Hold onto your seat! You are not gonna believe what is happening in our county, behind closed doors, in the midst of a global pandemic. Buried on page 4 of tonight’s Board of Supervisors agenda, our county’s head of Economic Development has proposed a resolution guaranteed to fulfill every developer’s dream.
Nothing is sacred to developers. In the midst of these uncertain times, big developers thought they could re-introduce their long-standing wish list of ideas to our new executive director of economic development for recommendation to our Board of Supervisors – and hope our community wouldn’t notice. Boy are they wrong!
Behind closed doors, with no citizen input, under the guise of allocating funds to needy small businesses, the worst of plans has been hatched by the new county ERTF. Who are they?
“Economic Recovery Task Force – In April of 2020, the Department of Economic Development created the ERT to assist staff in developing recommendations to aid Prince William County’s economic recovery PostCOVID-19.”
This county task force, neither elected nor appointed by our elected leaders, has gone off the rails.
Tonight this task force, members unknown, is asking our Supervisors to approve the following most egregious items contained in a Resolution targeted for Post-COVID-19 economic recovery, Item 9B on the agenda (read all 12 pages of the recommendation here):
1) Bi-County Parkway (page 7): Resurrect the Bi-County big rig “turnpike” truck cut-through, to bring massive heavy truck traffic from I-95 in the East, down a two-lane Route 234, into the western end. This developer’s dream highway would bring intense development and dissect the Rural Crescent, wasting precious dollars on a road that has been nicknamed the “Zombie Highway” for thirty years, because it just won’t die.
2) Work Force Housing (Page 8): Create a brand new terminology for housing under the guise of “work force housing,” that would negate our current comprehensive plan update, along with our strategic plan. Here is a quote from the resolution that was intended to help our small businesses who are struggling financially due to COVID. It looks to us to be a sneaky big Developer give-away that removes significant oversight!
“Expedited processing and fee reduction incentives also could be used to stimulate innovative homebuilding to house the County’s workforce While “workforce housing” means different things to different people, as used herein, the term is intended to describe housing for all workers at all income levels and includes all housing types – the goal is to foster innovation to create desirable communities for all.”
If this sounds like a free-for-all, you would be correct. EVERY new housing proposal in Prince William County would fall under this designation. This is the opposite of Planning. This is pure, unadulterated Chaos.
3) Expand Data Center boundaries (page 7): Instead of abiding by the recently adopted Date Center Overlay District, which includes 10,000 acres of available data center siting with identified compatible power infrastructure, they propose the county go back to square one. We would all be at risk for the blight of massive transmission lines everywhere. And who pays? All of us, with our most important financial asset – our homes and properties. It isn’t the data centers that need a break, it’s regular citizens. Here’s a section of the proposal:
“Data centers are a major source of commercial tax revenue that support the County’s schools, parks and recreation, and community and social services. Unfortunately, economically viable land within the current data center opportunity zone overlay district is shrinking rapidly. To continue to attract data centers, expanding the data center overlay zone is recommended by the Infrastructure Committee.”
Even IF this overlay district is shrinking, this needs to be a comprehensive discussion. Not only are energy requirements unique to this use, so is water consumption.
We must also ask ourselves as a county, within the context of the Data Center industry, is that what we want to turn our county into? Look at Loudoun County Parkway, surrounded on all sides by massive concrete buildings, with multiple substations and huge power towers across the landscape as far as the eye can see? We are giving so much away – Loudoun’s tax rate on data centers is $4.20 whereas PWC’s tax rate is only $1.35 per $100 assessed equipment value. We should seriously consider the negative impacts of courting this industry in our communities.
4) Fast Ferry (page 7): Is this really smart growth planning? Again – why is this project included in a package intended to provide immediate relief to existing small businesses?
These action items should NEVER have seen the light of day. They are definitely not seen through the new lens of “Equity” for all citizens, from the resolution which the BoS recently adopted. From the county website:
“The Prince William Board of County Supervisors recently adopted a resolution directing the County Executive to develop a framework and establish goals and objectives to ensure that the county is equitable in its dealings with the people it serves. The framework would also address or mitigate any adverse effects of racial and social disparities in the county’s programs, planning, and services.
According to Raul Torres, director of Prince William County Human Rights Office: The framework would also provide a methodology to assess programs, planning and processes for equity and inclusion, and identify racial and social disparities. To achieve the goals and objectives of the framework, stakeholders will use “lenses” or tools, which are different ways of looking at things, to determine who benefits, who is burdened, and who participates in county planning policies, programs, and services. That allows you to make a decision that is more equitable because you will try to mitigate the burdens that are imposed on certain people, and you are benefitting a group of people that you need to benefit. …There are a lot of people in the community that we want to reach out to and touch. We are committing to promote fairness in the formation of public policy.”
Where is the fairness in these items? Our focus for the CARES Act funds should be to help small struggling businesses, that are in crisis right now.
These four aren’t new and innovative ideas. These are the same old ideas that will only bring more crowding to our schools, more traffic to our roads, more transmission lines through our neighborhoods, and more stress on our police and other services.
The Board must approve the allocation of funds for our struggling small businesses now, and put these four initiatives in the trash heap.
Our Board of Supervisors needs to hear from you today about these proposals.
It’s too late to sign up to speak virtually, but you can go today at 2:00 pm to the McCoart building to speak in person, or go here to send your own email now to all the Supervisors, the County Executive, the Deputy County Executive, and the Executive Director of Economic Development.
You can have an impact!