Deja vu all over again

 

In 1995, Motorola bought approximately 230 acres of land in West Creek to build a computer chip plant, valued at $3 billion. It was touted as the largest single investment in Motorola’s history. The facility was planned to be a 1.5 million square-foot five-building semiconductor manufacturing center projected to employ 5,000 people. The company spent at least $20 million to buy the land and do site work in the next year. In September 1998, the company announced that, due to weak demand for semiconductors, it was suspending construction on the site, which was mostly parking lots.

The good news is that the plant was not built and abandoned leaving Goochland with an expensive white elephant.

Motorola road and parking

Soccer Complex on chip plant site

Motorola officially terminated the project in September 2002, citing changes in the industry. The property was sold to Markel Corporation in 2005 for $18.1 million. Markel has leased a portion of the property to the Richmond Strikers for a soccer facility and, for a time, some of the parking lots to Capital One for employee use.

Fast forward to 2022 when a rezoning application for approximately 94 acres on the west side of Ashland Road north of I64 was filed by California based Panattoni Development Company for an entity code named “project Rocky” appeared on Goochland land use radar. Though never formally acknowledged, the end user of the 650k square foot e-commerce distribution center, was believed to be Amazon.

Although located in an area of Goochland that, for decades, has been designated for industrial use, the project drew robust opposition from area residents who travel in the already congested Ashland Road corridor. Objections included contentions that more traffic, especially tractor trailers, would threaten their lives by drastically increasing EMS response times, and increased air pollution from more vehicles would cause health problems.

Traffic congestion was the biggie. Even without Rocky, the Ashland Road corridor is often clogged with dump trucks moving rock from the three area quarries, and tractor trailers accessing the 623 landfill. Traffic signal queues at busy times of the day can extend for a mile.

The project attracted the attention of the state government that supported approval for construction of a second bridge over I64 to construct a four-lane diverging diamond, which will vastly improve traffic flow.

Following community meetings, and public hearings, the supervisors approved the project in August 2022. Though permits were filed, and initial engineering and site design began on what was characterized as a “very complicated project” soon after the rezoning was approved, the property never changed hands.

At a December 12 transportation workshop attended by present and future supervisors, County Engineer Austin Goyne, said that the demise of Project Rocky will not have an impact on the diverging diamond project.

Conditions on Ashland Road were so bad, that, while Rocky got the state’s attention, it met VDOT Smart Scale funding threshold criteria on its own merits. Details of the interchange design are expected to be revealed at a December 20 meeting, said Goyne. Engineering will follow. Construction is expected to begin in June 2028. The rezoning of the Project Rocky site, which is still valid, was the main consideration in the Smart Scale ranking. “The funding for this project is 100 percent approved,” Goyne said of the new I64 bridge and DDI project.

Board Chair Neil Spoonhower District 2 said that, due to the demise of Project Rocky, the timing of the interchange improvements could change. He has a meeting with Panattoni later this week to discuss their plans, if any, for the site.

Goyne said that a study of the entire Ashland Road corridor—from Broad Street Road to north of the Lanier Industrial Park—transportation issues will be part of a report to the Federal government in the spring, with recommendations following in the summer.

Where do we go from here? The M-2 zoning for the Project Rocky site remains in place, removing what can be a complicated and lengthy step in the development process. The Goochland Economic Development Department is working with the landowner to market the property. Earlier this year, land a bit to the north on Ashland Road was rezoned for speculative warehouse/office use to attract smaller companies.

The good news is that Rocky was shut down before anything was built. The next buyer of the land has a clean slate.