County officials are exploring ways to speed up the process of prohibiting data centers along the Route 7 corridor in eastern Loudoun County. Much of the land along the corridor has for decades been zoned for the facilities, but county supervisors in recent years have expressed increasing concern about the aesthetics of the massive buildings being visible along some of the area’s busiest commuting routes.
Supervisor Juli Briskman, D-Algonkian, introduced a motion May 2 to consider hiring an outside consulting firm to perform some of the highly technical work required to overhaul the land use regulations for the corridor. The motion passed 6-2, with Supervisors Kristen Umstattd, D-Leesburg, and Caleb Kershner, R-Catoctin, voting against it based on procedural objections. County staffers will soon come back to supervisors with a report on the feasibility of hiring a consultant, according to discussions at the meeting.
Bringing in outside help wouldn’t change the board’s overall goal, which is to create a zoning overlay district along Route 7 that prohibits data centers while encouraging residential construction and other types of commercial development. But Briskman hopes using consultants could speed up the zoning overhaul process by six to nine months, meaning a final proposal could be ready for a vote as early as next summer.
“I just felt that we could help out staff and get these projects moving forward,” Briskman said at the May 2 meeting.
“This is some work that the board had directed to get done, and it needs to get done so there’s certainly in the data center world and also for our residents,” Briskman said. She emphasized that “during the entire project, staff will be involved. This doesn’t mean we’ll lose any of the institutional knowledge.”
Other supervisors were generally open to exploring the idea. “I think an effort to try to do this more quickly and bring in outside resources could be a good idea,” Supervisor Matt Letourneau, R-Dulles, said. “I think it’s actually a win for everybody involved.”
Representatives of the Data Center Coalition, which represents most major data center operators, said that they had no comment on Briskman’s motion. Data center operators have previously expressed concern primarily about keeping existing property rights in place for areas where data centers already exist near Route 7.
A quicker conclusion to the Route 7 zoning overhaul would provide certainty to data center developers and landowners, Briskman told the Times-Mirror in a May 3 phone interview. It could also reassure some residents who do not want to see data centers as they drive through the county. “I hear time and again … and they ask me over and over again: ‘Are we ever going to stop building data centers?’” Briskman said, though she also emphasized the industry’s significant financial contributions to the county government. “A lot of folks don’t like the look of the data centers.”
Briskman also pointed to a recent survey of county residents that found that the perception of the “overall appearance of Loudoun County,” has become less positive in the past four years. “I have to believe it’s causal, just from what I’m hearing anecdotally about what people think about the appearance of the data centers,” she said.
“I think the average person is fearful that that’s all we’re going to have … in Loudoun County,” she added at another point.
The 2019 General Plan envisioned most of the land along Route 7 east of Route 15 for “suburban mixed use” development, a category that excludes data centers. But a comprehensive plan does not on its own change the underlying zoning laws governing a particular place. “The County cannot prohibit by-right data center development within the existing regulatory parameters, and market conditions have created a high level of interest in parcels in the corridor by data center developers and land holders,” a 2022 report by county planners said.
There are at least 1,651 acres, 0.5% of the county’s total land area, in the Route 7 corridor and in other locations where data centers are a by-right use under zoning established by county supervisors in the early 2000s but envisioned for other kinds of development by the 2019 General Plan, according to a separate 2022 report.
But undoing that existing zoning is a complicated legal process, and hundreds of acres along the Route 7 corridor continue to require no special approvals from supervisors to build the data centers — only administrative approvals for site plans and other routine building reviews. In the meantime, county officials have tried on an ad hoc basis to dissuade data center development along Route 7.
With Briskman’s support, for instance, a 600-unit residential development at the northeast corner of Route 7-Loudoun County Parkway interchange was approved last month for land that would have otherwise been developed with data centers.
Supervisors are currently reviewing another proposed residential development, this one at the southeast corner of the Route 7-Belmont Ridge Road interchange, where data centers are also by-right use of the land. On the west side of Belmont Ridge Road, Vantage Data Centers is developing a by-right data center campus on a 134-acre, $180 million lot bordering Route 7. More data centers are planned for land immediately to the south, where they are also permitted by right.
While the land occupied by existing and planned data centers takes up just 1.6% of the county’s land area, tax revenue paid by the facilities accounts for more than a third of all local tax funding. Without revenue from data centers, for instance, the average residential real estate tax bill would need to increase by nearly 50% to fund county services at current levels. Data centers also account for more than half of the special tax district revenue that funds construction and improvements for Route 28 and the Metrorail Silver Line.
Most of these data centers have been built in “Data Center Alley,” an area roughly bisected by Loudoun County Parkway north of three Dulles International Airport runways, where noise from airliners flying low overhead makes it impractical to build residential neighborhoods. In the 2019 General Plan, supervisors also envisioned the area south of Leesburg Executive Airport — a landscape dominated by two large quarries and major electric transmission lines — along with some areas west of Dulles Airport for data center development.
