Photo by Zulfugar Karimov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/modern-chrome-kitchen-faucet-with-running-water-34295401/

Despite growing controversy, including a Goochland County lawsuit, City and state officials have indicated they will move ahead with an exciting, new, local utility program to support area new date center projects.

The DPU program is called ‘Richmond’s Next Step’ and it is already being touted as a ground breaking way to push area technological advancement and development through public/private partnership. ‘Richmond’s Next Step’, if successful, will be seen as a model for utilities around the state, and scale up to become ‘Virginia’s Next Step’. Corporate and government leaders are saying this is absolutely necessary to further the use of artificial intelligence in Virginia and be able to compete on an economic basis both nationally and internationally.

Although finer details are being worked out when the state’s General Assembly reconvenes later this month, these are the four major parts we know so far for ‘Richmond’s Next Step’:

1) City residents will see a new surcharge of around $11 on their monthly water utility bills, and the state government will contribute matching funds for the monies collected from the surcharge. This will in turn create a large resource to help with the following…

2) A portion of the proceeds will go towards implementing new infrastructure for needed energy and water for new data centers in state. Dominion Power will oversee this with an offshoot, subsidiary company, much of the same way it manages sewer connection insurance for City residents. This will insure smooth integration for both Virginia residents and industry.

3) A portion of the proceeds will go towards the decades-long project to ameliorate the City’s (CSO) sewer overflow problems. while CSO programs have made some progress, the City continues to beg for state and federal help with this. Many state leaders have asked for more control and oversight of money given to the City for this purpose. The new ‘Richmond’s Nest Step’ program will hopefully address these concerns and enable more state and federal funding.

4) In what is probably the most elaborate and high tech portion of ‘Richmond’s Next Step’, the City utility will roll out new toilet sensors for both private and public institutions, with commercial and residential places to follow. These sensors are based on the highway ‘EZ Pass’ toll collection service, and will be able to collect both tolls and data on toilet usage. Money collected from the tolls will be funneled back into the overall program and utility modernization efforts.

Mayor Danny Avula has enthusiastically embraced the measure, saying that this will finally address many of the outstanding matters with the Department of Public Utilities, while making sure that the City continues to support economic development for its corporate partners. He also said it would be contribute to the City’s commitment to ‘financial transparency’.

The Mayor, who has already had an extensive career in public health, including stints with both the City’s and the state’s health departments’ response to the Covid-19 epidemic, is particularly excited about the data collection from the ‘EZ-Pass’ toilet data collection. He noted how recent science has proven that studying COVID-19 through wastewater surveillance works because infected individuals shed the virus in their stool, which then enters sewage systems, often days before clinical symptoms appear. “Richmond should embrace this opportunity to learn more about its citizens and use data to create more robust emergency health responses and outcomes”, he beamed.

Longtime, reform-minded critics of the City’s water utility are not impressed.

Laurel Street neighbor Charles Pool, for example, was especially dour.
“The City’s PUBLIC water utility has been used as a cash cow with its regressive rates, it has essentially supported suburban sprawl in the counties by selling the counties water for less then it has charged it’s own poorest citizens, it has given large volume users incredible price breaks, and now they want City residents, their rank and file customers (who really own the utility), to directly subsidize the development of private data centers in other parts of the state? Intolerable!”

Another Spring Street neighbor expressed his frustration.
“All across the City, we have leaking water mains and outrageously high and erroneous bills that are stressing out working Joes like me, and the politicians tell us that we need to suck it all up for more dubious ‘economic development plans? Is AI going to help me figure out how to keep food on my family’s table? And now they want to track how much we poop!?”

Others harkened back to a public letter to former Governor Northam, prior to the January 2025 Richmond water crisis, and wondered if the City will ever address water rate reform.

Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, ‘the state’s watchdog’, has been strangely silent about the ‘Next Step’ plan, and it’s involvement in the plan’s formation. But water and energy conservation groups as well as privacy advocates are urging citizens to speak up to their elected representatives.

A Dominion representative restated that there is no evidence that residential customers are competing for energy with data centers (but did not mention water usage in his remarks).

Data center bills dominated this year’s General Assembly, but many government watchers are wondering if the full details for this ‘Next Step’ plan (and what else?) will fully emerge from the upcoming special budget session.