Prince William County

Prince William County sits at the western edge of the Northern Virginia data-center corridor, the densest hyperscale footprint on the planet. Between 2018 and 2022 the landowner and broker Mary Ann Ghadban assembled more than two hundred Pageland Lane parcels into a single 2,100-acre tract for the developers QTS and Compass. In December 2022 the Prince William Board of County Supervisors rezoned the tract from agricultural to technology use and approved what the county called the Prince William Digital Gateway, a project that would have carried roughly 2,700 megawatts of data-center capacity on land that shares a property line with Manassas National Battlefield Park.

The community that had lived along Pageland Lane was rural, working-class, and multi-ethnic. Several residents had held title for forty years or more, farming horses and cattle on parcels that the 1940 census had already recorded as family holdings. The Gainesville district around Pageland Lane, by the 2020 American Community Survey, was roughly fifty-eight percent white, seventeen percent Black, thirteen percent Asian, and nine percent Hispanic or Latino, a Piedmont exurb with median household income above $170,000 that nevertheless rested on a rural agricultural base the rezoning would have erased.

The Coalition to Protect Prince William County, founded in 2014 by the organizer Elena Schlossberg, had built the county’s opposition infrastructure a decade before the Digital Gateway vote. The Piedmont Environmental Council, founded in 1972 and anchored in Warrenton, carried the regional analytic and legal capacity. In January 2023 the American Battlefield Trust and nine Gainesville residents filed suit against the rezoning. The Oak Valley Homeowners Association, led by president Mac Haddow, filed a companion case on Virginia public-notice grounds. On March 31, 2025, the Virginia Court of Appeals ruled unanimously for the plaintiffs on the Oak Valley case, voiding the rezoning on procedural grounds. In April 2026, Prince William County withdrew from its appeal of the ruling.

The Digital Gateway fight is one of the few data-center cases in the United States that the community has won in court. The win rested on procedure, on the specific failures of public notice that the county’s rezoning record documented, and on the federal standing the American Battlefield Trust carried as a plaintiff. The campus has not been built. The Pageland Lane parcels remain in the hands of the holdout owners who did not sell into the Ghadban assemblage, and the county’s comprehensive plan amendment that underwrote the project is open to reconsideration in the next planning cycle.

The fight is also, in its rate-case and transmission dimensions, unfinished. Virginia SCC Case PUR-2025-00100 approved a Dominion Energy rate settlement that begins passing roughly sixteen dollars per month in data-center-driven infrastructure costs to residential customers in January 2026 and creates a new GS-5 data-center rate class in January 2027. The Valley Link 765 kilovolt transmission line, approved by PJM Interconnection, will cut a 200-foot easement across nine Piedmont counties on its 115-mile run from Campbell County to Culpeper County. Those costs and those corridors will land on Prince William and its neighbors regardless of whether the Digital Gateway campus is ever built. The community that won the rezoning fight has not won the grid fight.

The atlas carries Prince William into the record because the case tests, in an unusually clean way, whether the lessons of the twentieth-century clearances travel. Chavez Ravine was lost in a procedural fight the neighborhood could not win. Cooper Square was saved because a community counter-plan gave the legal fight a constructive alternative. Pageland Lane won the procedural fight that Chavez Ravine lost, and the open question is whether the organizing capacity that the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, the Piedmont Environmental Council, and the American Battlefield Trust built around the rezoning case can now carry the rate-case and transmission-corridor fights that the data-center industry has already opened on the same ground.