CHESTERFIELD COUNTY The $0.24 Rate, the Thirty-Year Lock, and the Two-Corridor County

Chesterfield County built its data center strategy on a single number. In April 2019 the Board of Supervisors set the equipment tax rate at $0.24 per $100 of assessed value, a deliberate undercut of Henrico County's then-disruptive $0.40, and the lowest data center rate in Virginia. The strategy worked. Google assembled three sites totaling nearly 1,640 acres through shell entities, Chirisa committed $2 billion to Meadowville, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems selected Battery Brooke Parkway for the world's first grid-scale commercial fusion plant. This case study documents what the strategy cost: a 30-year contractual rate lock, structured as an EDA grant-back that survives any future board's repricing…