to thrive after the departure of your marquis client, sell residential lots to pay back the bank and recover tax revenue.

While it should come as no surprise that Goochland would seek to invite businesses into a business park, it was a shock to home owners that the same county that welcomed them to retire in lovely neighborhoods like Mosaic and Readers Branch would turn around and not only allow, but actively seek to attract noisy, polluting, eyesore industrial development like AI data centers and gas peaker plants. Quite literally in their backyards.

So what happens next?

We’ve heard that residents in at least two neighborhoods are planning litigation and our guess is that this decision and the process leading up to it will be picked apart by attorneys and spend a good long time making it’s way through the court system. Goochland residents lost a major battle, but their fight will continue on a new front.