Data center development in Prince William County has long been a political lightning rod, drawing out fiery exchanges between opponents and supporters at packed Board of County Supervisors meetings.

Now, the issue shows signs of complicating politics among local Democrats ahead of the crucial November general election. The party hopes to keep its majority on the board and win several key General Assembly seats that could determine control of the legislature in Richmond.

Support for data center development was seen as a primary factor in the upset defeat of board chair Ann Wheeler by Deshundra Jefferson in the Democratic primary in June. Jefferson broke with the board’s Democrats on the issue, proposing instead stricter scrutiny on data center projects and higher taxes on the industry. (Wheeler doesn’t believe her defeat can be reduced exclusively to the data center issue, and she has also called for the party to unify behind Jefferson.)

Jefferson is now running in the general election against Republican Jeanine Lawson, the Brentsville supervisor, who has lately led the opposition to data center development on the board, though in the past she has advocated in favor of them. Republicans running for supervisor are now largely in agreement in their skepticism about data centers.

Democrats are more divided. Alongside Jefferson on the Democratic ticket are four incumbent Democratic supervisors who have previously voted to advance controversial data center projects, including the Prince William Digital Gateway, a particular flashpoint in the debate.

Jefferson’s winning campaign spent less than a fifth of what Wheeler’s did and had little formal campaign infrastructure. Instead, it was mostly powered by anti-data center activists who raised concerns about the long-term impact on the local environment and on nearby historical sites like Manassas Battlefield National Park, skyrocketing energy demand, and the load on other county services.

“We have to be careful where we site them,” Jefferson said in an interview with DCist/WAMU. “They don’t belong right up against people’s houses or right up against our schools.”

The county’s data center activists come from both political parties. The Democrats among them say concerns about conservation, water quality, and energy use are part of the party’s national identity — and are disconcerted by the local party’s divergence from them.

“When you talk to Democrats, they all say, ‘How did we become anti-environment? How did we become the party of revenue first and environmental consequences be damned? When did it become our talking point to carry water for the wealthiest corporate entity in the world over the concerns of the little guy?” said Elena Schlossberg, the founder of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County.

Schlossberg and the Coalition have been pushing back against data centers and the added electrical infrastructure they require since a 2014 fight over a transmission line near Haymarket that was meant to funnel power to a new Amazon data center in the area. Schlossberg advocated for the Jefferson campaign during the primary, and the Coalition was also instrumental in an unsuccessful recall attempt against Wheeler (the organization’s message following her primary defeat was “Recall complete”).

With the momentum following Jefferson’s win, Schlossberg and data center critics say they want to push the county to undertake impact studies, and they hope to forge closer ties with other data center skeptics in Northern Virginia and across the state.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the current board and their supporters see data centers as a major source of revenue in a fast-growing county that needs all the funding it can get to serve its burgeoning population, particularly in the eastern areas nearer to I-95. One estimate suggests that data center companies, attracted in part by the proximity to the federal government and the defense industry, had invested $125 billion in Virginia as of 2021. Tech behemoth Amazon announced in January it would spend an additional $35 billion on its data center footprint in the commonwealth by 2040.

Data center supporters point to Loudoun County as an example of the prosperity data center revenue can create. Loudoun has the highest concentration of data centers in the world and is also frequently named as one of the wealthiest localities in the U.S.

Other supporters cite practical needs, like funding schools. Prince William School Board Chair Babur Lateef wrote a 2022 op-ed in favor of the Digital Gateway project, noting the constraints of the current approach to school budgets. In an interview with DCist/WAMU, he said his position is still pro-data center, provided that they are sited properly.

“I continue to support them, as the community accepts them and as the board feels they are appropriate and in the right spots,” he said. “I think they’re great revenue sources for the schools.”

Some data center supporters have accused opponents of a misguided attempt to slow the inevitable growth of industrial and residential density in a county just down the highway from D.C. They see calls to preserve the county’s rural areas — currently zoned for one house on a ten-acre plot — as exclusionary by design, intended to keep out new residents, particularly from the racially-diverse eastern part of the county.

Amid these cross-currents, the Democratic party is attempting to unify ahead of the election, even as it wrestles with markedly different perspectives on the high-profile land-use issue. Jefferson said she’d had conversations with current supervisors in the wake of winning the nomination, but had not reached any clear consensus as of yet.

Jefferson said she and current supervisors are in agreement about the need for more revenue to fund schools, build more affordable housing, and other improvements.

“I know for current board members, it’s tough,” she said. “They’ve worked hard on some of these different data center projects, bringing them to fruition, and here I am, the new person coming in who wants to go in a different direction.”

“It’s going to take time for us to find a good, happy middle ground, to find a place where we can agree on how we’re going to move forward on siting them,” Jefferson said.

But for now, she’s willing to sit in that tension. Conversations are “ongoing,” she said, but she’s made her position clear.

“I’m used to being a nonconformist,” she said. “I understand what their concerns are, but I’m going to have to stay true to what it is that I pledged: data centers don’t belong any and everywhere, and we do need to tax them at a higher rate.”

It’s not entirely clear to what extent current Democratic supervisors have reconsidered their positions in the wake of Jefferson’s victory. Two current supervisors and multiple party leaders declined or did not respond to interview requests for this story. Immediately following Jefferson’s nomination in June, Occoquan Sup. Kenny Boddye, a Democrat, told The Washington Post the results suggested a need for a “middle path” balancing the industry’s revenue potential and the concerns about building more of the massive complexes. But he and the other Democrats on the board have since voted against a pause in county land-use approvals aimed at pushing controversial decisions to the next, presumably less supportive board.

One area of possible agreement is over raising taxes on existing data centers, something Jefferson campaigned on which also represents one immediate way of securing badly-needed funding. Lateef, the school board chair who supported Wheeler in the primary, heartily agrees on that point.

Lateef believes a tax hike would represent “both an increase in revenue at the same time as a deterrent from the data centers to want to go wild and open as many as they can,” and he notes that raising taxes would represent a more immediate boost in school funding compared to the wait to tax new projects that are yet to be built.

Currently, the county’s tax rate on the computer equipment in data centers is $2.15 per $100 of assessed value, significantly below Loudoun’s $4.15 rate. In 2018, the supervisors under Republican chair Corey Stewart considered a measure to rapidly increase the tax rate, but it failed over opposition from Lawson, who at the time called the industry a “cash cow” and raised concerns over dissuading companies from building in Prince William. The vote cut across political parties, with Stewart supporting the failed tax hike. The board under Wheeler set a schedule of gradual increases in 2021.

The idea of raising taxes on the industry to fund schools and other social services could bridge the geographical divide between the more densely populated eastern portion and the rural western part of the county, some Democrats believe.

“When I’m [talking with voters] in the east, yeah, I talk about the need for higher revenue from data centers, and I’ll talk about land use, not necessarily data centers,” Jefferson, who lives in the eastern part of the county herself, said. “I also talk about issues that people out here are feeling,” including education, housing, and programs for at-risk youth.

Schlossberg, with the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, notes that environmental impacts in the west could affect people in the east. She cites concerns about the Occoquan watershed, which provides drinking water for the eastern part of the county and parts of neighboring Fairfax.

What the pre-election wrangling over data centers means for the general election in November remains to be seen. Democrats took control of the board in 2019, and the county’s growing population — which has made it Virginia’s second-largest county — has favored the party.

But there’s a chance that frustration over the data center issue could chip away at Democrats’ advantage, according to Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of political science at the University of Mary Washington.

“Every now and then, something like this comes along that really has the opportunity to scramble the more conventional politics,” he said, noting that land-use controversies often play that role in Northern Virginia.

Another unanswered question for Democrats will be how much they can depend on support from local labor unions and industry groups in the general election, both of which stand to gain from more data center development. Those interests poured thousands into Wheeler’s campaign and the campaigns of other pro-data center incumbents in the primary, but it’s less clear to what extent they may choose to get involved in the chair race this fall.

Republicans in Prince William, at least on the board level, appear eager to take up the mantle of opposing data centers. Two of the party’s challengers spoke up in public comments in favor of the moratorium earlier this month. And Lawson, the party’s nominee for chair, has emerged as one of the most strident opponents of data center development, though her past record also includes votes for data center projects in the western part of the county and opposing tax hikes on the industry.

Western Prince William is also home to several highly contested legislative seats which could help determine the balance of power in Richmond — and Democratic candidates there have spoken out strongly against the industry. Del. Danica Roem, who is running for the 30th Senate District, has been thinking about data centers since her time as a local journalist covering the issue — and has emerged as one of the main voices in Richmond seeking to limit the industry’s expansion in the commonwealth. She’s carried bills designed to put in place stricter stormwater management requirements, requirements for a state environmental impact report on the industry, and prohibiting data centers within a mile of parkland.

“I’m pretty hardcore with this,” Roem said. “I mean, like aggressively hard core in wanting to get rid of data centers in western Prince William.”

Roem points out that Republicans in the House of Delegates killed much of her data center legislation. She also notes Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has been supportive of the industry, hailing Amazon’s $35 billion investment in the commonwealth and vetoing another bill which would have required the burying of electric lines expected to be associated with the Digital Gateway project.

“This not a Democratic problem, even though yeah, the votes coming out in Prince William County, as we’ve seen [have been] on party lines last year,” she says. “The Republicans in Richmond are the problem that I’m dealing with.”

At the end of the day, voters in the general election could be motivated by lots of different factors, including but not limited to data centers, Farnsworth said.

“The primary electorate is a tiny sliver of the most politically engaged part of the public. A general election involving many, many more voters is not necessarily going to be as motivated about a particular issue,” he said. “And that does give an opening for individual Democratic candidates to go in different directions as they think best for their own constituency.”