By Daniel Berti Times Staff Writer
A town hall organized by county residents opposed to a 2,100-acre data center proposal in Prince William County’s ‘rural crescent’ drew more than 250 people to Gainesville’s Heritage Hunt neighborhood on Wednesday evening.
The proposal, known as the “PW Digital Gateway,” would allow up to 27 million square feet of data centers along the Pageland Lane corridor in a rural area that borders Manassas Battlefield National Park, Conway Robinson State Forest and Heritage Hunt, a 55-and-over community. The plan is being spearheaded by more than 80 landowners who live on Pageland Lane who want to sell their land – and homes – to data center developers.
If it’s approved, it will be the largest, single land-use change in Prince William County since 1998, when the rural crescent was created.
Heritage Hunt residents are largely opposed the plan. The Heritage Hunt homeowners’ association, which represents around 3,500 residents, sent a letter to the board of county supervisors on Nov. 19 with a long list of concerns about noise, traffic, impacts on their neighborhood’s viewshed and environmental impacts.
The town hall’s guest speakers were Del. Danica Roem, D-13th, Prince William County Supervisor Jeanine Lawson, R-Brentsville, and Elena Schlossberg-Kunkel, executive director of The Coalition to Protect Prince William. They spent just over two hours addressing the crowd and answering questions. All three are opposed to the plan.
“You have seen land use decisions that have wiped out forestland, have wiped out natural habitat over and over and over and over. Data centers are part of that problem,” Roem said.
Roem said her primary concerns are the impact of data centers on the natural environment and on electrical transmission and transportation infrastructure needed to support the PW Digital Gateway. She said it would likely require a new transmission line be built in Prince William as well as an expansion of Pageland Lane to four lanes, potentially prompting reconsideration of the Bi-County Parkway.
“Transmission lines don’t go up if they don’t have something to connect to, and giant roads don’t get built unless you have a reason to create them,” Roem said. “… [Western Prince William County] is beautiful. Leave it the hell alone.”
The PW Digital Gateway is estimated to generate 13 times more traffic than currently travels along two-lane Pageland Lane. Allowing data centers in the area would likely require a road widening to support the additional traffic, according to a county transportation analysis.
Bipartisan opposition
Roem is the only Prince William County Democratic elected official who has publicly expressed opposition to the gateway proposal. The Prince William Board of County Supervisors’ Democratic majority voted along party lines in July to consider changing the county’s long-range plan to allow data centers along Pageland Lane. At the same time, the board’s majority approved a study of the entire Pageland Lane corridor for data centers.
The gateway was initially only planned for 800 acres. The plan has since expanded to 2,133 acres as more homeowners have signed onto the plan.
Lawson called the board’s five Democratic members “politically tone deaf” for supporting the PW Digital Gateway. Lawson has long opposed development in Prince William’s rural areas that would deviate from its current restrictions, and welcomed bipartisan support against the gateway. The rural crescent, which makes up more than half the county’s landmass, bans most industrial uses and allows only one home per 10 acres.
“I can tell you some of my board colleagues, a lot of them are rookies, they’re inexperienced. They’ve got two years under their belt, but they have walked back some policy decisions that they came out strong on and they will walk this one back,” Lawson said.
Lawson briefly discussed Gainesville Supervisor Pete Candland’s (R) recent decision to join the digital gateway proposal. Candland lives in Catharpin Farm Estates off Pageland Lane and joined his neighbors in asking the county to consider their homes for data centers uses in November. He subsequently recused himself from any future votes on the issue.
Candland said in a statement last month that he signed on because he did not want his home to be engulfed “in a sea of data centers.” He previously said he would fight plans for data centers on Pageland Lane “tooth and nail.”
Lawson said that Candland had asked her shortly after to act as a voice for his constituents who oppose the PW Digital Gateway because he “legally can’t have conversations about the project.”
Candland’s recusal on the gateway plan leaves only a very narrow path for the board of supervisors to defeat it. It now requires two Democratic board members to join Lawson and Supervisor Yesli Vega, R-Coles, in voting against the plan when it comes before the board.
Roem and Lawson briefly locked horns over the board’s recent approval of two massive data center rezonings in Haymarket and Gainesville: Gainesville Crossing, a 2.7 million square foot facility approved at the corner of Pageland Lane and Va. 29 in 2019, and the Interstate 66 and Va. 29 Technology Park, a 3 million square foot facility south of Haymarket.
Lawson voted in favor of both projects. Roem said those data centers, outside the county’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District and near the border of the county’s designated rural area, had set a precedent that brought the PW Digital Gateway into existence.
“On a bipartisan basis, the board of supervisors has kept approving data centers in Gainesville,” Roem said.
Lawson responded that neither of those data centers were approved for the rural crescent. She added that she “didn’t come here to debate you, I came here to advocate with you.”
‘Monolithic buildings’
Of the hundreds of Heritage Hunt residents who attended the town hall, nearly all of them said they were opposed by a show of hands. Residents had numerous concerns and questions about how data centers could impact their quality of life and how they could stop it from moving forward.
John Lyver, a resident who is organizing the community’s opposition to the plan, began the town hall with a presentation outlining their concerns, including noise, traffic, construction, environmental and viewshed impacts.
“These are big monolithic buildings, which will range anywhere from 40 to 80 feet tall and will make noise,” Lyver said.
Among the major concerns shared by residents during the town hall was the impact to the neighborhood’s viewshed. Dozens of residents audibly gasped at a picture presented by a Heritage Hunt resident that showed a picture of a very large data center photoshopped to loom over several suburban homes.
“These folks that are selling their property on Pageland Lane for millions of dollars are going to collect the cash, and that is what they’re leaving us with,” Lyver said.
Other residents asked why the board of supervisors seemed to be quickly moving forward with the plan, even as other data centers are being approved and constructed nearby. Some urged the elected officials to slow down their approval until they had a chance to see what the nearby Gainesville Crossing campus will look like when it’s complete. “What is the rush?” said Mike Barrea, a Heritage Hunt resident.
Lawson speculated that at-large Board Chair Ann Wheeler (D) and other board Democrats hoped to approve the project in 2022 to avoid blowback during the 2023 local election cycle. She encouraged residents to be “relentless in courting Ann Wheeler.” Wheeler has not explicitly said she supports the PW Digital Gateway, but has touted its potential economic benefits.
“It’s her job to show up and hear from the people that she represents,” Lawson said.
Several of the applicants and developers behind the PW Digital Gateway were also in attendance at the town hall. Mary Ann Ghadban, a longtime Pageland Land resident, land broker and one of the residents behind the application, said residents of Heritage Hunt are “not hearing both sides of the story.”
“We are longtime residents, 40-plus years, some, five generations. We’re not the enemy to Heritage Hunt or the Battlefield,” Ghadban said. “Pageland Lane is no longer rural. We have massive transmission lines and we are the right place for data centers. And we will make the least amount of impact on the viewshed and the park.”
Ghadban noted that many of the families who live on Pageland Lane have lived there for decades, some for generations, and that Heritage Hunt is relatively new. It replaced a former farm in 1997 that was once part of the agricultural community in the area.
“You can’t wish it were rural because it’s not. Change has happened in 23 years. I mean, this was the Marsh Farm. Everybody who lives here all moved here from somewhere else,” Ghadban said.