Coalition to Protect Prince William County

The Coalition to Protect Prince William County organized in 2014 around the county’s comprehensive-plan amendment process, nearly a decade before the Prince William Digital Gateway rezoning arrived at the Board of County Supervisors. Founder and executive director Elena Schlossberg has remained the coalition’s public face through the Digital Gateway fight. The Prince William Times, Data Center Dynamics, Virginia Mercury, and Inside Climate News have all quoted Schlossberg by name as the most sustained local voice on data-center land-use policy in Prince William County.

The coalition is a 501(c)(3) membership organization. It operates with a volunteer board, a small staff, and a policy presence at every Board of County Supervisors meeting that touches on land use, infrastructure, or the comprehensive plan. The coalition did not file the lawsuit that voided the Digital Gateway rezoning. The American Battlefield Trust and the Oak Valley Homeowners Association carried the litigation. The coalition provided the political, organizing, and public-record infrastructure that the litigation depended on: the speakers at the thirteen-hour December 2022 rezoning hearing, the press coverage, the media list, and the community memory of which supervisors had voted which way on which proposal. The coalition’s playbook of early coalition-building, legal partnership, and procedural focus now travels into fights across Fauquier, Culpeper, Spotsylvania, and the rest of the Northern Virginia data-center frontier.