The Chesapeake city council voted 9-0 on Tuesday, August 18, to approve a data center zoning ordinance that pulls the industry off the by-right track and forces every future project through a conditional use permit. The amended ordinance also strips the Fentress Airfield Overlay District from the list of eligible sites, closes existing by-right pathways, and bars data centers from connecting to groundwater.
Councilwoman Amanda Newins proposed the amendment from the dais. It passed unanimously, with nearly 40 public speakers on the record — the large majority of them opposed to data centers being built in Chesapeake at all, according to WTKR’s reporting from the meeting.
What the ordinance actually does
Before Tuesday’s vote, data centers were a by-right use across a wide slice of the city. The city’s own data center policy page lists them as permitted by right on land zoned Office and Institutional, M-1 and M-2 Industrial, and B-1 and B-2 Business. The city also counts more than 27,000 residentially zoned parcels sitting within 500 feet of ground where a data center could go up without any council approval at all. A developer could file, pull permits, and start building without ever appearing before elected officials.
The approved version reclassifies data centers as a conditional use restricted to industrial zoning districts. Every application now requires council review. Application requirements also expand to include noise limits, setbacks from residential property lines, and siting evaluations that did not previously exist, as the planning commission laid out when it recommended the framework on July 8…