The Prince William Board of County Supervisors approved a controversial planning proposal to open more than 2,000 acres of rural land to data center development and other uses on Wednesday, after a contentious 14-hour public hearing that lasted through the night.

The amendment to the county’s comprehensive plan sets new planning guidelines for the land along Pageland Lane between Route 29 and Route 234, in the county’s Rural Crescent. Southern parts of the plan’s area share borders with Manassas National Battlefield Park and Conway-Robinson Memorial State Forest.

The approved plan amendment will open more than half of the 2,100 acres in question to “tech/flex” uses, including data center development, and add some public parkland, open space and trails as buffer zones between the new development and the existing parks. The land was previously designated for environmental resources and “agriculture and estate,” which allows for one private home for every 10 acres. Estimates suggest that the Prince William Digital Gateway  plan could eventually turn that land into a site for as much as 27.6 million square feet of data center space. That would put Prince William’s data center capacity in competition with neighboring Loudoun County, the country’s largest data center hub.

Prince William County is already in the data center game, with about 6 million square feet built and about 5 million more in the pipeline. In 2021, the county designated a data center overlay district in an attempt to channel that development into particular regions, and it received about $80 million in revenue from the existing centers in 2021, equivalent to an 8-cent discount off of the residential tax rate, according to Wheeler and county staff.

Once data center projects are actually built — which could take more than a decade — officials project that the area addressed by the new plan amendment could yield about $400 million in tax revenue, depending on how full they end up being with taxable computer equipment. Loudoun County, the largest data center hub in the country, makes roughly $576 million per year in revenue off of its centers.

Supporters hailed the vote as an investment in the county’s economic future and a means of adding commercial tax revenue from data center operators to the county’s coffers, boosting funding for schools and adding new employment opportunities closer to home for county residents.

“This is a bold plan, and it will change the landscape of Prince William County,” said Board Chair Ann Wheeler (D-At Large), who has championed the proposal.

Others criticized the plan for a wide array of possible negative environmental and historical impacts on the area.

“I’ve been mentally prepared for this vote to go this way for a long time,” said Supervisor Jeanine Lawson (R-Brentsville). “This is a short-sighted plan that will wreak havoc on our county, our environment, our tourism.”

The public meeting, which ran through the night and into the morning on Wednesday, was highly contentious, with supervisors criticizing the tone of the community debate over the proposal and sniping at each other over parliamentary procedure. Lawson and Wheeler had several heated exchanges over Lawson’s desire to continue asking county staff questions about specifics of the proposal, while Wheeler attempted to move forward into public comment.

“Working together and taking the high road and not being divisive is really really important in leadership,” Wheeler said in final comments before the vote. “We need to come together as a board and as a county.”

After the vote, Lawson got the last word. “Madam Chair, when you stop harassing the public who disagree with you, I will consider reducing my anger with you,” she said, right before the livestream of the meeting ended.

The meeting itself was a marathon, with people who wanted to give input during the public comment period — which began after 10 p.m. — forced to stay up all night to have their say.

After hours of evenly-split public comment, the board voted along party lines, with the five Democrats for the plan and Lawson and fellow Republican Yesli Vega (R-Coles) opposed.

The approved comprehensive plan amendment does not in itself change zoning. Rather, it sets guidelines for Board and county staff to follow as rezoning proposals for the development of the 2,100 acres along Pageland Lane come in. It does not set binding requirements for specific projects.

Supporters argue that the rural character of the area in question has already been on the wane, with visible power lines and heavy traffic.Some vocal supporters own property in the designated area, and are already taking advantage of the opportunity to sell. Close to a hundred homeowners in the plan area, including Supervisor Pete Candland (R-Gainesville), who recused himself from the vote, have already signed on to selling their homes to data center developers offering close to half a million dollars per acre.

“Times have changed,” said Jon Brower, who said his family has farmed off of Pageland Lane for 140 years (they are now enmeshed in a federal lawsuit with a developer over a delay in signing paperwork).

“The world is growing around us, closing in on our family farm. With nothing to show for it, not only will my family lose, but so will the county as they watch the surrounding counties thrive,” Brower said.

Opponents of the plan took a radically different view. They said it could have far-reaching environmental impacts on wildlife and local streams and could adversely impact the Occoquan Reservoir, which provides water to 800,000 people in Prince William and Fairfax counties. In an unusual move, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and officials at the neighboring county’s water authority and planning department have publicly urged caution in moving forward with the proposal.

“These proposals will likely lead to land use changes that would result in land use conflicts both within Prince William County and the larger region, the impacts of which have not been clearly defined,” wrote Fairfax deputy county executive Rachel Flynn in a letter. “Proposed changes to the Comprehensive Plan have the potential to directly impact the natural environment and the heritage of the built environment. Changes may also engender auto-dependent development patterns, particularly in areas currently considered for agricultural uses, and increase impacts to the Occoquan Reservoir water supply.”

Fairfax Water has outlined specific concerns about possible increases in salinity in the reservoir due to stormwater runoff from impervious surfaces, and further noted that removing sodium and bromide from reservoir water is not possible using Fairfax’s existing water treatment plants. Upgrades to be able to do so would be “highly energy intensive and would require extensive capital improvements to the treatment plant costing hundreds of millions of dollars,” the agency said in a May letter to the Prince William County planning department.

Prince William County officials said they plan to complete a watershed study, in partnership with the Northern Virginia Regional Commission, with an eye to understanding salt content in the water. They are also strongly encouraging developers to submit plans with closed-loop water systems for the data centers themselves, a design that helps limit salt discharge, and to work with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to expand water quality monitoring in two nearby streams, Little Bull Run and Lick Branch. But in the final amendment, the board went against county staff’s recommendation to strongly encourage no net runoff from the development, instead going with softer language originally proposed by developers to the planning commission.

Other critics — including prominent documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and officials at Manassas National Battlefield Park — have also raised concerns about the effect millions of square feet of data centers and related utility and electrical infrastructure could have on the area’s extensive historical and cultural resources, including the park itself, nearby sites associated with indigenous people and freed African-Americans, and unmarked Civil-War-era graves.

“This proposal would have direct viewshed and visitor experience impacts on the Battlefield. Noise from the constant hum of large, industrial data centers would be ever-present on the landscape,” reads a letter co-signed by more than thirty local environmental and preservation organizations opposed to the project.

The fight over the Prince William Digital Gateway is emblematic of the tensions between the desire for economic development in a fast-growing region and the interest in conserving public lands and heritage, said Kyle Hart, the Mid-Atlantic program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association and a signatory on the letter.

“We are continually seeing and fighting threats of simply terribly-sited development directly adjacent to or inside of national parks in the region,” Hart told WAMU/DCist. “The Digital Gateway is by far and away the biggest, most serious of all of those threats in terms of its size and in terms of its proximity to the park. Nothing compares.”

Hart said he was encouraged by an addition to the plan offered by Supervisor Margaret Franklin (D-Woodbridge), which offered guidance recommending that developers conduct strict archaeological reviews and allowing the county to weigh in on removing or reinterring unearthed human remains and artifacts. Franklin ultimately voted for the plan amendment, and she criticized opponents of the plan for treating local Black history as a talking point.

“I’ve been talking about the importance of African-American history in this county since I got here, and only now have I seen some people actually express an interest in that history,” said Franklin. “I would encourage this county to not use African-American history as a weapon.”

What the approval of the comprehensive plan amendment will ultimately mean for Prince William County will come down to how county staff and the supervisors ultimately handle specific rezoning proposals brought by developers eager to take advantage of the new plan designations for the land around Pageland Lane.

There’s high demand for data centers as life and work increasingly migrate to the digital cloud, and officials in Prince William and elsewhere have targeted them as a means of capitalizing on the tech boom and boosting commercial tax revenue. That added tax revenue, they believe, will relieve pressure on residential taxpayers to pay the lion’s share of the fast-growing county’s budget.

Supervisor Kenny Boddye (D-Occoquan) called the project an “economic engine” for the county, and said he looked forward to using the revenue to help support the county’s workforce.

“It still boggles my mind that we are in a place where our teachers, our firefighters, our police officers, our county employees, can’t afford to live in the community they serve,” he said.

Lawson argued that the county should take steps to increase the tax rate it levies on its existing data centers as a first step towards increasing commercial revenues, an idea Boddye said he would also support. Lawson also raised questions about the durability of demand for data centers, and whether it would continue to remain high for the years it’ll take to complete projects in the plan amendment area.

In Loudoun County, officials scrambled to fill in a $60 million budget hole when data center revenues came in lower than expected earlier in the year. It’s not clear yet if the shortfall is the result of pandemic disruptions in the tech industry, or a shift in the pace of growth of data centers — but some Loudoun officials have expressed concerns about the county’s overreliance on the fortunes of a single industry to augment its tax base.

Prince William County economic development staff pushed back on concerns about demand, noting that the vast majority of data centers in the D.C. region already have leases lined up even before developers submit site plans.

Critics of the plan amendment also suggest that there are some additional costs the county may wind up bearing, depending in part on how negotiations of individual rezonings go. Generally speaking, developers are expected to pay the costs of extending county water and sewer lines and electrical infrastructure out to new development sites.

A representative for Dominion Energy said that some costs for new electrical infrastructure — which would be extensive, including possible new substations and transmission as well as distribution lines — would fall on all ratepayers in Virginia, not just Prince William County. Julie Bolthouse, Director of Land Use at the Piedmont Environmental Council, said the question of utilities costs gets complicated when the infrastructure desired by developers has to be run across property lines. She also suggested there could be maintenance costs down the road associated with added infrastructure.

Lawson also asked pointed questions about whether the county would end up buying some of the acreage designated for public parks and trails outright. She also suggested that the county was forgoing potential tourism development near the battlefield, which receives more than half a million visitors each year.

Bolthouse and Hart agree. They both said they’d be eager to support other economic development uses for the land, perhaps related to agritourism or local history.

“When I was talking to one of the supervisors about this proposal, they asked me, ‘Well, you know, they could put a brewery right across Pageland Lane from Manassas National Battlefield. How would you feel about that?’” Bolthouse said. “And I was like, that would be great. That is a secondary tourism opportunity built upon what is existing there currently and would not have a significant negative impact.”

“The disconnect between a data center industrial corridor and the Manassas National Battlefield is so stark,” she said. “They are not going to benefit each other.”

This story has been updated to clarify stormwater runoff provisions in the final plan.