Drive west on Patterson Avenue past the office parks at West Creek, and the open land on your right could soon carry substations, generator yards, and roughly two million square feet of data center buildings under a single name: Tuckahoe Technology Park. The company behind it, Denver-based Tract, filed a formal application for a conditional use permit on August 5, 2026, and the project is now scheduled to reach the Goochland Planning Commission no earlier than October. For a buyer comparing Goochland's land and tax numbers against Henrico or Hanover, that filing is the fact worth understanding before the county's other selling point, a real estate tax rate that hasn't moved since 2008, gets treated as a permanent feature of the place.
The rate that hasn't moved, and the budget that has
Goochland's real estate tax rate sits at 53 cents per 100 dollars of assessed value, a figure the county confirmed again in its April 2026 rate adoption. That's the number most buyers see and compare against neighboring counties. What doesn't show up on the same page is that Goochland's overall budget has not been flat. The county's FY2026 budget rose 9.2 percent over the prior year, and its FY2027 general fund grew another 4.6 percent. A supervisor cited more than $230 million in capital needs over the next five years, covering schools, courthouse work, and utilities.
A county can't grow its budget by that much while freezing the residential rate unless something else is picking up the difference. In Goochland's case, that something is a second, separate tax line created specifically for data centers and other high-technology property. The Board of Supervisors set that rate at 44 cents per 100 dollars in April 2026, up from 40 cents, after members debated whether a higher number would scare off developers or simply reflect the county's actual negotiating leverage. County staff modeled a single 500,000 square foot data center generating close to $3.4 million a year in combined real estate and business personal property tax, with an AI-focused facility bringing in more. That's the mechanism. The flat residential rate isn't an accident of rural land values. It's a number the county can hold only if projects like Tuckahoe get built and keep paying.
What Tract is actually proposing, and why the dollar figures are large enough to matter
Tuckahoe Technology Park would sit on roughly 871 acres across 13 parcels, land currently held by the Haddock, Stern, and Arenstein families. The site is bordered by Hockett Road to the west, Patterson Avenue to the south, Route 288 to the east, and the Mosaic at West Creek subdivision, a 55-plus community of more than 500 homes, to the north. Tract's own filings project more than $400 million in real estate tax revenue over the campus's first 20 years, more than $600 million in business personal property tax over the same span, and over $500 million for the county through sales tax tied to more than $3 billion in construction spending. Those projections assume the state's data center sales tax exemption sunsets on schedule in 2035.
Those are the numbers a county weighing a flat residential rate against rising capital costs has to take seriously, whatever a given resident thinks of the project itself. They also explain why this isn't a marginal rezoning fight. The site is one of the first tests of Goochland's Technology Overlay District, adopted by the Board of Supervisors in a 4-1 vote in November 2025 to cover about 4,400 acres along a five-mile stretch of Route 288, most of it inside West Creek Business Park.
The buffer distance depends on which side of the line you're buying
Here's the detail that a portal listing won't surface and a drive-by won't reveal: not every acre inside that overlay district is treated the same way, and the protections a nearby homeowner gets depend entirely on which part of the corridor a parcel sits in.
Most of the overlay district, the roughly 3,500 acres inside West Creek Business Park, allows data centers by right. That means a qualifying project can move forward with administrative approval and no public hearing, so long as it meets the district's standards. Tuckahoe sits in a smaller carve-out called TOD West, where a conditional use permit and a public hearing are required, which is why Tract had to hold a community meeting at Goochland High School before filing and why the project is heading to the Planning Commission at all.
The buffers negotiated for Tuckahoe specifically are also larger than what the district originally proposed countywide. When the overlay district was first drafted, the buffer for a shorter data center was as little as 50 feet from a residential lot line, rising to 200 feet for taller structures. Tract's formal application, filed in August 2026, commits to 1,000-foot setbacks for generator areas and equipment from existing homes in Mosaic at West Creek, and 600 feet from any other adjacent residence. The company has also committed to air cooling rather than evaporative cooling, which cuts the water demand that worried early commenters (county estimates had ranged from 25,000 to 600,000 gallons a day) but requires more electricity draw from the grid in exchange.
None of that is visible on a listing sheet. A buyer looking at a parcel near Hockett Road needs to know not just whether it falls inside the overlay district, but whether it falls inside the by-right zone or the conditional use zone, and whether any project-specific buffer commitment applies to that parcel or only to the district's baseline minimum.
The legal fight isn't settled, and it isn't staying inside Goochland
Four residents, Cynthia Haas, Peggy Knisley, Virginia H. Reed, and Gail Minnick, sued Goochland in December 2025, arguing the county failed to properly notify affected property owners and that the final overlay district differed from what was described in its published notices. A May 2026 hearing narrowed which of the county's 8,500 pages of legislative records the court will actually review. The next hearing, on the county's motion to dismiss, is set for October 20, 2026, and no trial date has been scheduled. The plaintiffs' legal costs have been funded by roughly 300 supporting residents, and the county set aside $250,000 for its own defense.
That timeline matters for anyone underwriting a purchase near the corridor. A project can clear the Planning Commission and still be litigated well into 2027, and a buyer closing this fall could own property inside a district whose founding ordinance is under active legal challenge.
The corridor's reach also doesn't stop at the county line. At a September 22 Henrico Board of Supervisors meeting, residents from western Henrico's Far West End raised concerns that the overlay district, which runs along five miles of the Goochland side of the border, sits close enough to affect neighborhoods and Nuckols Farm Elementary on the Henrico side. Henrico's Three Chopt District supervisor told residents she has personally raised objections directly to Goochland's board. A buyer comparing a Goochland parcel to a similarly priced one in western Henrico or Short Pump should treat this as one corridor, not two separate stories, when weighing proximity.
What to actually check before making an offer near the corridor
The rate sheet and the rural branding tell a buyer what Goochland has been. The overlay district tells a buyer what the eastern edge of the county is becoming, and that process is still open. Before writing an offer on land near Hockett Road, Patterson Avenue, or the West Creek corridor, it's worth confirming three things directly: whether the parcel sits inside the by-right portion of the district or inside TOD West where a CUP is required, what buffer commitments apply to any specific project nearby rather than the district's baseline minimum, and whether the CUP process for that project has cleared its public hearing or still has one pending. The county's own Tuckahoe Technology Park project page tracks the application's status and posts hearing dates as they're scheduled.
None of this means the flat tax rate is fake or that the corridor makes every nearby parcel a bad buy. It means the rate and the corridor are the same bet, and a buyer evaluating one without the other is missing half the math.
A few common questions
Does this affect home values across all of Goochland, or just the corridor? The overlay district and the pending project are both geographically limited to the Route 288 corridor and West Creek Business Park area. Land west of Hockett Road and the county's rural interior sit outside the district entirely.
Will my property taxes go up because of data centers? The residential real estate rate is a separate line item from the data center rate the county adopted in April 2026. The county's own modeling assumes data center revenue helps fund capital needs without raising the residential rate, though that rate is still set annually and isn't guaranteed to stay flat indefinitely.
Is Tuckahoe Technology Park approved? No. As of this writing the application is under completeness review, with Planning Commission consideration expected no earlier than October 2026, followed by a final vote from the Board of Supervisors.
Understanding where a parcel sits relative to a zoning boundary, a pending permit, and an active lawsuit takes more than a listing description, and it's exactly the kind of local groundwork Bradley Real Estate does before a client ever writes an offer in Goochland County. If you're weighing land near the Route 288 corridor or anywhere else in the county, schedule a consultation and we'll walk through what's actually on file for that specific parcel.
