Prince William's tech corridor stretches into mid-county

Prince William County is poised to add yet another “data center alley” to its already burgeoning tech industry — this time in the mid-county area.

The Prince William Board of County Supervisors moved Tuesday, March 19 to allow  85-foot data centers on 90 acres known as Parson’s Farm, a former landscaping outlet along Dumfries Road.

In April, the planning commission will hear another application to add at least three more 80-foot-tall data centers at Colchester Industrial Park and surrounding properties about three miles south on Dumfries Road. Part of the property would need to be rezoned, which would require approval by the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.

The latter project, dubbed the “Mid-County Industrial Park,” was unveiled Thursday, March 21 by Corey Stewart, the former chair of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, who is the lawyer representing the landowners in their rezoning application.

The project is proposed for 64 acres northeast of Minnieville and Dumfries Roads near the county’s landfill. It would encompass The Colchester Industrial Park to the west and would stretch east toward the back of Potomac Reserve, a newer development of large, million-dollar homes off Minnieville Road.

“If this data center is approved and built, it will become the easternmost data center in the county,” said Stewart, a Republican who served as the board’s at-large chairman from 2007 to 2019.

With the recently approved Parsons Business Park just to its west — and the proposed “Potomac Technology Park” on the other side of Dumfries Road just north of Prince William Forest Park — it could anchor a new mid-county data center corridor.

Stewart said his client, Minnieville Capital Acquisitions LLC, chose this site because it is in the county’s “data center opportunity zone overlay district,” a swath of 10,000 acres created by county officials back in 2016 to encourage data center development. The property is also partly zoned industrial and high-power transmission lines cut through it.

“There's only a handful of homes that are actually bordering it,” Stewart said. 

The proposed site consists of a 41-acre forested parcel on the east and the 23-acre Colchester Industrial Park to the east, which is mostly paved and home to GDC Construction as well as multiple lots with parked cars, tractor-trailer trucks and construction materials. 

“Every way you can look at (the project), it’s an improvement, compared to what’s already there,” Stewart said. 

Stewart noted that there is “an existing environmental issue on this site” that will have to be cleaned up, but he did not offer details.

The plan Stewart unveiled showed three data center buildings, a power substation, roads, pads for generators, parking lots and a stormwater holding pond. Of the data center buildings, two would front Dumfries Road while one would be set to the rear.

Stewart said the plan had been adjusted to avoid placing the data centers too close to six homes on John Mallard Drive within the Potomac Reserve neighborhood. The latest version shows one of the data centers moved further to the west and replaced by a power substation, which Stewart said would be less bothersome to the homes that back to the property. Stewart said he did not know the height of substation equipment but that it would be quiet and that the homes’ view of it would be buffered by some of the existing forest and at least 50 feet of planted trees. 

“The old data centers that first came into the county were just, frankly, really, really ugly,” Stewart said. “And you know, this is not going to be a work of art here, but these are designed to look much more like office buildings.”

The property is inside an isolated portion of the Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District. To the north, the zone appears on a map as an irregularly shaped blob west of Manassas. To the south of the zone, the supervisors added six islands where data centers also could be located. The site is in one of them.

Inside the zone, data centers have an easy path to development. In this case, the 23-acre part of the property is zoned industrial, but the 41-acre part is zoned agricultural, so the owner wants to change that to light industrial. According to Stewart, the application will be heard by the county planning commission on April 24 and the board of supervisors on June 4.

Stewart was peppered with questions from Mid-County Civic Association members.

Ashley McWilliam, who lives about two miles north of the site, was concerned about building heights and proposed tree buffers. She argued the 50-foot tree buffer between the homes in Potomac Reserve and the substation was inadequate. She pointed out that the supervisors had just approved 100-foot buffers at the Parsons Business Park to the north.

“Just want to point out the data centers don't actually have to be as big as possible.,” she said. “They could be shortened by 50 feet and still be massively profitable.”

Stewart said that the buffering of the project was 50 feet in just one spot, and that behind other houses the old forest would be retained up to 150 feet deep. But he said that the planted buffers along Dumfries Road were only 20 feet.

“I'd like to say this is the most beautiful part of the county here on (Va. 234, but it is next to the landfill),” he said.

“And it’s also across from the forest,” McWilliam said, referring to the 15,000-acre Prince William Forest Park.

In response to other questions about noise and efficiency, Stewart said, “We're on the cusp of becoming the biggest data center locality in the world. And the latest and greatest technologies are being used here, including in this development.”

But the association’s vice president Delton Nichols demurred.

“I'm not sure that saying that is endearing to a lot of the citizens,” he said. “And particularly in a time for some of the other counties that have been saturated with data centers. They are beginning to have a different view.”

Reach Peter Cary at news@fauquier.com