Letter: Chamber CEO says it is time to move forward with Digital Gateway

When your professional planning staff rejects the application (after having approved nearly if not every other--and there have been a lot) and one of the lead professional planners publicly criticizes the overt time pressure and quality-impactful strain on departments after having been challenged from the dais by elected officials for their professional opinions during a 27-HOUR public hearing, it is reasonable to think not all issues have been effectively resolved. Just that the public hearing lasted 27 hours probably should have been a pretty good indicator that there was going to be lawsuits.

Mr. Sweeney fails to mention that in this most recent case dismissal the judge also granted standing to all ten plaintiffs and acknowledged that the county failed to give proper notice. He simply blamed that on the Washington Post without, as noted by attorney Chap Petersen, any testimony or evidence from the WP that this was the case. Seems like the judge just basically teed up the appeal. Mr. Sweeney's letter seems quite premature if not disingenuous.

Consider the source, the motivations and the allegiances.

On March 27th of this year, Sweeney wrote a letter to Board of County Supervisors Chair Deshundra Jefferson imploring her not to raise the data center tax. His principal rationale was that it would be difficult to collect because many data center occupants “have never filed a certificate of occupancy with Prince William County.” That seems to argue for more aggressive tax enforcement, not a lower tax rate.

Prince William County’s “all in” on data centers has already triggered additional staff requirements. At the November 19th BOCS meeting, the PWC Finance Department requested two new full-time equivalent commercial real estate appraiser positions “to provide dedicated support for all research and valuation functions to assist in the timely and accurate assessment of data centers in the County”.

Ironically, the extra positions are needed, in part, to ensure the county can fend off demands from Prince William Digital Gateway landowners who are suing the county to avoid paying the increased assessments on land they campaigned to rezone. Data center operators regularly seek to avoid the very taxes that were the principal rationale for the county embracing their projects.

I’m sure there will be many more staff positions requested to attend to data center issues. These additional costs directly attributable to data centers justify raising the Prince William County data center tax rate from the current $3.70 to one comparable with Fauquier ($4.15), Fairfax ($4.57) and Loudoun ($4.15).

Fauquier County has shown how the data center tax can be decoupled from other personal property taxes so individual and small business taxes do not have to be raised in tandem.

In an October 8th edition of the Prince William Times (https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/data-centers-use-mailers-text-messages-to-counter-pushback/article_420b47dc-85c7-11ef-90ed-cfe9b41f9e5a.html), Sweeney was quoted as justifying PWC Chamber support for a data center PAC to counter “a lot of misinformation about the data center industry, their motives, how noisy they really are”. This PAC is responsible for the Virginia Connects mailers and text messages the county is being blanketed by.

The Prince William Digital Gateway is an environmental albatross, its review and approval process was a pre-ordained sham, and aggrieved citizens have every right to challenge its propriety.

The truth is that they campaign on better school budgets and lower taxes, but they never lower the taxes. The school budgets in PWC is not the problem, it’s the leadership. This project endangers our history and it will erode the battlefield next door. The Digital Gateway project is good for those who sold, the power company and the politicians that took pay outs. The county and the people of this county did not get what they voted for. Bob Sweeney is just another politician that lies to us in an effort to move up the political ladder. Shame on you all.

This is proof-positive that the Chamber of Commerce is nothing more than a lobbying group for the data center industry. Sweeney is part of “Virginia Connects” a bunch of data center operators and their advocacy groups, including the Data Center Coalition, that received over $275K to send mailers out to residents trying to convince them that these huge buildings and campuses are no problem at all and are the victims of “misinformation”. Sorry, that’s what Bob is spewing. See the Prince William Times piece “Data centers use mailers, text messages to counter pushback” from October 9, 2024. The only folks singing praises of the Digital Gateway are those reaping millions from selling land, receiving donations to political campaigns, or other monetary kickbacks. Everyone else looks at the wasteland of industrial zones sweeping across PWC with shock and utter discouragement as to how it could even happen. Loudoun County is now realizing the downside of relying on one industry that takes so much land, power, water, natural resources and open space, inundating residential neighborhoods with noise and industrial zones. The tax money isn’t adding up, but the horror is.

If the Chamber cared about residential interests, Sweeney never mentioned it until he decided to declare unwavering support for the data center industry when Stack Infrastructure shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to their advocates. He cites “… issues that were raised during the years of debate ...” What a disingenuous statement. The passage of time is NOT an accomplishment, and clearly in this case it wasn’t as there were NO “stringent standards” put in place, and NO safeguards, which the county planning staff clearly recognized by repeatedly recommending the Board of Supervisors should DENY it. As for the passage of time, consideration of the world’s largest data center industrial zone should take a great deal of it - but that didn’t happen either, with the county’s professional planning staff noting they’d seen “Dunkin Donuts take more time than this”. The Chamber should be more concerned about small businesses that can’t afford to locate in PWC because of the dramatic rise in commercial land prices (directly inflating property taxes and commercial rent) caused by the data center industry’s land speculation and acquisition practices that operate in secret to buy-off opposition while pitting neighbors and communities against one another.

He says we should all come together - that because a couple of lawsuits filed by average citizens, residents and non-profit preservation groups, against the richest industry ever in human history, were dismissed - it’s time to fold the tent and go home. He didn’t mention those average homeowners and advocates of historic preservation, who simply want to live normal lives and preserve sites (Civil War and Black community history) that the nation and the Congress, long-ago deemed nationally significant, are appealing these decisions to the Virginia Court of Appeals. And yet another, broader lawsuit has yet to be heard. Bob should understand where we’ve been before he tells all of us where to go. Clearly, he and the Chamber of Commerce never cared.