Washington Post: A fight over turning a ‘rural crescent’ in Northern Virginia into a hub for data centers

“This is a chance to really bring in more commercial revenue,” said Ann Wheeler (D), the board chair.

With homeowner payments making up about 47 percent of the county’s general fund, “Just to say: ‘No, we’re not going to do this,’ is not responsible governing,” Wheeler said.

Supervisor Jeanine Lawson (R-Brentsville), whose district is within the 117,000 acres of county protected land known as the “rural crescent,” said there is something larger at stake.

Opening it up to industrial development, “will forever change who we are as a county,” she said. “There would be no turning back from this.”

Snyder and her family are longtime veterans in the war to keep the Gainesville area rural.

The following decade, the elder Snyder led a fight to defeat a proposal to build an auto racetrack near the Manassas National Battlefield Park that preserves the site of the two Civil War battles at Bull Run.

“We’ve spent our entire lives fighting one thing after another,” said Page Snyder, who joined her mother in the later battles.

Meanwhile, farming in Northern Virginia diminished, with wineries and microbreweries taking over. More traditional family farms began to rely on agritourism as they struggled to compete with larger corporate agricultural companies.

Pageland Lane became a convenient cut-through for the area’s increasing traffic, including trucks from a nearby rock quarry that has supplied raw materials for the new construction.

Snyder and her neighbor Mary Ann Ghadban had led their community in a years-long fight to defeat a planned 10-mile ″Bi-County Parkway” along the edge of the battlefield site that would connect I-66 in Prince William to the Dulles International Airport corridor in Loudoun.

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The $400 million state-funded project was indefinitely stalled in 2016 when the then-Republican-controlled Prince William board removed it from the county’s list of long-term priorities.

But with state transportation officials and surrounding jurisdictions still favoring the bypass while the area’s traffic grows increasingly worse, “we saw the writing on the wall,” said Ghadban, who works as a real estate broker.

“We did not create this situation,” said Ghadban.

“We all thought we’d get to die here,” she said. But “it’s time for Prince William to evolve.”

A ‘lifestyle’ about to change

The residents of Heritage Hunt have mounted the most intense opposition.

The Heritage Hunt residents — joined by slow-growth advocates, environmentalists and national park enthusiasts — argue that data centers are a threat to their quality of life, the local environment and the region’s importance to Civil War history.

Data centers have typically been large one-or-two-story concrete buildings occupying as many as 100 acres of land, with a steady hum emanating from the massive equipment inside, though technology companies have been exploring ways to build more eco-friendly structures that blend into their surrounding environment.

Despite assurances in the Pageland proposal that any structures built there would follow that eco-friendly trend, the opponents argue that they will still potentially be visible from the battlefield site, and, therefore, harmful to its historical integrity.

“The idea is: They’re very, very close,” said Kyle Hart, the Mid-Atlantic field representative for the National Parks Alliance.

The Dominion transmission lines running through the battlefield site “are certainly less than ideal,” Hart said. “But I don’t think they ruin the character of the park the way 2,100 acres of data centers would.”

The opponents have also challenged the economic development authority’s assertion that the overlay district is running out of marketable land, and say the structures will add more urban runoff into the region’s already damaged streams.

“In a time when you can least afford to destroy your environmental assets, this board is running us off a cliff,” said Elena Schlossberg, head of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County slow-growth group.

‘A sea of data centers’

Candland, who has represented the Gainesville district since 2012, is at the center of the acrimony surrounding the Digital Gateway proposal.

The outspoken supervisor surprised his supporters when he announced in a November Facebook post that he and his wife Robyn had signed on to the Pageland proposal.

All of their neighbors in the Catharpin Farm Estates development just off Pageland Lane had already done so after a July board decision to include their community in the study area for the potential land use change, Candland wrote.

That created the possibility of remaining behind “in a sea of data centers” and potentially losing what they invested in their home, he wrote.

“I can honestly say, this was one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever made,” wrote Candland, who has since recused himself on matters related to the Pageland proposal. He did not return messages seeking comment from The Washington Post.

Some area residents have called on Candland to resign over the issue, which he has said he won’t do.

Even Ken Burns, who documented the histories of the Civil War and the country’s national parks in two of his films, got involved after Wright asked the filmmaker to write to the board chair, opposing the Digital Gateway.

“As a student and chronicler of American history for more than 40 years, I can attest to how fragile our precious heritage is and how susceptible it can be to the ravages of “ ‘progress,’ ” Burns said in his Jan. 5 letter, which data center opponents promptly circulated.

The Pageland Lane residents countered with their own statement titled “Ken Burns doesn’t live in Prince William County and is living in the past,” that criticized him for not hearing out their side.

A spokesperson for Burns, who lives in New Hampshire, said he stands by the letter.

While the Digital Gateway proposal makes its way through a county review process and a study of the data center overlay district’s boundaries continues, the two sides agree on one thing: the Gainesville area is no longer a rural paradise.

Tim Kissler, a neighbor of Candland’s, said he is greeted by “a major traffic jam” along Pageland Lane every morning when he leaves his home for work as a real estate developer. More than 5,100 vehicles pass through per day, according to the state transportation department.

“Everybody likes it here,” said Kissler, who has overseen the Catharpin Farms portion of the Digital Gateway proposal. “The problem is: change has come and is coming and nobody wants to get left behind.”

Denise Roberts said the debate has eroded the area’s once-strong sense of community.

She and her husband signed on to the Digital Gateway proposal but are now against it, reasoning they won’t get much for the renovated brick rambler they bought nearly five years ago.

“These are my friends that no longer talk to me because they think I’m trying to screw them out of $10 million or whatever they stand to get,” she said. But “this is my dream home.”