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.
The Newins amendment did three additional things. It removed the Fentress Airfield Overlay District from the list of eligible sites — a change the planning commission had not recommended. It eliminated the by-right pathways that had let projects skip council review entirely. And it prohibited data centers from connecting to groundwater, which Newins said would limit draw from the Williams Farm area in southern Chesapeake, according to WAVY’s coverage of the vote. Her stated reasoning was that a project capable of consuming extraordinary amounts of electricity and water, and generating significant noise, should not be able to move forward without the community having a voice.
The council also kept in place the eight-month pause on data center applications it adopted on July 21, as Virginia Business reported at the time. The pause runs for up to eight months or until the city adopts full regulations, whichever comes first. During that window, the city can refine implementation without new filings stacking up in the queue.
What the Fentress Overlay actually is, and why it was the fight
Fentress is easy to misread. It is not an industrial park, and it is not an agricultural preserve either. The Fentress Airfield Overlay District is a military noise overlay. The city defines it as covering every lot falling inside the AICUZ noise contours above 75 dB Ldn on the NAS Oceana / NALF Fentress mapping — the loudest band around the Navy’s field carrier landing practice strip in southern Chesapeake. The federal AICUZ program that produced those contours maps zones of high noise and accident potential and recommends land uses compatible with them.
In practice that means the overlay pushes housing away and leaves light industrial, commercial and agricultural uses as the compatible remainder. Which is precisely why planning staff saw it as a logical candidate for data centers, and precisely why residents did not. The land underneath the contours is mostly farmland and rural road frontage, and the people who live at its edges have spent years watching it absorb the infrastructure nobody else wanted.
That history is documented. The Battlefield Golf Club near Centerville Turnpike and Whittamore Road was contoured using fly ash from a Dominion coal-fired plant, a decision that triggered years of EPA well testing. Roughly 475 acres of nearby farmland became the 70-megawatt Bedford Solar Center off Blue Ridge Road, adjacent to the airfield. And Fentress itself anchors major transmission work, including the Fentress-Yadkin 500 kV rebuild and new-line project before state regulators. Each was approved on its own terms. Stacked together, they are the reason a fourth industrial use in the same corner of the city did not land as a neutral zoning question.
There is also a direct line from the overlay to the fight that started all of this. The 350,000-square-foot Etheridge Lakes data center the council rejected in June 2025 sat on 22.6 acres at Centerville Turnpike and Etheridge Manor Boulevard — land zoned A-1 Agricultural and lying within the Fentress Airfield Overlay District, per the city’s rezoning staff report. Leaving the overlay on the eligible list would have left the door open on exactly the kind of site that produced the last two years of hearings. By removing it, the council closed that door, at least until the code is rewritten again.
The room was not unanimous the way the vote was
Public comment ran heavily against data centers. Nearly 40 speakers took the microphone. Outside city hall, protesters gathered before the meeting with signs reading no data centers in Chesapeake, and one resident brought a donkey.
The core complaints tracked what has shown up in similar fights across the country: noise from cooling systems and backup generators, electricity and water demand, and general quality-of-life effects on adjacent neighborhoods. Several speakers pressed the point that these decisions are not reversible once ground is broken.
Not every resident opposed the industry outright. At the planning commission hearing in July, some argued the city should engage on stricter terms rather than block the use, including one speaker who said Chesapeake residents should share directly in the investment and that the commitment should be clear from the start. Others said proximity was the real issue — a data center 100 feet from a home does not stop being a problem because the zoning code relabels it.
The planning commission had framed its recommendation as a floor, not a ceiling. The council’s job was to modify and implement. That is what happened Tuesday, and the modifications ran in the direction of tighter restriction.
Where Chesapeake sits in the regional pattern
Chesapeake is not passing the strictest measure in the country, and it is not passing a ban. It cannot. City Attorney Catherine Lindley has told council that state code prevents the city from prohibiting data centers outright, though it retains the power to regulate them. What the council did instead was take the industry off the by-right pathway and give itself a review mechanism for every future project.
Neighbouring cities are converging on the same instinct from different angles. Virginia Beach City Council voted the same night to temporarily stop considering permits for new data centers, a pause that runs twelve months or until the city addresses the use in its own zoning.
Chesapeake sits between the poles. It is not banning the use. It is not freezing permits without a plan. It is putting every application in front of council with expanded siting requirements, and it is doing so while an eight-month application pause is already running.
What happens next
The amended ordinance is adopted and the application pause continues to run. Newins has said the practical effect is that no data center application can reach council until early next year. When the pause lifts, any new proposal will need a conditional use permit, will not be permitted in the Fentress Airfield Overlay District, and will not be allowed to connect to groundwater.
Existing by-right pathways are closed. That is the change with the longest tail. A developer who might once have filed permits and started site work now has to make a case to council, on the record, in front of the same residents who filled the chamber Tuesday night.
The specifics that were deferred — setback distances, noise ceilings, the written policy that will sit alongside the zoning text — are still unwritten, and they will be written during the pause. What the record already shows is a council that heard both sides and moved further than its own planning commission had recommended. The room asked for that. The council delivered it 9-0, and then gave itself until early next year to decide what the rest of the rulebook says.