Approved by the Planners, Denied by the Board: A 427-Acre Data Center in Hanover County

On April 16, 2026, the Hanover County Planning Commission recommended approval of one of the largest land-use requests the county had seen: a 427-acre data center campus. The vote was 6 to 1. The applicant had a generous community-benefit package, more than 40% open space, and staff working with it on conditions.

Six weeks later, on May 27, the elected Board of Supervisors denied it 4 to 3. The rezoning, the building-height special exception, and the substation permit all failed on the same split.

For anyone putting capital behind a data center, or behind any large rezoning, that gap between the two votes is the whole lesson.

The project: Mountain Road Technology Park

The applicant, TRACT (with Marchetti Properties, through the entity Valco Hanover County 4 LLC), sought to rezone 427 acres from A1 Agricultural to M1 Limited Industrial for a master-planned data center campus on US Route 33, at the Chickahominy River near the Henrico County line. The request was actually three linked approvals:

• A rezoning of 427 acres, A1 to M1 (REZ 2025-00023)
• A conditional use permit for up to three electrical substations (CUP 2025-00016)
• A special exception for building heights up to 62 feet and increased fence heights (SE 2025-00023)

It was not a thin proposal. The applicant offered a $15 million contribution toward water infrastructure, including a booster pump station and a storage tank, plus $6 million for land conservation and parks, and committed to roughly 41% open-space preservation. That is about $21 million in proffered community benefits.

The win that wasn't: a 6-1 recommendation

At the April 16 Planning Commission hearing, the campus was recommended for approval 6-1, with only Commissioner Abbott opposed. The recommendation came with conditions that read like a project on track to pass: the county would research enhanced noise standards before the Board hearing, the applicant would resolve a buffer issue with the adjacent Wilson family property, transportation improvements would be completed before the first building permit, and the substations would sit behind 300-foot setbacks and a double row of evergreens.

A developer reading only that outcome would have felt good. Six of seven commissioners, staff engaged on conditions, a clear path to the Board. On the strength of a recommendation like this, predevelopment continues, land gets carried, and the deal gets modeled as a probable yes.

The vote that counted: denied 4-3 on water

On May 27, the Board of Supervisors saw it differently. The rezoning was denied 4-3, with Supervisors Pritchard, Floyd, Stoneman, and Davis voting to deny, and Dibble, Herzberg, and Hudson opposed. The substation CUP and the height special exception fell on the same 4-3 split.

The deciding issue was water. The campus would have used an estimated 600,000 to 2,000,000 gallons per day, in a county whose supply situation is not settled. The record reflects the anxiety plainly. As one resident put it at the hearing: "the problem we got is we're dependent on the city of Richmond. And I don't know who in here wants to depend on the city of Richmond for water."

That is the structural fact behind the denial. A $15 million water-infrastructure proffer did not overcome a board that was not convinced the county could supply up to two million gallons a day to a single campus without putting existing users at risk. The $6 million for parks and the 41% open space did not change that calculus.

Two lessons that outlast this deal

Two things here generalize to almost any large entitlement, and especially to data centers.

First, the Planning Commission recommendation is not the decision. It is advisory. The binding vote belongs to the elected board, which answers to a different constituency and can reverse a 6-1 recommendation to a 4-3 denial. Underwriting a deal on the recommendation is underwriting the wrong vote.

Second, for data centers, water and power are the kill switches, not zoning. The Hanover campus checked the land-use boxes: appropriate corridor, industrial rezoning, generous open space, setbacks, screening. It died on a resource question that no proffer fully answered. A developer who diligences the zoning map but not the county's water posture is reading the easy half of the file. And Hanover was not an outlier; it is one node in a 2026 data center moratorium wave that spread across multiple states the same spring.

What the wrong read costs

A 427-acre rezoning with a conditional use permit and a special exception is not a cheap thing to pursue. Before the Board ever votes, the predevelopment spend includes land-use counsel through commission and board hearings, civil engineering, a traffic impact analysis, environmental and noise studies, and the months of negotiation that produced a $21 million proffer package. On a deal of this size that is well into six figures of unrecoverable soft cost, and that is before the carrying cost on 427 acres held under option or contract across an entitlement window that ran at least from the 2025 application numbers through a May 2026 vote. (These are typical entitlement ranges for a project of this scale and vary by deal; the proffer and acreage figures are from the county's own record.)

The larger loss is strategic. A team that read the 6-1 recommendation as a green light, and kept the land and the capital committed on that basis, absorbed the full cost of a denial that the elected board's composition and the county's water position had been signaling. The expensive way to learn how Hanover's Board votes on data center water demand is to be the applicant. The cheap way is to watch the board do it to someone else first.

How ZoneWire would have flagged it

ZoneWire covers both bodies in Hanover County, the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors, and keeps the recommendation and the binding vote as separate records, each with its conditions and the reasoning behind it. The April 16 recommendation and the May 27 denial were both pulled from the meetings themselves, the 4-3 split and the water rationale on the record the day it happened.

A developer or site selector watching Hanover on ZoneWire would have had two things in hand the recommendation alone never gave them:

1. The distance between the commission and the board, tracked as separate votes, so a 6-1 recommendation is read as advisory rather than as approval.

2. The county's revealed priorities, in this case a board unwilling to commit two million gallons a day to one campus, so a data center deal can be underwritten against the resource question that actually decides it.

A favorable recommendation tells you what the planners think. It does not tell you how the seven people who actually vote have behaved. Those are not the same file.

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