NIMBY activists have suffered a sequence of current defeats attempting to cease Northern Virginia’s knowledge middle sprawl from encroaching into rural areas of Prince William County, their arguments rejected by a majority on the county’s Board of Supervisors.
However which may be about to vary—as a result of these grass-roots protestors have managed to vary the composition of the county board itself.
Final 12 months, the NIMBY crowd circled their wagons round Manassas—website of the Civil Warfare battlefield at Bull Run—attempting to cease a 2,139-acre, 28M SF knowledge middle campus from being constructed. In November, on the finish of a contentious 14-hour board assembly, the Supervisors voted 5-2 to approve the challenge, often called the Prince William Digital Gateway.
The board adjusted the county’s land use grasp plan to allow rezoning of a giant swath of farmland, houses and guarded forest in Prince William County often called the Rural Crescent, which stretches from the Manassas battlefield within the south to Route 234 within the north.
The Supervisors additionally created a brand new Information Middle Alternative Zone Overlay District, which incorporates the Digital Gateway challenge. Builders constructing server farms within the zone are fast-tracked, avoiding a cumbersome special-use allow course of.
Digital Gateway is one in every of a sequence of mega-projects which have been fast-tracked in Prince William County as obtainable house—and obtainable electrical energy—are approaching capability limits in neighboring Loudoun County, the epicenter of the world’s largest knowledge middle hub.
This week, Japanese knowledge middle supplier NTT filed plans to construct a 2M SF, 336 MW knowledge middle campus on a 104-acre website on John Marshall Freeway in Gainesville, VA. Earlier this month, Virginia-based JK Shifting Companies filed plans for an 82-acre, 1.8M SF of information processing house on the location of the Hillwood Tenting Park, a residential RV neighborhood in Gainesville.
In Bristow, Stanley Martin Houses has proposed to construct 4M SF of information facilities on 270 acres that can be often called the Devlin Know-how Park.
However after these tasks acquired preliminary approvals, NIMBY activists efficiently mounted an surprising grass-roots counter-offensive in Prince William County that seems to have outflanked their opponents:
In Virginia’s main election on June 20, an rebel who ran on a platform opposing knowledge middle growth knocked off the chairperson of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.
First-time candidate Deshundra Jefferson defeated incumbent County Supervisors Chair-at-Giant Ann Wheeler after a marketing campaign during which Wheeler’s assist for large-scale knowledge facilities was the central subject. Jefferson, a Democrat, will face one other staunch knowledge middle opponent within the November election, Brentville District Supervisor Jeanine Lawson, who simply received the Republican main.
Opponents of information middle growth in Prince William County consider that the first consequence portends a shift within the stability of energy on the Board of County Supervisors—an expectation apparently shared by some knowledge middle builders.
Developer Chuck Kuhn, who purchased the Hillwood Tenting Park knowledge middle website, informed Bisnow that he expects the election outcomes to immediate the board to rethink the place knowledge facilities are allowed to be inbuilt Prince William County.
“I feel it’s going to reshape the areas that we develop in and the areas that we don’t develop,” Kuhn stated, in an interview with Bisnow. “I wouldn’t say it assist or hurts, however there’s going to be change when it comes to the imaginative and prescient that the board has with respect to knowledge middle improvement and the place it takes place.”
There presently is greater than 24M SF of information middle improvement within the Prince William County pipeline, in response to Cushman & Wakefield.
The pipeline contains campuses that knowledge middle suppliers QTS and Compass are planning to construct as a part of Digital Gateway—amenities encompassing 18M SF and 1,000 MW of information processing capability—however which nonetheless want remaining approval of zoning modifications from the county’s Board of Supervisors—and, in November, from a brand new Chair-at-Giant.
Keep tuned.
