The giant data centers next door

Evone Mounier and her family loved to look at the endless trees from the back window of their Village Place home. Her girls, who attend nearby Tyler Elementary School, delighted in watching the wildlife emerge from the woods, especially deer, squirrels, rabbits and even foxes.

But on Sept. 23, 2022, the bulldozers came and toppled all the trees. In November, the land was graded, and on May 22, the first concrete wall of a data center went up—70 feet high, 580 feet long and only 200 feet away. It filled them with despair.

“I chose this house for the scenery. It was amazing,” Mounier said. “If I had known about this, for sure I would not have bought this house. … I feel that I am dreaming, but it’s not a dream; it’s a nightmare.”

Village Place residents Chris and Dale Erickson wonder why the building had to be so close.

“They say it’s 200 feet, but 200 feet isn’t much,” Dale Erickson said. “And then they plant these little trees, and it’s going to take years for them to mature. They don’t do anything for us.”

Village Place residents Chris and Dale Erickson, center and right, greet a neighbor while walking their dog last May. Photo by Jill Palermo

They are not the only residents of Village Place, a cozy community of about 200 condos and townhomes just east of Haymarket, to be shocked by the rise of the mammoth slabs next door.

“I’m moving next year away from here,” said Gloria Jones, whose condominium is even closer to the buildings than the Ericksons’. Like Mounier, she misses the deer that used to come out of the woods to their parking lot, where she fed them.

“Where did they go?” she asks. “I’m not living next to this.”

In a county where some data centers have developed their own particular notorieties—for blocking sunsets, for their noise, for their electricity demands—the Village Place Technology Park stands out.

Jeanine Lawson, R-Brentsville, one of three supervisors to vote against its approval, called the sight of it “gut wrenching” in a recent interview. Kathy Kulick, president of a local association of homeowners’ associations and part of a group trying to write tighter data center standards, called Village Place “the poster child of improper land-use planning.”

“We’re kind of a guinea pig on how close you can put a data center to residences,” said Ari Govoni-Young, a member of the Village Place homeowners’ association board. 

How the project was approved—with little public opposition, little skepticism from county officials, and the acquiescence of the homeowners’ association—is a rich tale. The stew includes apparent misrepresentations or misunderstandings, an agreeable county planning office and resident apathy amid the COVID epidemic. Pointedly, the record shows that key decision-makers mainly fretted about the routing of power lines to the project and missed the elephant in the room—the sheer size of the buildings.

“Everybody comments on the shock value of those buildings and their out-of-character nature,” Lawson said last week.

Earlier plans fell apart

Since 2002, there had been plans to expand Village Place with additional housing and a small shopping district on the vacant 45.5 acres to the east. Residents who moved in 20 years ago said they looked forward to being able to walk to shopping from their back doors. But it never happened.

The first sign that something new was afoot came on June 26, 2020, when a company called CTP-I LLC filed a set of rezoning applications with the Prince William County planning office. (CTP-I appears to be affiliated with Black Chamber Partners LLC, which signed a non-disclosure agreement with county officials regarding the project 14 months later. Black Chamber also owns land nearby slated for the John Marshall Commons Technology Park beside Tyler Elementary and Pace West schools)

In its filings, CTP-I argued that the shopping and housing development next to Village Place was never going to happen. It proposed a four-building data center campus, the Village Place Technology Park, which would need rezoning and special use permits. 

As is standard practice, county officials in various departments commented on the plans, and the developer began to make changes. County planners objected to the 50-foot treed buffers, and the developer offered to make them 80 to 120 feet instead. Setbacks were increased to 200 feet from John Marshall Highway and 190 feet from the closest residence.

The watershed management office objected to 33 especially mature and beautiful trees being cut down as the forest was toppled. The developer agreed to preserve two wooded acres on the northwest corner that residents could use as a small park.

During late 2020, as they refined the plans during COVID lockdowns, the developer’s agents held two Zoom meetings with residents. Govoni-Young, who was not on the homeowners’ association board at the time, recalls attending meetings in September and November. She said they were lightly attended.

Some residents contacted by the Prince William Times said they didn’t know about the meetings, but the developer said all residents were invited.

“We knew,” said Govoni-Young. She said residents who did not attend apparently chose to just “hope for the best.”

Govoni-Young joined the homeowners’ board in November 2022 and thinks she may have attended one more meeting on March 31, 2021. “But after that, I stopped going because I realized partway through that nothing's gonna change,” she said. “There is nothing we could do to change things.”

She said she was discouraged because the developer already owned the property, the county had been green-lighting other data centers, and the applications were moving through the system.

”They pushed this through as fast as possible,” she said.

At least, she said, the homeowners’ association was able to get some concessions from the developer, including $380,000 for the park or to plant more trees.

“Originally, they were gonna have it right on top of us, and there was a lot of push back. And so, I guess you could say they kind of worked with us. That at least it wasn't directly on top of us as much.”

Rezoning approved despite concerns

Three weeks later, on April 21, 2021, the planning commission met to consider the development. Their representative, Sherman Patrick, of Compton & Duley in Woodbridge, accompanied by an engineer, spoke for 30 minutes. He said berms would be planted with evergreen and deciduous trees to hide most of the building facades from view—at worst, 25% to 30% of the future data centers would be seen from John Marshall Highway. From the residences, he said, “there would be additional visibility of the building but still very much limited.”

Sherman said that the project would provide 200 permanent jobs averaging $125,000 a year. He said the homeowners’ association was behind the project: “You have before you this evening, a letter from their attorney representing their support for this proposal,” he said. 

Most of the commissioners’ questions were about power transmission to the site, as they were very wary of bringing high-power lines through Haymarket eastward. They did not ask about how the buildings would look from residents’ balconies, nor did they question the promise of high-paying jobs. One commissioner said of the applicant’s team, “They are straight shooters, and they know their stuff.”

Meika Daus, the county planner for the project, cited “landscape buffers, berms, screen walls and architectural enhancements to limit adverse impact.” Of the design elements, she said, “Those are good things.” Her office recommended approval.

Five residents spoke, though none from Village Place. Rhonda Reese, who lives about a half-mile west of the community, said the developer’s plans showed that much of the buildings would be seen from residents’ windows. “I don’t want a big, massive structure there,” she said. “It doesn’t fit there. You will see it every day.”

A Bristow resident called the buildings “monolithic” and said they were “not architecturally consistent” with Village Place.

A view of the nearly finished 70-foot data center built behind the Village Place townhomes and condominiums. Photo by Jill Palermo.

Chris Coon, Haymarket's town manager, said his town officials had concerns about proximity to schools, transmission lines and benefits to the town. “If you cannot say it will benefit the town of Haymarket, vote no,” he told the commissioners.

The planning commission voted 6-2 to recommend approval.

On June 15, 2021, the county board of supervisors met in what was largely a repeat of the planning commission meeting.

Patrick said the campus cooling system would be very quiet. He said the complex would generate $111.7 million in real estate and personal property taxes over 10 years. The Village Place homeowners’ association would get $380,000 for parks and trees. A security guard would take noise complaints at any time.

Daus noted Haymarket’s disapproval but said her office recommended voting for the project. A Village Place HOA attorney had sent a letter of support, she said.

But during the meeting, Lawson said she read the HOA letter and would not call it a letter of support. “I think it’s a stretch to call it an approval letter,” she told Daus. “It's more like an agreement, like, ‘Okay, if this land gets rezoned, this is what you're gonna do for us.’  It's not … ‘We definitely want this project approved.’”

Former supervisor Peter Candland, who represented Village Place, said he had received more than 340 emails against the project. “I don't want anyone to think, ‘I'm going to support this because the community supports it.’ That is not what I've seen,” he said. 

Candland said he had consulted topographical maps and could see the data center was going to be built on elevated land, so it would tower 50 feet over the roofs of neighbors and Tyler Elementary school. “This will be the tallest building in the area,” Candland said.

Once again, like the planning commission, most of the supervisors’ concerns were over transmission lines. The issue was defused, however, when the developer promised not to build if transmission lines had to come from Haymarket.

Nine citizens spoke in opposition. Karen Sheehan, a Gainesville resident and a data center opponent, said data centers are completely incompatible with the historic town of Haymarket. “The fact is that 70-foot, six-story-tall data center buildings in that location are absolutely ridiculous,” she said.

She also questioned the assertions that the complex would provide 200 full-time jobs averaging $125,000 each. She said she had managed a data center for Time Warner Cable Inc., and they had three full-time employees, with the rest on call from contractors.

“At best, those four 70-foot-tall buildings may have 50 full time employees,” she said.

When the vote was taken, Lawson, Candland and Supervisor Yesli Vega, R-Coles, voted no. Supervisors Kenny Boddye, D-Occoquan; Victor Angry, D-Neabsco; Margaret Franklin, D-Woodbridge; Andrea Bailey, D-Potomac; and Board Chair Ann Wheeler, D-At Large, voted to approve.

The three supervisors who voted against the rezoning all cited power line concerns.

The five “ayes” listed a variety of reasons. Franklin said she was impressed by the promise of 200 jobs for locals at $125,000 each. And the plan for buffers screening the buildings from view, she said, was “one of the best I’ve seen.”

Boddye, however, appears to be having buyer’s remorse. In an interview after the walls went up, he said the result he saw was not what he was expecting. 

“That's not exactly what they advertised to us when they brought it before the board. They advertised a lot more robust buffers (and) much higher trees and shrubs than (what) you see,” Boddye said.

Boddye said Village Place is an example of the need for county officials to rewrite data center zoning rules.

“To me, we have to do a much better job at really sharpening our pencils, when we talk about buffers, how robust they are and look at elevations especially,” he said.

But Boddye also said he voted in favor of the Village Place rezoning because he was assured by the developer that the community was OK with the project.

“On the night of the hearing, we were given the impression, including by a letter from the community there, that they were comfortable with it,” Boddye said. “The developer told us that they had worked with the community there to carve out that pocket park and put in enough buffers that the community was comfortable with it. That's the information we had at the time. That's what we voted for.”

Gainesville Supervisor Bob Weir, R-Gainesville, who was elected after Candland resigned, was not yet in office when the Village Place Technology Park was approved. Instead, he was one of the few residents who spoke out at the county board meeting, urging the board to refuse the plan mostly because he feared it would require more overhead power lines.

Now that he’s a supervisor, Weir said he checked with county inspectors and was assured that the builders are following county guidelines and the promises the developer made in its proffers. Still, Weir described the buildings as a “horror.”

“The board let the existing residents down in a manner that’s just unfathomable,” Weir said.