We are now talking about food waste prevention and recovery. Craig Rice from Manna pointed out that the tighter margins (as food costs go up) for grocers and restaurants means food recovery groups get fewer additions.

ALSO food recovery is NOT free!

Note about these rising rates of food insecurity (from 27% to 34% in Montgomery County) is these numbers do NOT include our furloughed employees.

Organizations are reaching out daily to ask “can you feed another 70-100 families who have lost their SNAP benefits” but there isn’t fed $

Go Bills Natali!!

Last point on the tour: ~90 properties on Pageland in Prince William County banded together to sell their land to data center developers. Digital Gateway will result in 22 mill sq feet of data center — larger than Data Center Alley currently is. It’s ALL ag, forest, and homes now.

The data center demand is through the roof: DCs generally have a low vacancy rate so companies feel like they can continuing building since companies want their servers before the buildings are even built.

This is a crisis by contract, the grid isn’t overloaded by residential energy usage. Residents are lowering their usage even though our populations are increasing! Without the data center load growth, we wouldn’t be talking about this energy crisis, we would just be transitioning to renewables.

More spookiness: Julie said that whatever energy we start with, we are stuck with the next 25 years.

So if a data center says that they will temporarily use gas, that plant will not hit ROI (for ratepayers) for nearly 3 decades.

Another EJ issue: the areas where gas peaker plants are staying online are NOT the areas where they are getting the financial benefits of data center development. They have no say in the matter!

Someone asked a great question about the demographics of Loudoun. The EJ issue here is not necessarily about building in the backyards of poor residents, but of “who is able to leave when things get bad?”

Several billion $ was spent to bring 3 metro stops in Loudon. 1/2 a billion was paid for the Loudoun metro — and it has the lowest ridership in all of @wmata.com. This is what happens when we allow by right development!

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

At $400 mill/an acre, only our richest multinational corporations can afford this land, and they only want to build data centers. They don’t need to build light industrial or mixed use areas!

👻👻 Julie has said, somewhat ominously, “this is just the beginning. Look at all those cranes.”