For four decades — the 1960s through the 1990s — the Roanoke Valley was something of a laughingstock in Virginia.
The valley was well-known as a place where local governments were notoriously unable to cooperate with one another.
In 1967, when what was then known as the Salem-Roanoke County Civic Center opened (today it’s just the Salem Civic Center), Gov. Mills Godwin came to preside over the dedication. Godwin was a masterful politician: He delivered what sounded like an upbeat, happy talk speech that was really a stern upbraiding of certain local officials who he said were obsessed with “arbitrary boundaries.”
“Whether they be related to water supplies or sewerage disposal or education or recreation needs, with few exceptions, they are the problems not just of one locality but of two or more,” Godwin said that day. “There may have been a day in Virginia when residents of a village or a county could afford the luxury of exclusiveness, or when it really did not matter so much that hands seldom reached across boundaries in mutual trust and concern. In this day, however, we realized that no community can be an island unto itself. … One locality’s problems inevitably spill over its lines to affect the inhabitants on the other side and no amount of disinterest can make them go away.”
This seemed like praise for Salem and Roanoke County for joining together to build a civic center, but could also be read as chastising Roanoke, which insisted on going its own way to build a separate facility (what today is the Berglund Center).
Governors come and go, but the poor reputation of Roanoke Valley governments did not. In the early 1970s, one of the consuming local issues was the unwillingness of Roanoke Valley governments to work together to upgrade their sewage treatment facilities — at the time, Smith Mountain Lake downstream was little more than a cesspool full of raw sewage. Norman Cole Jr., the Fairfax County engineer tapped by Gov. Linwood Holton to lead the State Water Control Board, had little patience for the quarreling Roanoke Valley governments who repeatedly showed up in Richmond and blamed one another. Cole complained that the state panel was becoming “the Roanoke coordinating board.”
“Some of you apparently haven’t spoken to each other until you come down here,” he snapped. “If we had many more places like Roanoke, we’d be in continuous session.”
For my first two decades as a journalist in the Roanoke Valley, the bickering between local governments was a constant story. The details changed — the landfill, the airport, the water supply — and the politicians changed, but their basic conflicts did not. Nobody trusted one another, and what was seen as an economic development victory in one locality was often seen as a loss or missed opportunity in another.
At some point around 2000, all that changed, first gradually, then rapidly. A new generation of political leaders came along, and that generation understood that the real competition wasn’t on the other side of Peters Creek Road; it was on the other side of the world. Since then, the Roanoke Valley has become a model for local government cooperation. The best example of that may have come in 2016 when Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem announced that they were banding together to jointly develop a new 106-acre business park — Wood Haven, near the strategic intersection of interstates 81 and 581. At one time, that kind of cooperation would have been unthinkable. Even more remarkable, the Wood Haven deal came together with no public drama. It happened almost routinely, handled at the staff level with the politicians coming together at the end to congratulate one another.
Another good example came about that same time when Roanoke found itself too lucky:
Both the Deschutes Brewery and the Eldor auto parts manufacturer were looking at the same piece of property in the city’s industrial park. Thinking it would win Deschutes, Roanoke made a point of directing Eldor to Botetourt County. Unluckily for the city, Deschutes never happened while Eldor did — at Botetourt’s Greenfield business park, which is about to figure in what’s to come.
I walk through all this history not simply because I’m cursed with a long memory, but to show how far the Roanoke Valley has come — and why the city’s recent response to Botetourt County landing a Google data center now sounds not just off-key, but a reminder of a past we shouldn’t want to go back to.
When it was announced that Eldor would locate in Botetourt — a project that could have been in the city or even Roanoke County, another place that was short-listed but lost out — the government leaders from those localities showed up at the event at Greenfield to offer their congratulations.
So what did the city do in response to Botetourt’s Google deal? Did it cheer that a fellow valley government had landed a project from the company ranked eighth on the Fortune 500 list? No, it sent Botetourt County a letter insisting that Botetourt pay the city 15% of the county’s tax revenue from the project until the water demands for the data center are replaced by other sources.
This response has baffled me because it seemed so out of character with the more recent all-for-one, one-for-all spirit in the Roanoke Valley. I asked Roanoke Mayor Joe Cobb and Roanoke City Manager Valmarie Turner about this; I received a lengthy response from Cobb, which I’m including in full below.
The essence of the city’s concern seems to be that a) the Google data center will use so much water that it might foreclose other economic development opportunities and b) the city doesn’t trust Botetourt County to live up to its promise to replace that water. In his response to me, Cobb said that “by tying revenue sharing to our support … we also promote timely and responsible action by the project’s partners on water capacity replacement.” In other words, if the city can force Botetourt to share its tax revenues until the water is replaced, Botetourt will be motivated to make sure the water is replaced.
Data centers are known for using both lots of electricity and lots of water, for cooling. Google would become the largest customer of the Western Virginia Water Authority, the valley’s water system (and an outgrowth of that cooperation between local governments that once insisted on operating their own systems, efficiency be damned).
Google’s water demands appear to begin at 2 million gallons a day and could perhaps someday reach 8 million gallons a day, depending on how much the Botetourt data center expands. That sounds like a lot. Is it? Does Google risk draining the Carvins Cove reservoir too low — or any of the valley’s smaller water sources, for that matter?
Now let’s look at the numbers. In the past fiscal year, the water authority pumped and treated an average of 21.9 million gallons per day. For the fiscal year ending in 2021, the authority averaged 18.72 gallons per day. That means in four years’ time, the valley’s water usage rose by 3.18 million gallons per day. There are two ways to look at this. One is that Google adds even more demand on the valley’s water supply. The other is that over the past four years, the valley’s water usage rose by more than Google’s initial draw will be — and no one seemed concerned over that. Both are true; it just depends how you look at it.
So what happens if and when Google drives up the valley’s water usage by 2 million or even 8 million gallons per day?
Google’s initial draw would be from the water at Carvins Cove, so let’s just look at the capacity there. The water authority’s annual report says the cove has a safe yield — the amount it could safely produce without running out — of 14 million gallons per day to 18 million gallons per day. In the most recent fiscal year, the authority averaged 9.7 million gallons per day from the cove. That means Google’s initial water demands of 2 million gallons per day would still leave the cove below its minimum safe yield. Even Google’s eventual high point of 8 million, if it all came from the cove, would still be below the maximum safe yield, although it doesn’t seem wise to be cutting things that close. That’s when Google would start drawing water from some of the authority’s other water sources.
Google’s minimum draw would increase the valley’s daily water usage to 23.9 million gallons per day; the maximum would take it to 29.9 million gallons per day. Once again, there are two ways to look at this. The latter would represent a 36.5% increase in the valley’s water usage, which seems a mighty big jump, especially when one company is driving it. However, the water authority says its “safe yield” is 52 million gallons per day. Against that scale, Google’s maximum draw still doesn’t put us close to running out; it would mean the difference between using 42% of the safe yield now and using 57.5% of it then. The main difference seems to be how the water runs through the system — how much of it comes from Carvins Cove, how much of it eventually comes from elsewhere.
The need to “replace” that water doesn’t seem particularly urgent, although history tells us it’s wise to start planning early. The planning for the Spring Hollow Reservoir began in 1981. It opened in 1996. That’s a 15-year span, so if we need to add additional water resources, we need to start planning now for 2040. That also appears to be what’s happening anyway.
The city’s request for 15% of a neighboring locality’s tax revenue from a particular economic development project remains unprecedented.
It appears that the city has reverted to a pre-2000 mindset. Cobb’s initial letter said that the cove “is a vital tourism and recreation asset for the City of Roanoke.” The cove is actually owned by the water authority; the city owns the land around it above a certain point. However, regardless of who owns what, the cove is indeed a “vital tourism and recreation asset” — for the entire Roanoke Valley. If Google, or anything else, has a negative impact on the cove, those impacts will be felt by all of us in the Roanoke Valley, not just those in the city.
Cobb wrote to Botetourt that “reduced water capacity could prevent future economic development projects from locating in Roanoke.” The water usage figures above don’t read that way to me. However, the city may still suffer from the memories of the 1999 drought, when Carvins Cove did run dangerously low — but the Spring Hollow reservoir in Roanoke County had plenty of water. It was that crisis that forced Roanoke to agree to something the city hadn’t previously wanted to do: merge its water system with Roanoke County’s to form a regional water authority. For Roanoke, the past half-century has been a steady loss of stature as neighboring localities evolved from rural communities into economic forces of their own. What looks like regional cooperation to the rest of the Roanoke Valley was — before 2000 anyway — seen by some in the city as a diminution. The city had to “give up” its airport to a regional authority; it had to “give up” Carvins Cove and the water system to a regional authority. I had thought those old viewpoints had faded away, but now they seem to be coming back as the mayor talks about “giving away” the water in Carvin Cove (something that happened when the water authority was created).
I understand some of the city’s concerns. While we seem to have a bountiful supply of water, it may not be so bountiful that we can become Data Center Alley Southwest. Google doesn’t seem to come anywhere close to touching the limits of our capacity, but it’s good to be reminded that we do have some limits out there — and what they are.
Still, we’ve never seen a request like this before — and one that is tied to the city’s support for the project (which, in practical terms, means delivering three of the city’s votes on the eight-member water authority board for the water replacement plan). Since the city doesn’t have a majority there, maybe this is all symbolic and sometimes symbolism matters. For now, the city appears to be putting its interests above those of the rest of the Roanoke Valley. While the Google data center is a major “win” for Botetourt County, it’s a reputational win for the entire Roanoke Valley — whose name is now associated with one of the best-known brands in the world. That’s a connection the whole valley should be able to leverage. Reputationally, Roanoke might even be the biggest winner out of this. The further away you get, the less likely people are to say that Google is in Botetourt County and the more likely they are to say it’s “out near Roanoke.”
There was, and still is, a different route available to the city: It could have cheered on the Google announcement and, instead of trying to extract tax revenue from another locality, it could have embraced the potential for what Google and its artificial intelligence applications might hold for the city’s own economic development star, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. The Roanoke Valley could see itself as being on the forefront of the marriage of AI and medical research. But that’s not what we’ve heard out of the city. The city is also grappling with financial issues. It’s raised the meals tax, with half of that expected $2.02 million going to pay for deferred maintenance; it’s now looking at issuing $25 million worth of bonds to pay for even more deferred maintenance. A cynic might look at Roanoke’s proposal for Botetourt to share its Google tax revenue not as a concern about the valley’s water supply but as a simple cash grab. Roanoke might get some reputational shine out of Google, but reputation doesn’t pay the bills.
Maybe all this will pass and someday be forgotten. The danger is that the Roanoke Valley reverts to what it used to be — a collection of squabbling local governments. Maybe we could afford that in a different economic era; we can’t afford that now.
Statement from Roanoke Mayor Joe Cobb
I told the mayor and the city manager I was baffled by the city’s position on the Google data center. Here’s his reply:
Last night, while attending the races at the USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Championships, a couple stopped by to say hi, and the gentleman asked me, “Is our water supply going to be ok?”, to which I replied, “We’re going to make sure it is.” “Up to 8 million gallons of water per day is a lot,” he said. “Yes,” I answered, “it is likely to be up to 8 million per day.” “Well, thank you for looking out for us.”
Roanoke consistently supports projects that drive innovation and economic growth. We are proud of our role in fostering regional progress—and we remain committed to collaboration that benefits all. In fact, we have consistently expressed overall support for this project, while also indicating our concerns related to the project.
We are concerned that this project will consume a significant portion of the remaining regional water capacity, and there is not, as of yet, an agreement on water replacement. Unlike previous projects, this development’s scale directly affects the City’s access to a critical shared resource (water), with possible downstream effects on service reliability, recreational amenities, and our own future growth opportunities. The City is seeking a share of the project’s tax revenues as compensation for the reduction in water access and these potential limitations.
As a founding partner and contributor to shared water infrastructure (the Water Authority), Roanoke has made historic investments and continues to maintain critical facilities that benefit the region. Revenue sharing is a practical and equitable way to balance the benefits and burdens among regional partners.
By tying revenue sharing to our support (asking Botetourt County to remit 15% of its annual tax revenue generated from the project to the City until the water capacity is fully restored) we also promote timely and responsible action by the project’s partners on water capacity replacement and mitigation of impacts to park infrastructure. As. These steps are essential to preserving the integrity of regional cooperation and ensuring that growth remains sustainable.
This is not a matter of opposition; it is a matter of stewardship. We have a duty to advocate for our residents and protect community assets. Raising these concerns and seeking suitable agreements are a part of good governance. In addition, we understand that this project has been in the works for 18 months, yet our new City Manager and City Council first became aware of the effort only three months ago. I have been on City Council for seven years, and as Mayor since January, and given the short amount of time to we’ve had to review and fully understand the benefits and concerns related to the project leave me feeling somewhat frustrated, yet hopeful that we can work toward a meaningful outcome.
Ultimately, this is about ensuring fairness and sustainability as we pursue regional progress. Our approach creates a path for all partners to benefit while protecting core interests and assets. We look forward to collaborating on solutions that allow the region to thrive together.
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