Data center proposal pits Pageland residents against neighbors | Headlines | insidenova.com
By Nolan Stout
January 10, 2022
Maryann Ghadban, far right, and many of her neighbors are urging the county to zone areas along Pageland Road for data centers.
Paul Lara / InsideNoVa
The ripples started in December 2019.
Prince William County’s approval of a data center project near Manassas National Battlefield Park that month was the flashpoint for a battle that has become all-consuming for hundreds of people on and around Pageland Lane in the western part of the county.
Dozens of landowners along the road have filed applications to change the land designation of their properties in the county’s Comprehensive Plan from agricultural zoning to technology zoning.
Their requests would support what’s being called the PW Digital Gateway – more than 27.6 million square feet of data centers, or nearly as much data center space as is currently in use or under construction in neighboring Loudoun County, the world’s largest concentration of such facilities.
Mary Ann Ghadban and Page Snyder were some of the first to be hit by the ripple effect. They’ve led opposition to big projects in the area in the past, but are two of the big names on the original application, which included 12 landowners and 800 acres.
Next, the ripple reached Denise Roberts and Gary Kwitkin as more people signed onto the proposal and got their neighbors on board. Roberts has signed on, but Kwitkin is still a holdout.
Meanwhile, the ripple reached the nearby Heritage Hunt over-55 community and Bill Wright, who is in full “guerilla warfare” mode to stop the project.
What is this all about?
Data centers are essentially large warehouses that hold the mechanisms needed to support computer systems, including digital storage that powers large portions of the internet.
The industry is booming in Northern Virginia. Other than real estate taxes, Prince William County’s primary levy on data centers is the business tangible property tax, projected to produce $63.4 million in county revenue for the current fiscal year – just under 5% of the total county budget.
To support and direct development, the county created a Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District in 2016. The district is about 10,000 acres and reduces regulatory hurdles for developments within its boundaries.
In May, the Board of County Supervisors voted to spend $120,000 on a consultant to study areas to expand the district along high-transmission power lines. The consultant is also considering necessary changes to construction standards, the Comprehensive Plan, zoning ordinance and any other effects from data centers.
The Comprehensive Plan is a guideline used by county staff and the Board of Supervisors in land-use decisions. The application along Pageland Lane seeks an amendment to the plan specific to that corridor.
A Comprehensive Plan amendment only changes what the county says it hopes for future use of the land. It does not bind the county, the board or the landowners to any guaranteed future uses. The properties would still require zoning approval to allow data centers.
Supporters of the PW Digital Gateway say it will provide a huge economic boom to the county in an area that’s no longer rural. Opponents say such large developments would decimate the character of the county’s rural area – they have raised concerns about the availability of power, effects on water quality and the potential that the buildings could quickly become obsolete as technology continues to improve.
No public meetings have been scheduled on the application, but the landowners hope it will come forward in spring.
How it started
Just about every point raised by the applicants or their opponents has a counterpoint across the aisle. But the sides share one thing: passions for their stances.
Maryann Ghadban, center, meets with her neighbors Jan. 1 who are urging Prince William County to zone the area for data centers. Ghadban said the power lines created unsustainable conditions for her horse farm, with infertile mares and stillborn foals.
Paul Lara
For Ghadban and Snyder, the road to the application has been long. They are among Pageland area residents who bitterly fought major development proposals over 30 years, including Disney’s plan for a theme park near Haymarket in the mid-1990s and the Bi-County Parkway that would connect Prince William and Loudoun counties.
Ghadban and Snyder said their opposition to projects has always been about property rights.
Snyder has lived on Pageland Lane for more than 70 years. At age 10, she recalls, her family fought a proposed motocross speedway at the Brawner Farm.
“Ever since then, it’s been one fight after another,” she said. “I’ve been fighting things for over 60 years here. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to do it anymore, and I don’t like living here anymore.”
It all came to a head in December 2019 after the Board of Supervisors approved Gainesville Crossing, a 3 million-square-foot data center outside of the existing overlay district and next to the battlefield park.
Soon after, Ghadban and Snyder said they started receiving calls from data center companies.
By May 2021, they had filed an application to change the designation of 800 acres, including their properties. Ghadban said the land is already under contract to be sold to a data center if the application is approved.
In July, the Board of Supervisors agreed to review the proposal and expanded the scope from just the requested properties to the entirety of Pageland Lane between U.S. 29 and Sudley Road.
Once the board expanded the scope, Ghadban said the process became “grassroots on steroids.”
Denise Roberts learned of the application from a neighbor on Pageland Lane last spring. A few days later, she was told the application could include her property and, if it didn’t, she might end up in a “sea of data centers.”
“As time went on, it just got worse and worse,” Roberts said. “The pressure kept mounting.”
Roberts held out at first, but then she heard that Gainesville District Supervisor Pete Candland had joined the application in November. Candland, whose district includes the Pageland Lane area, is now barred from participating in discussions or votes on the proposal.
Candland’s decision pushed Roberts to sign, but she wants nothing more than the application to be denied.
Denise Roberts, a homeowner on Pageland Road, feeds the family ducks at her pond. She opposes plans to turn her rural area into data centers.
Paul Lara / InsideNoVa
“Once Pete signed I was like, ‘You know what, it’s a done deal; there’s no way we’re going to keep our house. I might as well sign to make sure we’re not stuck in a sea of data centers,’” she said.
Gary Kwitkin, who lives in Dominique Estates off Pageland, is one of the few holdouts, even though he believes the application will be approved.
“They started dangling money in front of everybody and everybody’s seeing green now,” Kwitkin said. “Greed has set in basically.”
‘I don’t want to move’
The ripples eventually reached Heritage Hunt, an age-restricted development next to the area under consideration.
Wright is fully mobilized to defeat the proposal. He will take you on a two-hour guided tour, with maps, of relevant portions of Heritage Hunt, existing and under construction data centers and the potential land along Pageland Lane.
Wright can quote the size and owner of data center parcels nearly like clockwork. He barely needs the navigation system to move from location to location. He is worried the project will devastate the character of Heritage Hunt and the ideal he bought into when moving to the area.
“I used to have hobbies,” he said. “My wife says if this gets approved we’re moving.”
Some of those who didn’t initially come up with the idea for the Comprehensive Plan amendment feel forced into a decision they didn’t want to make. Some are worried they won’t earn enough from selling their land to data centers to find similar housing.
“There’s so many things about this house that are important to me. I don’t want to move,” Roberts said. “Where am I going to get this in the Northern Virginia area and keep my kids in the school of excellence that we chose to put them in when we moved out here?”
Kwitkin recently installed a pool and finished his basement and runs two small businesses out of his home. He hosts parties for his son’s football team on the 10.5-acre property and planned to live out his days there.
“I love it out here. This is the prime location for everything,” he said. “My kids are growing up here. We love it here.”
‘Let us get out’
For those who support the project, it feels like a welcome end to a long-term headache.
Kenn Knarr, who lives in Dominique Estates, said roughly 90% of landowners – owning about 90% of the land in the corridor – have joined the application.
“Just let us get out. It’s a cry,” Knarr said. “This is an opportunity for all of us to get out with some dignity.”
The pitch from the landowners is that the area already has transmission lines, fiber connectivity is available and there’s plenty of land. They say if the county designates the area for data centers, it can help avoid the perceived sprawl of the businesses outside of the overlay district.
Landowners also say the area is no longer rural. Ghadban said the road is a truck and commuter cut-through to Loudoun County. Each day, she said, there’s a 1.5-mile backup at Pageland and Sudley Road and another 1-mile backup at Pageland and U.S. 29.
Ghadban said a planned traffic light at Pageland and Sudley is another sign that the road isn’t rural. “I don’t know any rural road that has two traffic lights in 4½ miles. You can wish all you want that this is rural, but it’s not.”
An ongoing problem for the landowners has been the decline of farming. Ghadban formerly bred horses and cattle, but said they started producing stillborns after the transmission lines came in so she stopped.
Farmers are aging, and their children aren’t sticking around to maintain the land, the landowners said. That makes it even more precarious because using the land for farming provides a significant break on real estate taxes.
If the land is not used for agriculture, landowners must pay the base tax rate for their land and owe the county five years of back taxes. To keep the designation, they hire someone from Nokesville to create hay bales from their fields and haul them off.
“I’m 71 years old. I’m not getting out there on the tractor anymore or chasing cattle,” Snyder said. “If it’s not in land use, we can’t afford to pay the taxes.”
Ghadban admits, “It’s the lottery for us, the landowners, we don’t deny that.” But she said it would be the best change to benefit the county. Other potential residential or commercial uses would stress on schools and county services.
The landowners addressed a few of the concerns raised by opponents, particularly that existing forests and buffers will be paved over for data centers. They said the existing pastures are encircled by woods and that forestry will remain.
Heritage Hunt primarily abuts Snyder’s property. Carter Wiley, a commercial broker assisting with the project, said there is 1,000 feet from the edge of Heritage Hunt to Snyder’s property line. Snyder said that existing forest land is on steep terrain and couldn’t be developed anyway.
Another concern is that although the application says the properties would be developed for data centers, potential developers might put another type of industrial use there.
The Board of Supervisors is not bound by the Comprehensive Plan. John McBride, a land-use attorney assisting in the application, said the plan is typically not very specific about potential uses and acknowledged that the board could make a decision that’s not in line with it.
Bill Wright, a resident of Heritage Hunt, shows the hilly woodland along Pageland Road that some want to be zoned for data centers.
Paul Lara
However, such decisions usually occur when the plan is vague and the board interprets it differently than county staff intended, he added. He said the “unprecedented amount of detailed guidance” in the proposal will make it less likely for an incongruous board vote.
Market demand
Another sticking point for opponents is the available land in the existing overlay district. On his tour starting at Heritage Hunt, Wright provides a laundry list of properties already approved for data centers that haven’t been built.
Wiley will counter and say data centers are seeking large parcels and there aren’t enough left in the overlay district to keep up with demand.
A market study commissioned by the county says that the demand is “extremely strong according to data center specialists and industry representatives and will likely remain so for many years.”
“Experts say there is practically unlimited demand in Northern Virginia for data centers,” the study says. “The high rate of growth in the sector will continue and be abated only by the lack of land availability.”
The applicants also say that if the county directs data center development to the Pageland Lane area, it will keep the supervisors from continuing to approve projects outside of the overlay district.
Fight continues
The applicants are still making their pitch to the Board of Supervisors and landowners in the Pageland Lane area.
Meanwhile, opponents are drumming up support from surrounding neighborhoods and trying to convince supervisors to oppose the project.
Brentsville Supervisor Jeanine Lawson, a Republican, has come out against the project and, while she doesn’t have a final say on it, Democratic Del. Danica Roem, whose 13th District includes Heritage Hunt, is also opposing it.
Before recusing himself from the application, Candland, a Republican, made clear he opposed the project. Without his vote, Democrats hold a 5-2 majority on the Board of Supervisors. All five Democrats voted in favor of expanding the scope of the application in July.
Among those on Pageland Lane, Roberts and Kwitkin show two sides of the opposition.
Roberts discusses the application with the enthusiasm of someone angered by the process, but with a renewed tinge of hope that it can be defeated. “I don’t think it’s a done deal yet. I think we can still flip them. Losing Pete definitely hurt us.”
Kwitkin is more resigned to his fate.
“There’s too much money involved,” he said. “They have the votes to pass it. With Pete, our representative, gone, who do we have to speak for us? When your supervisor’s telling you it’s a lost cause, it’s a lost cause.”
Nolan Stout covers Prince William County. Reach him at nstout@insidenova.com or @TheNolanStout on Facebook and Twitter.