GATE CITY — The Scott County Board of Supervisors approved a special use permit Wednesday for an underground data center that is being proposed for a former mining site located in the Duffield area.
Following a public hearing, supervisors voted unanimously to award Roanoke-based Secure Mountain, LLC a special use business permit that would allow the company to convert the former Foote Mineral Co. Mine into a data storage facility.
“We had the privilege of going down there and visiting that and looking,” Scott County Board of Supervisors Chairman Danny Mann said. “It’s a very interesting prospect and I look forward to something happening there.”
The special use permit was needed due to the area being zoned for residential and agricultural use.
Although the project is still in the planning stages, Secure Mountain, LLC President George Foresman said the proposed site near Duffield could be a good fit for the company.
“Our goal is to pursue this because we think it is a good job creator for Scott County. We think it is a good opportunity from a business standpoint, and we see it as a way that will harness some of the natural attributes of this community, including the communications, the power, and the exceptionally well-trained work force,” Foresman said.
If Secure Mountain decides to move ahead with constructing the facility, it is expected to generate between 20 and 30 jobs that pay above the median income for Scott County.
Foresman said several factors make the former high-calcium limestone mine a good candidate for housing the data center.
“The unique nature of this site and some of the attributes it offers in terms of potential data storage, makes it just a no-nonsense decision for us from a business standpoint,” Foresman said.
“We’re looking at this as a way to create a level of reuse of an existing site,” Foresman added. “This was a high-calcium limestone mine, but in today’s age and the information age it certainly has benefit to folks in Scott County from an economic development standpoint, but certainly to a lot of companies and government clients to be able to do data storage.”
The underground area that would house the computer equipment measures roughly 21 acres, Foresman said, and offers enhanced security, natural cooling and is located in close proximity to power and communications infrastructure.
Foresman also said the facility would cause minimal disruption above ground.
“The focus here is not to build a large above-ground structure, but rather to minimize our above-ground footprint and from an architectural standpoint to have it very much flow into the natural topography of the land, because for various reasons we are not looking for this to be a very high-profile site,” Foresman said.
So far, Foresman said the company has spent more than $1 million cleaning up and securing the site and is currently working to map out the total usable area and clean up byproduct from past mining operations.