The Prince William County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to make it harder to develop new data centers in the county.
Among other things, the county stripped tech companies of automatic approvals for those projects.
The change in Prince William County is significant, and it reflects a massive shift in the county’s posture and how it’s going to address data center development — and also of the public sentiment on data centers and how that’s been changing over the last decade.
About a decade ago, a previous Board of Supervisors created what it called a data center opportunity overlay — a long, fancy name that basically designated an area of the county they thought data centers should go. And as long as data center developers meet a certain set of criteria, they can just go ahead and build there without special approval from the Board of Supervisors.
Ten years later, public sentiment has shifted dramatically.
A new Board of Supervisors, for the most part, has been elected in, and a lot of them were elected on a much more restrictive data center approach. And to that end, they have stripped away that data center opportunity overlay district.
So while data centers are still allowed to develop in Prince William County, they can’t just build in that area anymore without being scrutinized at the county level.
Now, every new data center in Prince William County will have to go before the Board of Supervisors, which the board chair said is a much more transparent approach to addressing this type of development.
Data center developers will need a special use permit if they want to build.
There will have to be public hearings, and every single development moving forward will have at least some public input.
