The outcomes from the May 4 Board meeting were a mixed bag of some good news, and some bad news.
The good news is that the desecration and disrespect to the Thoroughfare community in the Rural Crescent has finally been acknowledged by the entire Board.
There was bipartisan support for Supervisor Candland’s two directives:
- County Staff is to hold a public discussion about what happened, how we got into this situation, and what the County is going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
- By the next Board meeting, County Staff is to present a plan to implement a program, outlining costs and required headcount, on how the county will protect all cemetaries, gravesites, and historic communities throughout the county.
Details on the next Board meeting, May 18, below.
The bad news is that the fight for the Rural Crescent is prolonged.
The transparent chess moves in the wee hours of the morning did not fool anyone. In obviously pre-orchestrated grandstanding, Chair Wheeler ensured her edicts for the motions ultimately put forward were to her liking.
The Board voted unanimously to deny the Rural Plan CPA, approve PDR, and remand TDR and CR zoning back to Planning.
The people who came to the meeting to address the Rural “Preservation” Plan came from two camps – Me or We.
The “Me” people came with their hands out, and are all those who stand to personally profit from sewer expansion, cluster housing, and data centers in the Rural Crescent.
The “We” folks talked about what sets Prince William County apart from our neighbors, our special rural environmental and historic places, and focused on protecting the rural area watershed and water supply for the greater community.
Supervisor Lawson’s email explains: “I will sum up the night by equating the series of votes to a restart. But in this restart discussion, it was also clear Chair Wheeler is interested in allowing data centers in the Pageland Lane corridor, and of course, that would only be the beginning.”
Don’t count this vote as a win. With the exception of the passage of PDR, which will be useful for permanently conserving land in the county, we are in for a more complex fight. The Rural Crescent isn’t saved, and this wasn’t a permanent decision.
Chair Wheeler is expecting the Democratic majority on the Board be in lockstep with her for intense housing development with sewer, and commercial and industrial uses, including data centers, within the current boundaries of the rural area. She now calls the Rural Crescent “the current undeveloped area.”
Not being acknowledged are the liability costs of what is being pushed:
- Permanent damage to the rural area watershed of the county from impervious surfaces introduced by massive data centers and dense housing
- Rising taxes to cover ongoing costs of maintaining new roads, schools, sewer lines, and other infrastructure required for dense housing
- Permanent loss of environmental resources to rate-payer funded additional high voltage transmission lines and substations required for every data center complex, along with their intense water usage demands
- Not to mention all the other environmental and historical losses
May 18 Board Meeting:
THOROUGHFARE:
County Staff will provide presentations to the Board per Supervisor Candland’s two directives coming out of the Thoroughfare debacle.
CHANGES TO DATA CENTER OVERLAY DISTRICT:
The Board will vote on a resolution to initiate a zoning text amendment to the Data Center Overlay District. They will be discussing the parameters of what might be considered to expand the overlay into more areas of the county, including the Rural Crescent.
There are thousands of unused acres in the overlay district. Changes to the Data Center Overlay District will harm all County residents.
Sign up or show up to speak for 3 minutes on either topic during Citizen Time at the 7:30 PM outset of the meeting.
If you are not available to join the meeting to provide your input, send in your personalized thoughts here. Your message will be sent to all the Board Supervisors, Planning Commissioners, and the Planning Director. Be sure to tell them what you care about and what you want.
As Supervisor Candland pointed out, many large landowners showed up at the May 4th meeting and petitioned very vocally that the rural plan be denied because the zoning in it made data centers in the rural area more difficult. The risk of data centers now being pushed within the rural area was also explained in this Prince William Times article.
While Supervisors Candland, Lawson, and Vega have publicly declared they will not support data centers in the Rural Crescent, the rest of the Board has declared in many different ways that they want to bring these industrial uses to the rural area, and throughout the rest of the county.
Many on the Board view data centers as a way to boost tax revenues – not by taxing data centers at an appropriate rate to boost county revenues, and by siting them only where they belong – but by having many, many data centers throughout the county, and a paltry tax income from each.
The large landowners who want to sell acreage to the data center industry for massive profits are organized and lining up for the overlay district change. The data center pushers – if they get their way for applications they have already submitted or are now submitting – will have data centers sprinkled anywhere there is open acreage in the county.
But, any transmission lines and substations in place today will not be sufficient to support all the additional data centers being considered and proposed. The massive 230kV and 500kV transmission lines impacting Pageland Lane now are already dedicated power for Loudoun County’s Data Center Alley.
Bulk load customer energy infrastructure is the most extreme example of corporate subsidy. Innovation to make their facilities smaller and to use fewer resources will come faster when these bulk load customers are motivated to make changes. Their motivation to innovate will only come from requiring that they pay for their own infrastructure. Their infrastructure should not impact our homes, our environment, and our small businesses.
The State Corporate Commission legal staff eloquently agreed with this position in their post hearing brief on the Haymarket case:
.…the Commission “may wish to require [data center] to put some of its own skin into the game. Otherwise, the general public [all of us], already burdened by the environmental and aesthetic impacts of otherwise unneeded transmission projects, [are] also burdened with 100% of the otherwise unnecessary costs.”
Contrary to what large landowners along Pageland Lane claim, their proposed “Pageland Data Center Corridor” will require even more 230kV transmission lines and substations.
We are facing massive industrial concrete buildings and even more huge 230kV and 500kV data center transmission line extension chords with additional humming substations dropped near any new data centers approved outside the existing overlay boundaries. All of this will chop through our communities and our historical and environmental resources.
If residents throughout this county, who care about their quality of life and having some stability to be able to thrive in their homes, don’t show up and speak up, there will be data centers popping up all throughout our neighborhoods, fields, and forests.