Prince William data center adversaries rally as Digital Gateway hearing looms

A pivotal demurrer hearing will take place Thursday in Prince William County Circuit Court, with the future of a trial on the Prince William Digital Gateway – and its 37 proposed data centers – likely hanging in the balance.

Nine individual plaintiffs, all Gainesville residents, and the nonprofit American Battlefield Trust sued Prince William County and two tech developers earlier this year. The plaintiffs allege it was illegal for the Board of County Supervisors in December 2023 to grant approval of 23 million square feet of data centers on roughly 2,100 acres along Pageland Lane near Bristow. 

Community leaders and organizers combating data center sprawl held a Zoom webinar Monday morning to update residents and media on the pending hearing.

Elena Schlossberg, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, moderated the session, which organizers said garnered 104 total virtual attendees. 

Fellow speakers came from the American Battlefield Trust, the National Parks and Conservation Association, the Piedmont Environmental Council and the Sierra Club’s Great Falls-based group.

On Oct. 3, an amicus curiae brief was filed and signed in support of the plaintiffs by the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, the National Parks and Conservation Association, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and the Coalition to Protect Prince William County.

In its conclusion, the brief states that, “Because the rezonings represent exercises of public authority that threaten destruction of this commonwealth’s and our country’s historical legacy, they must be met with judicial skepticism and held to the letter of the law, particularly the letter of those provisions intended to enable public input and mitigate damage to private and public goods.”

Former Democratic state Sen. Chap Petersen, an attorney representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, opened Monday's session by explaining the nature of Thursday’s demurrer hearing.

“A demurrer is effectively akin to a motion to dismiss in federal court. It's where the defendant says, ‘Taking all the facts you say to be true, you have not stated a legal cause of action,’” Petersen said. “Particularly in land use cases, it's a tool that's used by local governments to try and dismiss cases right off the bat, and there's a couple ways to do that – one is they challenge the standing of the plaintiffs by saying they're not sufficiently involved in the rezoning or in the property.”

Petersen continued, “Our lawsuit is basically saying that the [Board of County Supervisors] failed to follow its own rules. It failed to follow state law. It failed to properly notice the hearing. It failed to follow its own zoning ordinance in terms of having an application that was complete in terms of delineating the properties, delineating the structures, delineating the power lines. And finally, it failed to get a special use permit for a data center development, the largest one in the history of Prince William, certainly the largest in the history of Virginia, which was outside of its own data center opportunity zone.”

As the motion was filed by the county, Petersen said he will not be able to present evidence at Thursday’s hearing and that his odds of winning are “50-50.” 

“I’ll be playing defense,” he said.

If the presiding judge moves forward with the suit on Thursday, Petersen said he would anticipate a trial on the Digital Gateway in the first quarter of 2025.

Petersen said the Digital Gateway decision was rushed by the supervisors in order to be heard last year before the lame-duck board left office. The current board is viewed as more hostile to data center development. 

Prince William County spokesperson Nikki Brown said the county doesn’t comment on active litigation.

In addition to the county, the other co-defendants in the suit are subsidiaries of Digital Gateway developers QTS Realty Trust Inc. and Compass Datacenters.    

American Battlefield Trust President David Duncan, who was also a speaker on the Zoom event, emphasized the global scope of the Digital Gateway’s proposed size, which would render it the largest data center corridor in the world at 2,100 acres. 

“That is nearly one-third the size of the existing [Manassas] National Battlefield Park. So let's just keep in mind the size of what we're dealing with,” Duncan said. “And by the way, folks, this isn't the only one, and it's not just the data center itself, of course – it's the power lines, it's the substations that these data centers are going to need.”

Duncan said the rezoning request would infringe on the battlefield’s “study area.”

“The core area [is] the areas defined by extensive combat, where the real shooting, fighting, killing and dying was done,” Duncan said. “The study area ... those are areas of troop movements, of hospitals, artillery parks, things like that.”

Duncan continued, “It's interesting to note that in the congressional American Battlefield Protection Program, which provides matching money for organizations like us and other partner organizations to go save battlefields, they will make those grants available to both core and study areas.”

In addition to a dwindling freshwater supply – an issue that Petersen said was also brought upon by data center proliferation – Schlossberg said she fears added costs will take a toll statewide.

“It's important not to forget the financial burden on Virginia ratepayers is going to be catastrophic – it's going to be immense,” Schlossberg said. “The ratepayers are covering the majority of the infrastructure that is required for this industry, and that cannot go unnoticed or unremarked by elected leaders.”