The Department of Environmental Quality, being a state agency, must put the health and safety of Virginians first, not profits. The emergency generator allowance must not be broadened. The cost to public health (and the health of future generations through the resulting pollution) is simply unacceptable. Especially since planned outages are foreseeable, and therefore the company that runs the data center has time to make appropriate arrangements that don't take advantage of the community, and especially since data centers don't do anything so important they can't afford downtime.

Making this change is a betrayal of the citizens this department serves. Should this department choose to betray their people, then they must forbid Tier II generators to be run for planned outages near schools, hospitals, parks, trails, residential areas, and other sensitive areas. The public must also be given notice about where and when these generators will be run. This notice must be published and posted in mediums where the public will actually see it. No publishing it in some obscure newsletter nobody reads and claiming they informed the public. Every site where emergency generators are running must be inspected daily to monitor fuel usage and air quality the whole time they are running.