Insidenova.com: “Deshundra Jefferson on Tuesday night was heading toward upsetting incumbent Prince William Board of County Supervisors Chair Ann Wheeler in the Democratic primary.”
“Jefferson’s apparent narrow victory marked voters’ rejection of Wheeler and her backing of the growing data center industry in the county.”
“Jefferson, a single mom who lives in Montclair and is a communications professional and former journalist, had 52% of the vote with 96% of the precincts reporting, according to preliminary results from the Virginia Department of Elections. She held a lead of over 1,000 votes out of nearly 25,000 cast.”
Look at the creative ways they try to exploit your inattention. Did you know that our board of county supervisors has authorized a water study of the Occoquan watershed, a Sustainability Commission Report, development of a revised noise ordinance, and considering enhanced building code standards for data centers?
The results are due back about the same time as they finish pouring cement for the millions of square feet of data centers they already rushed to approve.
You’d think if they were really interested in what they claim, they might have looked into these issues before sealing our fates with their pre-determined decisions. After all, there were certainly enough informed citizens lining up at Public Comment time pleading for them to do so. They finally got the message after the damage was done. Better late than never.
For the next few months of election season, you will hear nothing but accomplishments from this board. Just don’t look too closely out your car window, and for some neighborhoods, don’t even look out your back door, or you will see the reality of their “accomplishments.”
Chair Ann Wheeler is the chief practitioner of the drive-by photo op and the innocuous “proclamation.” Throw in buttering-up a few select community members with appointments to commissions (our equivalent of ambassadorship), and you’ve built a superficial following.
How’s that working for us?
Paula Daly
Gainesville
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Ann Wheeler will seek a second term as chair of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.
She’s led the governing body for Virginia’s second-largest jurisdiction since January 2020. Since that time, she’s pushed a progressive agenda that has been applauded by her supporters who wish to grow the county’s tax commercial tax base and vilified by others who have mounted a recall petition for the Democrat.
Fellow Democrat Deshondra Jefferson will challenge Wheeler for her seat.
Here’s more in an announcement from Wheeler:
In my 2018 campaign announcement [for her first term], I promised to ensure our school system was adequately funded and that, when elected, I would make it one of my primary missions to build the schools we need, to pay our teachers what they deserve and to make sure the school system has the resources it needs to be successful. I kept that promise. In our FY23 County budget, we funded our schools over $100 million more than when I took office, representing a 17% increase over prior years.
I promised to make Prince William County more attractive and welcoming to prospective large and small businesses, thereby relieving our homeowners from the burden of making up over 80% of the County real-estate tax revenue. I made good on that promise.
Over the last three years, Prince William County has enjoyed a surge in large business investments, steered significant CARES and ARPA funds towards small businesses and created new business grants to incentivize local business growth. In that same time, we secured funding for over $1 Billion in active and new projects to improve our transportation infrastructure.
I also campaigned on bringing an inclusive and a welcoming culture to all Prince William County residents. I saw the opportunity to address the unique issues of the large and diverse population of the County and to enable a bright and prosperous future for all. I delivered on that promise. Over the last three years, we have embraced as a strength our place as the 10th most diverse county in the nation, and experienced a palpable positive shift for our immigrant communities. We also invested $2 million in federal recovery funding in an immigration Welcome Center and hosted numerous cultural events celebrating our diversity.
In addition to these promises kept, I have led a Board of County Supervisors that has celebrated many other achievements, while also successfully navigating a pandemic.
We funded and established a Crisis Receiving Center for those experiencing mental health crises, which is opening in early 2024.
We created a Racial and Social Justice Commission to address community issues that needed to be addressed.
We committed to long-term Climate and Resiliency Goals and created an Office of Sustainability with over $1 Million in funding in FY23 and a Sustainability Commission for community input.
We adopted Prince William County’s first ever Collective Bargaining Ordinance to give our public sector employees, Police Department and Department of Fire and Rescue a seat at the table at their urging.
Finally, we adopted the long-overdue Prince William County Comprehensive Plan Pathway to 2040. This bold vision document updates and modernizes our land use policies and robust transportation network plans, and adds brand new affordable housing goals and policies to make sure the people who work here can afford to live here.
I am grateful for everything we have accomplished, but we still have much work to do. I look forward to serving Prince William County for another four years as your Chair-At-Large and earning our residents’ vote on November 7, 2023.
A judge tossed a lawsuit against Prince William County Supervisor Peter Candland, representing the Gainesville District.
On November 10, U.S. Eastern District Court Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff granted the motion to dismiss a lawsuit against Candland. With the dismissal, the judge gave Plaintiff 15 days to file an amended complaint to address the issues brought up by the motion to dismiss. Plaintiff failed to meet the deadline. Thus the lawsuit remains dismissed, according to a press release from Candland.
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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
Opponents of data centers will hold a protest outside the Prince Wiliam County Government Center.
Drivers on Prince William Parkway should see the protesters at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 13, at the county government center, 1 County Complex Court in Woodbridge.
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It’s a bit unusual to have one-quarter of your county supervisors facing recall petitions from their constituents. It’s also unusual that Prince William County has no Ombudsman or Ethics Office. So, what other recourse do our citizens have?
In the Navy, when a commanding officer is relieved for cause, it is usually not for specific misdeeds but for leadership failures that adversely affected subordinates or enabled their substandard performance. You’ll hear terms like “loss of trust and confidence in the ability to command” or “cultivating a poor command climate.” There is a recognition that bad leadership is unacceptably corrosive to an organization.
Thus, Chair at Large Ann Wheeler’s conflicted financial trading is not only problematic by itself, but as an indication of the shoddy values, she demonstrates to the those she presides over.
Examples of behavior that may not constitute legal violations but are potentially more damaging than those that do, include:
• Setting low ethical standards that invite unscrupulous individuals to exploit them for personal gain
• Using personal wealth or power for electoral advantage or leverage over more vulnerable colleagues
• Using a powerful position to pressure apolitical staff into relaxing professional standards to advance a personally or politically advantageous agenda
• Suppressing legitimate inquiries into improper conduct and performance
The Coalition to Protect Prince William County will be collecting recall petition signatures at the upcoming County fair. See the livestock and then seek us out to help send Supervisors Pete Candland and Ann Wheeler out to pasture.
Bill Wright
Gainesville
However, those same safeguards wouldn't apply to locally-elected officials.
Since 2020, Spanberger has sought to ban politicians from trading single stocks. Spanberger introduced the Transparent Representation Upholding Service and Trust in Congress Act. She has also gone so far as to recommend that family members of sitting members of Congress should not be allowed to buy or sell individual stocks due to the privileged information that may find its way into their hands.
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Ann Wheeler has much to say in a fundraising email to constituents following bi-partisan calls for her to resign or be removed from office.
Wheeler, the top locally-elected policy maker in Prince William County, dodged a question from this news organization about her reaction to a bi-partisan effort to recall the Democrat, who's served as the At-large Chair of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors since 2020. However, in an email posted to the Coalition to Protect Prince William's website, one of the groups calling on Wheeler to resign, the chairwoman July 17, said those calling for her recall are detractors of the Board's progressive agenda.
