Research
Everything we have found, with the sources attached
One library. Every figure traces to a county document, a records request, or a published budget. Where a number is an estimate, we say so — and where the county disputes it, we say that too.
All
Taxes & Budget
EDA & Debt
Data Centers
Shoosmith
Water
Schools
Land Use
8 findings
$15.5M
Chesterfield's published checkbook cuts vendor names at 30 characters, splitting one contractor relationship into two smaller ones. Combined, it is the largest vendor in the period — and the county's own file does not show it that way.
Taxes & Budget
Estimated
County payment file · pending vendor-ID confirmation
24¢
The county's Economic Development Director confirmed the rate in writing, along with a freeze of up to thirty years. Set against the 1% sales tax debate, this is the far larger number.
Data Centers
Verified
Chesterfield Economic Development, 21 Jul 2026
$34.7M
Debt service ran $98.0M in 2023 and $114.8M in 2025. The 2024 figure came in at $34.7M against a $101.5M projection. We have asked the county to explain the gap.
EDA & Debt
Verified
County debt service series, 2017–2026
$2.82M
An arbitrage rebate is what a locality owes when it earns more interest on tax-exempt bond money than the rules allow. The payment is in the county's own file. The bond issue behind it has not been disclosed.
EDA & Debt
Verified
County payment file · records request open
36.9%
Two trends running opposite directions over the same eight years. We are not claiming one caused the other — COVID sits in the middle of it — but the county should be able to explain it.
Schools
Verified
SchoolDigger.com and county education budgets, 2017–2024
$8.24M
Payments booked as reimbursements to the Economic Development Authority are the mechanism behind the county's incentive agreements. A plain-English walk through how the pass-through works and why it is hard to see from outside.
EDA & Debt
Verified
County payment file, Jul 2025 – May 2026
$3.36M
The department itself spent $3.36M in 2024, and its headcount actually shrank over the same six years everything else in the county grew. That is not where the real money is. The county's economic-development spending runs through EDA reimbursements and incentive agreements instead — see the $8.24M card above. A small department budget does not mean small economic-development spending; it means the spending is booked somewhere else.
EDA & Debt
Verified
County department spending census, 2019–2026
1 map
The monitoring record for Shoosmith is spread across separate reports from different companies — some have a map, several (the April Leachate report, the gas monitoring reports) have none, just lists of sampling locations. We consolidated the results onto one map. What's new is plotting Swift Creek and Piney Branch alongside it: the two waterways that form the landfill boundary and are the likely routes for anything leaving it. Neither DEQ nor the operator had reason to draw them — we did, because it's the part that shows where this could actually go.
Shoosmith
Verified
SCS Engineers report
~4 mo.
The county is rewriting the document that governs what gets built where, on a nine-month timetable. Roughly four months remain in which public comment can still shape it.
Land Use
Estimated
County planning calendar