Davis Town Hall Draws Record Crowds

By: Lydia Crawley, The Parsons Advocate

A record number of residents from across the area were in attendance for a Town Hall Meeting at the Davis Fire Hall Sunday, April 13th. The meeting, hosted by Davis Mayor Al Tomson, centered around the controversial proposed power plant and data center between Davis and Thomas. Besides a Fire Hall so full that there were not enough chair available for all in attendance, leaving nearly half the attendees without a seat, over 100 participants signed in via Zoom for the meeting leading to what Mayor Tomson called a record attendance for a meeting in Davis.

Presenters at the meeting included Mayor Tomson, Tucker County Commission President Mike Rosenau, Tucker County Commissioners Fred Davis and Tim Knotts, Davis Resident and West Virginia Highlands Conservancy President Marilyn Shoenfeld and PMP Certified Professional Project Manager Zena Raye.

Tomson supplied the meeting with information as was best known at this point. The Air Quality Permit submitted by Fundamental Data to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection was highly redacted. Tomson and other Tucker County officials have been researching the project since news first dropped 10 days prior to the meeting. Raye also assisted Tomson with the research for the meeting.

Rosenau took the brunt of the crowd’s ire during the meeting. Several in attendance accused him of not doing enough at the State level to stop the project and to stop the passage of House Bill 2014 that was closely tied to the project. During public comment, one member of the public came to the County Commisioners’ defense and said that the Commissioners fight for Tucker County, but they still have to work with those in the State House, as well.

West Virginia Senate President Randy Smith also was the subject of heavy criticism from those present due to his support of House Bill 2014. Many of the public present felt that Smith should have been at the meeting to answer their questions and many more felt betrayed by the actions the State Legislature took in enacting the measure that would allow the formation of centers such as the one proposed in Tucker County.

Commissioner Fred Davis said that his personal “gut feeling” was that nothing would come of the project and equated it to the hyper loop project that never came to fruition. Davis also said that he was afraid that all the issue would do was divide the community.

“If we’re going to fight, we need to fight about what matters,” Davis said.

Shoenfeld and Tomson along with several members of the public expressed the need for an email campaign. Tomson presented those in attendance with an information sheet with information on the project, as well as contact information for the DEP and Casey Chapman with Fundamental Data, the company that filed the Air Quality Permit with the DEP for the project. The DEP is currently in a public comment period on the Air Quality Permit for the project and Tomson encouraged those in attendance to contact the DEP to voice their questions, concerns, or support for the project.

Raye said she had created a document outlining how she reverse engineered what she could of the project from what is known. The document was shared with Tomson and the I Love Canaan Facebook Page. Raye questioned why a company would knowingly propose a project in an area where the watershed could not support the water needs and why the community was not engaged early in the planning process.

“I put in there the reverse engineering of what I saw in there of that permit and what gave me questions,” Raye said.

Steve Leyh, Executive Director of the Tucker County Development Authority, was also on hand at the event and spoke on his thoughts of the project and the implications of the veil of silence surrounding it. Leyh said that even the Development Authority had no prior knowledge of the project and was just as surprised by its announcement as the rest of the County. Leyh said that there are projects happening throughout the County that are bringing in job opportunities and this could be one, but with the lack of dialogue and the lack of listening to the concerns of the community, there are too many concerns. Leyh also said that it was a private company dealing with a private land owner and was not something that the Development Authority or County Commission could control. Leyh encouraged those present to reach out to leaders in Charleston to let their voices be heard on the issue.

“This project came out of the blue and usually that doesn’t happen with real projects,” Leyh said. “Usually projects you start talking about months in advance. So when this happened and the County Commission didn’t know about it and they called me and said did you know anything about that? That’s a red flag. Usually good companies want to be transparent, even if they aren’t at a point where they are able to be transparent, when they are ready to put something in the paper, generally they want to have conversations with your County Commission, with your Mayor, with your Development Authority. They want to talk because they know they need to be part of this community… Its also really important that all of you know that real companies that do real things generally don’t shove it down your throat.”

Resident Mike Swinson said that he and his attorney wife had researched Fundamental Data and discovered that the company had only been developed for the Tucker County project. According to Swinson Fundamental Data and Chapman’s parent company has no projects on the scale being proposed for the Tucker County project and no clients on the scale of Google or Amazon needed for it.

“He formed it just for this project,” Swinson said. “Here’s from public records, his main company is called Caseco LLC and he has 0 projects in his portfolio of this scale. He only does residential/light commercial. There’s nothing in there on this scale.”

Justin Greer, a Computer Engineer and Architectural Designer spoke during the public comments about data centers. Greer said that data centers are not decreasing in power, but are instead increasing. According to Greer, power consumption has increased over 20%. Regardless to whether it would be a closed or open loop system, Greer said, the center would use massive amounts of water. There was also a point made by Greer about how the center would address its need for data access in an area that currently has limited internet and data access.

Contacts supplied by Tomson at the meeting are as follows: DEP: West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, Division of Air Quality (DAQ), 601 57th St., SE, Charleston, WV 25304 or email: DEPAirQualityPermitting@WV.gov phone: (304) 926-0499 ext. 41281 or contact Jerry Williams at the DEP at jerry.williams@wv.gov or phone: (304) 414-1214. Fundamental Data: Casey Chapman: Purcellville, VA, (540) 338-8271 or email: Cchapman@fundamentaldata.com