Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
The Virginia Beach Planning Commission met on October 14, 2026, for an informal session that began with a comprehensive briefing on data center impacts before proceeding through a lengthy consent and regular agenda of land use applications. The meeting featured expert economic testimony, public comments on a proposed bulk storage yard, and debates over conditions on a subdivision and a family daycare home.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you. Planning commissioners of city staff for your participation today. My name is John Cofton, and I'm the chair of Virginia Beach Planning Commission. Welcome to the October 14th informal session of the Virginia Beach Planning Commission. Call this meeting to order. Is that anything, Ms. Caitlin? Just one quick reminder. Your November meeting is on the second Thursday due to Veterans Day. So don't show up here on Wednesday. We won't be here. And that's all I have. We are going to go a little bit out of order today. We're gonna start with the briefings and then we'll get to the agenda items. So giving a data center briefing today, we have Joao Ferrara. He is the acting director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at the Weldon Cooper Cooper Center. A couple members of the planning staff along with our deputy city attorney, we did a attended our data center workshop training back over the summer. Um, where Joao was one of the presenters, and we found the information that he gave very helpful. So we wanted to bring it back to you, understanding the ongoing conversations there. Um with that thank you. Um good morning, everyone. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, thank you, uh members of the planning commission. It's really a pleasure to be here. Um, so um it has been uh a couple of months since uh I met some uh of your staff in this uh presentation that I did in Richmond. Uh and since then we have been having a very productive conversation uh about how useful this presentation can be. But I will be totally open to any other aspects, and please feel free to stop me at any point if you have specific questions on specific topics. What I'm going to bring here today is kind of an overview of what we have been uh learning, uh, because yes, we are mostly learning uh at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia on our work with data centers. Just a little bit of context for those that don't know us. Uh, we are the Weldon Cooper uh Center, one of the oldest uh public service organizations within a university context in the country. Uh we have training programs. Uh we are nationally recognized by our applied research, particularly also on the data center area. Uh nonpartisan, uh we try to provide reliable and timely services and data to everyone that comes to us. Um we serve different kinds of uh policymakers and uh for our elected officials, governments, community leaders, uh, universities, primarily in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but also uh nationally and even in certain cases internationally. We are currently tracking data center growth in the United States and doing plenty of studies all across the nation on the impacts of data centers. We have uh a research unit that uh works mostly on energy aspects, economics, demographics, and provides help doing surveys and local surveys. Uh we have a leadership development team uh that works from with local governments uh all across Virginia. I'll uh spend one minute in the end just mentioning this. Um, and also we work with uh local governments in terms of community and promoting community engagement uh and understanding like how can we um increase uh the economic well-being across the Commonwealth. Now, going back to data centers. Um research started with Virginia. Uh the first work that we did was in 2019 for JLark. Uh many of you probably familiar with uh it's uh a body of the uh General Assembly that basically uh the government can consult with JLARC to understand what are the economic impacts of different incentives that uh are um that exist on the Commonwealth. And in 2019, we did a study because at that point Virginia already had a tax incentive on data centers. Um but but nobody paid attention like COVID in 2020, like data centers by then were there was some clustering in Virginia already, but the way they were small. We were not talking about, and I'll I'll I'll bring that back in one minute. We were not talking about the dimension of data centers that we are seeing right now.