We are Democrats, neighbors, and fellow citizens of Prince William County who find ourselves on different sides of an issue that has pitched your fellow landowners along Pageland Lane against a huge majority of residents in the county and surrounding jurisdictions.
We respect the right you and other property owners have to your personal financial interests in this issue, and we had hoped you would show others the same respect.
Trying to manipulate this into a partisan political issue, a racial issue, or an anti-school issue is completely dishonest. Your attempt to cast Hung Cao, the Republican nominee for Congress (Va.-10), as against equal opportunity, property rights, businesses, schools, students, teachers, government employees, and first responders is unhinged.
Your letter to Congresswoman Jennifer Wexton, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, the Planning Commission, and others recasts your differences with Mr. Cao, and the vast majority of County residents, in the most self-serving and disingenuous way imaginable.
And, for the record, you dishonestly characterize a screenshot from an HOA Roundtable email message as being a flyer from the Hung Cao campaign. That is simply untrue and another example of the dishonest public relations campaign you are waging.
Congresswoman Wexton has, herself, conveyed concerns regarding the impacts of such an aggressive expansion of data centers in areas selected primarily for the economic gain of landowners rather than professionally established land use policies that place such facilities where they minimize impacts on surrounding communities.
In her letter of January 25, 2022, to the Prince William BOCS, Congresswoman Wexton stressed former Manassas National Battlefield Park Superintendent Brandon Bies’ concern about ” … the effect of increased traffic, noise pollution, deforestation, and the degradation of park streams and water quality …”
She is right to have those concerns, as is Mr. Cao, and we look forward to continuing to work with both of them on these issues.
As Democrats working alongside Republicans, we are not against data centers, and neither is Mr. Cao. We support the expansion of the commercial tax base to balance the tax burden on every homeowner in Prince William County.
We believe that properly placed data center developments can increase the commercial tax base, but they cannot be placed where the environmental impacts devastate the watershed, where noise makes adjacent homes unlivable, where the property values of homeowners are significantly eroded, and where the current infrastructure simply does not exist for power generation or distribution for more of these new industrial monoliths.
We understand the financial windfall that you and a small number of landowners wish to receive, but you have no right to demand everyone else around you willingly have their property values reduced to enrich your financial position.
When located in appropriate locations in Prince William County, data centers can be a valuable tool to rebalance the tax burden on homeowners. But such impactful industrial development must be implemented with reasonable tax policy comparable to surrounding jurisdictions.
The county absolutely should not give a 60% tax break to the world’s richest corporate entities at the expense of Prince William taxpayers. Once taxed fairly, there is no need for the excess 27 million square feet of industrial data centers the PW Digital Gateway would bring, and the citizens of our county will not be taken to the cleaners for your largesse and that of big tech.
And, as residents representing diverse financial means and employment, we support workers in data centers and the unions that represent them. Adding union representatives to your letter demonstrates clearly how you deliberately mislead others when the real issue is the amount of money you will receive if this self-serving land grab works.
While you claim a desire to expand public open spaces and parks, the gymnastics you are going through to sell a lie that data centers will save the County from a deficit of needed parklands is absurd. Attempting to con the families of Prince William into believing that trails between gargantuan industrial buildings, ringed by security fences, is “hundreds and hundreds of acres of permanent public open space and parks” is laughable.
The PW Digital Gateway is proposed between a National Park and a State Forest. How can you claim to increase parkland while destroying the environs of two major parks in the process?
The truth is, the current view scape of the Manassas National Battlefield Park (MNBP) will be destroyed forever by the proposed data center corridor on Pageland Lane, and the Rural Crescent that has been the most effective land use tool ever enacted in the state will be demolished. A four-lane divided industrial highway will become the highly dreaded Bi-County Parkway that even the Board of County Supervisors has removed from any planning document precisely because of its negative impacts on the entire county.
Your characterization of the Rural Crescent as stealing your property rights 23 years ago is a convenient recast of history for you and some of your neighbors when just two years ago, you personally extolled the virtues of the Rural Crescent when the Bi-County Parkway would have significantly reduced your property values.
You publicly argued that the Bi-County Parkway would just be a way to expand housing developments in Loudoun County that would threaten the Rural Crescent designation in Prince William County.
You fought for the Rural Crescent then, and in the blink of an eye, you condemn it as a segregationist relic. That’s a convenient 11th-hour conversion to line your pockets with millions at the expense of an entire culture that actually suffered through the worst of our nation’s history. Some of us stood together with you and fought for the protection of the Rural Crescent.
You are on record – and we can roll the videotape of media conferences.
Further, you supported the previous Board Chair, who frightened people of color by advocating for the 287(g) migrant enforcement policy with ICE. Only now, when millions are at stake, have you chosen to embrace equity and inclusion, in name but not in practice.
What is true today is that you and your neighbors have found a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you to hit the land-sale lottery because a group of large multi-national data center companies is willing to pay a high premium for the land where the siting of data centers serves their economic interests, not the interests of the communities and homeowners impacted by those decisions.
None of those data center companies would have even thought to promote the historic and environmentally vulnerable Pageland corridor without your personal promotion. Don’t try to make this about anyone else benefitting other than you and a small number of your neighbors.
Those who oppose the PW Digital Gateway are not exclusively “Republicans,” and the fact that a congressional candidate from the Republican Party has recognized the importance of this issue and its impacts on the MNBP, the Occoquan watershed that serves a large portion of the Northern Virginia homes, and the national security interests at Ft. Belvoir, makes it far more than a local land use issue.
The HOA Roundtable, whose email image you intentionally misused, is made up of tens of thousands of homeowners of all political stripes who have one common objective: Protect our homes, our communities, and our quality of life. Your cynical attempt to make this a Republican vs. Democratic issue is plainly dishonest.
Neither Hung Cao nor Prince William County Republicans are against expanding the commercial tax base in Prince William County, and they fully support Prince William County Schools, its students, teachers, employees, and first responders every bit as much as you do. As part of a strong bipartisan coalition, we all support the property rights of landowners – including our land and homes – and the right we have to protect our property values from personally exploitative decisions that benefit a small number of people at the expense of hundreds of thousands of homeowners.
Finally, you argue that your vision for data centers will result in “billions in investments.” Responsible land-use and tax policy will deliver the very same results, without the devastating impacts of the improperly placed data center corridor you are promoting for your own economic benefit.
Hung Cao sees through your selfish ambitions and, like us, knows you are far from the self-styled virtuous protector of Prince William County’s future.
We appreciate Mr. Cao and his principled stand on the PW Digital Gateway. His views represent courage and commitment emblematic of the dedicated service he selflessly gave to the nation during his storied military career. We thank him for supporting us as we work to prevent Prince William from being bulldozed into a vast industrial zone.
Sincerely,
Prince William County Democrats:
- Deshundra Jefferson, Treasurer of the Potomac Democratic Committee
- Ruth Balton, Former Chair of the Gainesville Magisterial District Democratic Committee
- Bill Wright, Former Treasurer of the Gainesville Magisterial District Democratic Committee
- Roger Yackel, Gainesville District Resident
- Sue Yackel, Gainesville District Resident
- Erik Brown, Gainesville District Resident
- Brigette Wilson, Gainesville District Resident
- James Ryan, Gainesville District Resident
- Jacqueline Ryan, Gainesville District Resident
- Elena Schlossberg, Executive Director, Coalition to Protect PWC, Gainesville District Resident
- Paula Daly, Board of Directors HOA Roundtable of Prince William County, Member Gainesville Citizens for Smart Growth
