For five years this community banded to together to demand Amazon bury their data center extension cord through residential communities. We didn’t stop there. We continued our fight, working with the Board of Supervisors, to unanimously adopt a common sense Data Center Overlay District – to avoid repeating the same mistakes with data centers in the wrong places.
Now, a mere three years after our hard fought win, there is a proposal to put a data center campus in the Rural Crescent, AND directly within the legislative boundary of one of Virginia’s most important environmental assets.
“Prince William Forest Park protects the largest piedmont forest in the National Park Service and the largest greenspace in the Washington, DC metropolitan region. It captures the transition from Coastal Plain to Piedmont ecosystems; its value to current and future research is significant and will continue to grow over time.”
Our county planning commission is scheduled to vote this Wednesday, December 9, on the Independent Hill Small Area Plan, which includes plans to put a data center on land to be removed from the Rural Crescent.
The newly created category of Public Facility/Office and Technology/Flex allows for Data Centers outside the overlay district, which circumvents the overlay’s sound zoning measures. Find a full description of the issue here. Access the complete Small Area Plan here (data center content on pages 48 – 50).
The Data Center Overlay District was adopted to ensure that the industrial aspect of data centers would be compatible with surrounding uses. It is clear to everyone that a data center within the Rural Crescent, adjacent to Prince William Forest Park, does NOT meet that criteria.
It is ironic that on the same night as the vote on this proposal, the planning commission also votes to do the right thing for a different data center application within the overlay district. There will be no major public opposition to that other application – because it’s in the right place.
Please tell the Planning Commissioners to protect Prince William Forest Park, protect the Rural Crescent, promote smart land use decisions. There are 10,000 acres set aside and available for data centers in the Data Center Overlay District – utilize those acres for data centers first.
If you don’t want this plan to be approved, use our easy click-to-send email here. Your input must be received by mid-day December 9.
We know there are other plans coming, to put more data centers deep in the Rural Crescent. If approved, this project will set a precedent for those.
To be honest, rather than remove these 160 acres from the Rural Crescent and develop them, the only way to truly protect open space in the Rural Crescent, and the integrity of PWFP, is to set up these acres in a permanent conservation easement.
If we are not vigilant and do not speak up now, what we are facing is data centers and high density housing throughout Prince William County’s Rural Crescent.