Residents File Lawsuits Over Prince William Digital Gateway (dcist.com)
Margaret Barthel
Members of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County protested outside of the county building during the Board of County Supervisors hearing on the Digital Gateway plan, which the Board ultimately approved. More than a dozen county residents are now challenging that decision in court.
Just a month after it was approved by the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, the highly controversial Digital Gateway data center project is headed to court.
The Digital Gateway, which some say would be the largest data center complex in the world, would put over 22 million square feet of data center buildings on more than 2,000 acres of land adjacent to Manassas National Battlefield.
It’s been a political lightning rod in Prince William County for years. Meetings to approve the comprehensive plan amendment to permit the project — and then to approve applications from QTS Realty Trust and Compass Datacenters to build it — routinely ran overnight, with hundreds of residents testifying on either side.
The Democratic majority on the board ultimately voted for the project, despite recommendations to deny it from the county planning commission and county staff.
Now there are two legal challenges, both made public on Friday and both alleging that the county and companies seeking to build the Digital Gateway violated county and state laws governing zoning procedures. The suits ask the Prince William County Circuit Court to overturn the board’s decision to approve the applications to build the project.
One lawsuit comes from nine residents who own property near the site and the American Battlefield Trust, which also owns land near the site. That complaint is also associated with the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, an advocacy group that has led opposition to the project. Lawyers plan to file a second lawsuit, on behalf of a dozen property owners in the nearby Oak Valley Homeowners Association, late Friday afternoon.
Both lawsuits argue that there were several irregularities in the public process leading up to the approval of the project, including eleventh-hour changes to the plans negotiated by board members with company representatives from the dais. Those edits, the lawsuit argues, should have been subject to review by the county planning commission and planning staff and advertised to the public before the board’s vote to approve them.
The suits also cite a lack of specificity in development plans submitted to the county, inadequate environmental review, and a failure to follow the special use permit process, which governs data center projects outside of the county’s so-called overlay district.
“All of that was ignored to get this done before a lame-duck Board departed office,” said Chap Petersen, the lawyer for the Coalition lawsuit and a former Virginia state senator. “We are pointing out those violations, violations of Virginia law, violations of Prince William County ordinance.”
Petersen said he expected the litigation to last six months.
A spokesperson for Prince William County declined to comment on the lawsuits. A spokesperson for Compass Datacenters said the company was aware of the lawsuit but was “focused on implementing the County’s vision for the Digital Gateway and moving forward with the development of our data center campus.”
Lawyers for the companies representing QTS and Compass Datacenters responded to allegations from Petersen and the Coalition that the county had not properly advertised the zoning hearing in twin letters to the county attorney’s office in December. The letters argued that the delay in publishing the notification was an error by The Washington Post.
The legal wrangling is the latest in a drawn-out fight over where to put data centers in the growing county. The argument has already ended up in court: late last year, Petersen brought a similar challenge against Devlin Technology Park, another controversial data center rezoning decision, and Oak Valley Homeowners Association has an ongoing legal challenge to the county’s 2022 comprehensive plan amendment to allow industrial uses on the Digital Gateway land.
Democrats on the Board of County Supervisors — including former Chair Ann Wheeler, a champion of the project — have generally supported expanding the data center footprint in Prince William county. They’ve pointed to the enormous economic benefits data centers could bring to the fast-growing exurb, which has struggled to develop a robust commercial tax base, even as migration from closer-in suburbs has brought new demands on county services. The Digital Gateway project would put Prince William County in line with Loudoun County, which has the largest data center concentration in the country, in terms of the square footage of data centers. Some estimates suggest the county could receive as much as $400 million in tax revenue from the Digital Gateway once it’s fully built.
But for Digital Gateway opponents, the dollars don’t outweigh what they say will be the data centers’ environmental, historical, and quality-of-life impact on western Prince William, a traditionally rural area. They say the project could have adverse effects on the Occoquan watershed, a key regional drinking water source, drive deforestation, and will further stress the regional power grid, which is already struggling to keep up with energy demand from existing data centers in the region.
Historical preservation advocates, including the National Parks Conservation Association and the Manassas Battlefield National Park superintendent, have argued that the land is of historical significance. One of the lawsuits — which the American Battlefield Trust joined — offers several pages of historical context, including a detailed account of the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862 and historical evidence suggesting two postwar settlements of free African-Americans. One was home to Jennie Dean, a formerly enslaved woman who became a prominent Black education advocate in Prince William County at the turn of the century. The complaint also notes there are several family cemeteries on the land, as well as the possibility of unmarked Civil War graves.
“The Manassas Battlefield is a national treasure and the very definition of hallowed ground,” said David Duncan, president of the American Battlefield Trust, in a news release. “It is reckless in the extreme to jeopardize this historic sanctuary over a development that could easily be built elsewhere in the state.”
Beyond the courts, some lawmakers in the Virginia General Assembly — many of them from western Prince William County — are putting forward legislation to more strictly regulate data centers. One bill, previously carried by Petersen in 2023, would prevent data centers within a mile of a national park.