Weighing a windfall

Musings on a landmark announcement in my back yard.

I am attracted to thinkers who can take profound and complex concepts and boil them down into short encapsulations that still manage to maintain their profundity. In a way, it is one of the things I do every day in taking a mountain of raw information and boiling it down to it’s bare essentials, then delivering it in an understandable and relatable format.

Thomas Sowell may be the best at this. His pithy one-liners will be repeated until the end of time because...well...they are damned good. His warning about “giving authority to people who pay no price for being wrong,” will be just as good advice in 3535 as it is today. Timeless.

I have been thinking of another Sowell quote the past couple of days as the city and county I love and have called home for six decades on this beautiful blue marble moves towards the precipice of what can only be described as a metamorphosis.

The Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facility Authority this week signed a local performance agree with Stack Infrastructure, a Denver-Colorado data center developer. Their plans call for a “digital infrastructure campus” at the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill. It would encompass nearly three-thousand acres, compromising most of the land in the largest mega site on the East Coast.

The phrase “game-changer” seems ridiculously inadequate to describe the scope of this announcement. It is transformative. Estimated local tax payments are (give or take) three billion dollars over the next thirty years. That is roughly 120 million dollars a year that Danville and Pittsylvania County will split.

Right now, the county is in the middle of drafting a 26-27 budget. They are having to increase the real estate tax from 56 to 62 cents per hundred dollar value---and they will STILL come up about four million dollars short.

Now...imagine how this budget process would be different if there were a 60 million dollar tax contribution from the digital infrastructure campus. Supervisors could, in theory, completely ELIMINATE the Real Estate tax and STILL have millions left over.

Does that sound like a good thing to you? Because it sure as hell sounds good to ME!

Getting back to Sowell, the quote of his that has stirred in my brain is this one.

• “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.”

This is perfect. This is mature. This is the realization that for every action, there is a reaction.

Of *course* building a project of this magnitude is going to cause issues. A project 1/1000th of its size would also come with issues. That is unavoidable.

Yes, this campus will use water. No it will NOT suck the Dan River dry, as many alarmists insist. It will use less water than Dan River Mills used at the height of its production. According to a JLARC study it will use less water than most large office buildings. It will use less water than your favorite golf course uses to keep the greens green.

The “nattering nabobs of negatively” that Danville is infamous for have had a field day on data centers. To hear them you would think we are building a hazardous waste incinerator/industrial hog slaughterhouse next to a nursing home and on top of an orphanage.

There are people who would honest to God refuse to endorse this because it might create some problems. Newsflash...EVERYTHING causes problems. Any change creates a new situation that has to be dealt with.

So yes, this campus will bring changes. That’s kinda the goal of a mega park, isn’t it? We’ve spent about 200 million dollars getting this land ready for the “Big One.” And here it is.

There was ALWAYS going to be something very big at Berry Hill. We didn’t get all dressed up for nothing, right? And among the dozens of potential large-scale industrial uses that could have come, a data center campus is one of the quietest, cleanest and most sustainable options.

One drawback is job creation. Berry Hill was built and marketed with large employment projects in mind. The campus has pledged 2,500 jobs. If those 3,000 acres could have been occupied by, say, 8-12 large industries, we could be looking at employment totals of over 10,000 or more.

That brings us back to the concept of “tradeoffs.” Sacrificing job creation for an insane amount of investment is a tradeoff. And it is up to us to decide if it is a fair trade off.

And I say...it most definitely is.

Think about it. To generate this level of taxable investment, Pittsylvania County and Danville would have to recruit 50 Microporous-sized announcements. We would have to recruit 113 Avio Rocket plants. So while the raw job totals are a bit short of the original goal, that is MORE than made up for by the fact that each locality will eventually collect an average of 60 million dollars in tax revenue each year. And that is the floor, not the ceiling.

In its own odd way, the concerns remind me of the cautionary tales while Danville voters were weighing a casino. We were assured that Caesars would bring crime to Danville---as if we didn’t already have it.

People were concerned about rising property values. Well, yes. That is the consequence of economic success. It beats the hell out of having property values decline, I assure you.

“They’ll never spend that kind of money or hire that many people!!” This is an evergreen uttering of the nabobs. My answer is always...”OK, then explain to me how having thousands of jobs and billions of investment a BAD thing?”

Basically, I tell people that whatever bad things this campus brings will have to negatively offset annual local tax payments of sixty million dollars to BOTH the county and city that I love. That is a high bar.

Even with the tradeoffs, this is an all-time no-brainer.

Lets do this!