The lease Chesterfield signed projected $194,250 a month. The County and School Board are paying $234,643.17. The certificate that would confirm which figure is correct — and that the lease requires both parties to execute — does not exist.
Chesterfield County occupies roughly half of Springline at District 60 Office Building One, at 7120 Midlothian Turnpike, under a twenty-year lease with SRG53, LLC. Filings with the Virginia State Corporation Commission show SRG53, LLC was organised by Timmons Group on 27 June 2022, and that Timmons Group has served as its registered agent since 12 May 2023. County and School Board employees moved in during February and March 2025.
Every rent payment since has been made without the one document the lease requires before the rent is fixed.
The lease runs 240 months. For the first lease year it sets out a specific, modest set of numbers.
Those figures are estimates by design. The lease provides that actual first-year rent is calculated by applying a “Rent Constant” to the landlord’s final development costs, with the result recorded on Schedule 1 to the Certificate of Lease Commencement. The Exhibit F worksheet derives the $23.58 figure from an estimated $41.6 million in total project costs. That worksheet is what the County had in front of it when it approved the deal.
County and School Board check registers show payments to SRG53, LLC beginning 20 February 2025. The two funds pay separately, in a fixed proportion.
Against the lease’s first-year figure of $194,250, the recurring payment of $234,643.17 is 20.8 per cent higher — about $40,393 every month. That gap is not explained by the lease’s 3.5 per cent annual escalator, which had not yet taken effect during the first lease year.
Nineteen payments were made between 20 February 2025 and 10 July 2026, totalling $4,538,211.85 in rent. Over the same period the lease’s own schedule — thirteen months in the first lease year at $194,250, then six months in the second at $199,408 — would total $3,721,698.75. The difference is approximately $816,500.
One variable affects that figure. The 10 July 2026 payment is exactly double the recurring amount in both funds. If it covers two months rather than settling arrears, the payments span twenty months rather than nineteen, and the difference falls to approximately $617,000. Both figures are stated here. The County can resolve which applies.
This comparison holds operating expenses flat at the $7.50 per square foot estimated in the lease. Section 6 requires the landlord to deliver a statement of actual operating expenses by 30 April each year, after which either party pays the other any overpayment or deficiency. If actual operating costs have risen, some part of this gap may be legitimate. But no such reconciliation has been made public, and the tenant’s audit rights under that same section appear not to have been exercised.
The premises are approximately 75,000 rentable square feet. If operating expenses remained at the estimated $46,875 a month, the base rent implied by the payments works out to about $30.04 per square foot — above the $28.00 ceiling the lease sets for the first year, and roughly 27 per cent above the $23.58 the County was shown. If instead base rent was held at exactly the $28.00 cap, then operating expenses are running near $9.54 per square foot, about 27 per cent above the $7.50 estimate.
CBRE’s Richmond office report put the market’s average asking rate at $21.85 per square foot in the first quarter of 2026, up from $21.68 a year earlier. Newmark reported Richmond office rents closing the second quarter of 2026 at $23.68 per square foot.
Springline is new build-to-suit construction, which typically prices above a market average that includes older inventory. These figures are context, not a direct comparison. The telling comparison is internal to the lease: both $23.58 and the $28.00 ceiling sit within what the Richmond market was commanding. The rate implied by the actual payments does not.
Under the lease, the Certificate of Lease Commencement is where the parties confirm the building’s final square footage, the tenant’s share, the landlord’s total costs, the Rent Constant, the first-year minimum rent, and the tenant’s share of operating expenses. It also fixes the commencement and expiration dates of a twenty-year term.
Assistant County Administrator Jesse Smith has confirmed by email that the certificate was not executed before County employees occupied the building in February and March 2025. It remains unexecuted today.
Supervisor Ingle has further stated that responsibility for negotiating a resolution has been removed from the Economic Development Department and the Economic Development Authority, and now rests with the Board and County staff directly.
Based on multiple conversations with County officials, it is CCRG’s belief that staff aware of the situation were instructed by Dr Casey to avoid discussing it with the Board. We have not obtained a document establishing that instruction, and we state it as our belief rather than as established fact. The County has not addressed the question publicly.
The lease terms formed the financial basis for moving School Board and Economic Development staff into leased space rather than building a new County facility, an alternative estimated at $40 million. That comparison rested on the rent schedule in the signed lease.
Rent escalates 3.5 per cent a year for 240 months, and each year is calculated from the year before it. A first-year rate of $30.04 per square foot rather than the $23.58 in the lease does not stay a first-year problem — it compounds across two decades. Establishing the correct first-year figure is not a bookkeeping matter. It sets the baseline for the entire obligation.
Because the County and the School Board write separate cheques, the two streams can look like independent obligations. They are not. Every paired payment in the record splits at exactly 16 per cent Economic Development, 84 per cent School Board — to the penny, across all six distinct payment amounts and through three separate rate changes.
The $726,113.94 paid from the County’s General Operating Fund is therefore Economic Development’s proportional share of a single building cost, not a duplicate of the School Board’s payment. The gap identified on this page is the difference between the combined total and the lease schedule — not the existence of a second payment stream.
We are not saying the lease is invalid. It is fully executed and binding, signed by both parties in 2023. The missing certificate means the final rent figures were never confirmed — not that the lease does not exist.
We are not alleging that any individual profited from this. We have seen no evidence of that and make no such claim.
We are not asserting what the correct rent should be. Only the landlord’s certified costs and the Rent Constant determination can establish that, and neither is public. What we can show is that the payments do not match the schedule in the signed lease, and that the document meant to reconcile the two was never executed.
We have also asked for a full, independent forensic audit of Economic Development Authority projects authorised by the Board of Supervisors. We will publish the answers here, including any that change what is on this page.
Every figure on this page comes from the records below. They are published here in full so anyone can check the arithmetic.