More staffers exit Prince William County as data center debate rages

And just like that, Prince William County Planning Director Mark Buenavista is gone.

Buenavista resigned this week, after less than a month on the job, according to sources who spoke with PLN.

His resignation follows two others who walked out of the county’s planning office, including Meika Daus, who resigned following a contentious public hearing on a plan to build data centers and 135 homes at Linton Hall and Devlin roads next to hundreds of existing homes in Bristow.

Daus was a deputy in the department assigned to the land-use case, which seeks to rezone nearly 300 acres from suburban mixed residential land to industrial. In 2022, she also worked on the controversial Prince William Digital Gateway project, a more than 800-acre rezoning next to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, now cleared for data center construction.

Steven Gardner, a planning manager at the development department, resigned last month. A spokeswoman for Prince William County Executive Christopher Shorter has not responded to a request for comment on the departures.

Since 2020, there’s been a revolving door at the county’s planning department. In 2021, Parag Agrawal announced his resignation. In 202o, we were the first to tell you that Argawal accepted a job as planning director in Charlottesville before ghosting the city and reporting for his new job in Prince William County.

Agrawal lasted about a year in Prince William County. Rebecca Horner was the last planning director to work in the department for over a year. Horner was promoted to Deputy County Executive in 2020.

Data centers and the prospect of building more have continued to drive a wedge between neighbors who want to maintain their relatively quiet lifestyle in the suburban neighborhoods and developers and a majority of Democrats on the Board of County Supervisors who support rezoning more land for industrial use.

The project at Linton Hall and Devlin roads, the Devlin Road Technolgy Park, will return to the Board of Supervisors on March 7, 2023, after more than 90 people spoke to oppose the project.

About five labor union officials who stand to benefit from the project were the only supporters. Supervisors unanimously voted to defer the decision until March after a majority of Democrats on the board killed a motion to deny the rezoning, effectively ending the project.

The public hearing on the project is closed, so residents who attend the March 7 meeting won’t get to speak on the matter.

A Special Election on Tuesday, February 21, 2023, to decide the next Gainesville District Supervisor has also been dominated by data center discussions. Republican Bob Weir opposes building more data centers in the county’s rural lands, citing lacking electricity and water resources and the noise data centers generate when cooling the server farms inside the buildings.

Democrat Kernsa Sumers, who is largely funded by labor unions, calls for developing more data centers in rural areas to increase the county’s tax base. During a candidate forum sponsored by the Leauge of Women Voters and the Prince William Committee of 100 held on February 9, Sumers said the Haymarket and Gainesville areas have been rural for too long and should be built out to resemble the Sudley Road corridor near Manassas.