HOA Roundtable

Gainesville District School Board Member Jennifer Wall speaks truth to power, and she does it powerfully. Simply put, the rush to pave over Prince William County (literally) with data centers needs to stop, leaders need to take a breath, and everyone needs to start over in the planning process. ---------- CLICK ON THE SHARE BUTTON NEXT TO THE HEADLINE OF THIS BLOG POST TO SHARE IT TO YOUR FACEBOOK OR OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS.

  Why would any politician support a proposal to make Prince William County the largest data center hub in the world when it has enormous adverse impacts on the citizens of the county? Why would any politician support approving data centers that blast dangerous levels of sound next to schools where teachers cannot teach and kids cannot learn -- and next to communities that destroy the quality of life of the families that live there? Why would any politician support approving data centers in a location where they will pollute the Occoquan Watershed that supplies nearly 2 million citizens in eastern PWC, Fairfax, and Alexandria? Why would any politician support approving data centers in a location where they will destroy wildlife habitats and the invaluable rural landscape in PWC? Why would any politician support approving data centers in a location where 4 lane divided industrial roads have to be built that will CREATE the Outer Beltway (aka the Bi-County Parkway) that will make roads f

  It's become a sad truth in politics. Its all about the money. What else can explain why the Board of County Supervisors is willing to turn its collective backs on the impacted families -- and there are tens of thousands of those families who are horribly impacted for every one landowner on Pageland Lane. And it's the real estate developers who are behind the cash flowing around Prince William County from mega-bucks multi-national data center operators? The Piedmont Environmental Council lays out the massive impact on families from the land giveaway being considered by the Board of County Supervisors:  The Digital Gateway application proposes to designate   nearly 2,100 acres in western Prince William County for up to 27.6 million square feet of data center space   along Pageland Lane, converting the rural area beside Manassas National Battlefield to a complex of data centers larger than Data Center Alley near Dulles International Airport in Loudoun County. For scale, the aver

 

    Targeted Industries and SnackWell's   If you remember the 1990’s you may remember SnackWell's. According to an April 23, 2019 article on www.tastecooking.com ,   “SnackWell’s runaway success was a particularly ’90s moment….. the defining moment for the very American idea of permissible indulgence. Here was a cookie that you could eat as much of as you wanted. Because fat and cholesterol were bad, and everything else was…fine.”   Similarly, Prince William County has conferred targeted industry status for data center approvals. This may have made sense when it was first introduced, just like SnackWell's made sense. But now, the targeted industry concept is completely out of balance.   Who is being targeted when the Board of County Supervisors zones 25 million square feet of data center campuses surrounding homes and schools in the Gainesville/Haymarket/Bristow area during a 12-month period?   Particularly as it was a time when residents were ove

The Pageland Lane crowd pushing the destruction of our quality of life for their personal economic benefit is spending a lot of money with Madison Avenue style public relations campaigns all designed to mislead everyone about what the real impacts are of noise polluting, water hogging, 70-120 foot high monster sized big box buildings, all packed with energy sucking data storage computers in every Data Center building. Fun Fact #1:   There is almost 40 million more square feet of data centers ALREADY in the planning process which are WITHIN the Prince William County Data Center Overlay Zone.  That is 140% of the Prince William Digital Gateway (PWDG) square footage.   The Dominion Power website claims that about 11,000 Mega Watts of power is the current consumption of electricity for the entire Commonwealth of Virginia. Adding the PWDG and the Data Centers already approved or planned in the Data Center Overlay Zone electricity load will add 15,000 Mega-Watts for Data Centers ONLY in Wes