The Prince William Board of County Supervisors has joined separate motions to stay and clarify Judge Kimberly A. Irving’s Aug. 7 ruling declaring the PW Digital Gateway project void ab initio, meaning the project’s rezonings in effect never happened.
The board’s efforts mean it is pushing to move the project along as planned.
County attorneys filed an Aug. 15 motion requesting a “stay” of the ruling and asking Irving to suspend her Aug. 7 order pending further appeal.
There are three separate rezonings involved in the massive data center project: Digital Gateway North, Digital Gateway South and the Compass property. Should the ruling be stayed, the three rezonings and subsequent construction would proceed as scheduled until the appeal process is fully resolved.
In a text message to InsideNoVa, board Chair Deshundra Jefferson directed legal inquiries to a county spokesperson but said the board has not had any emergency meetings in recent weeks.
Nikki Brown, a county spokesperson, told InsideNoVa the county’s policy is to not comment on active litigation.
Defendants in the suit are the Prince William Board of County Supervisors and two developers involved with Digital Gateway, H&H Capital Acquisitions and GW Acquisition Co. Compass Datacenters is an affiliate of H&H, while QTS Data Centers is an affiliate of GW Acquisition.
At full buildout, the Digital Gateway near Gainesville would be the largest data center corridor in the world, with over 22 million square feet of data centers spread out across over 2,100 acres in western Prince William. The project would include 37 data centers overall, roughly the size of 144 Walmart supercenters.
“Despite its heading, the August 7 order is not final for multiple reasons,” the developer defendants’ initial motion to stay said. “First, it does not dispose of all claims and causes of action against all parties. Instead, it only addresses Count I. There remain 6 counts that the August 7 order fails to address.”
The motion continued, “Although the Court’s letter opinion suggests that a ruling in plaintiffs’ favor on Count I would render the other counts moot, the August 7 order does not make any such finding.”
The board, in turn, concurred with the developers and added a few new elements.
“Many collateral issues — both known and unknown — arising from the August 7 order are best decided at the end of any pending appeals in these proceedings,” the board said in its Aug. 15 motion, “to avoid conflicting rulings, inefficiencies, reassessments, citizen confusions, and the potential for unnecessary enforcement actions if defendants are ultimately successful on appeal. The stay would simply preserve the status quo pending the likely appeal.”
In a Wednesday phone call with InsideNoVa, Mac Haddow, president of the Oak Valley Homeowners Association – a key plaintiff alongside several of its residents in the initial lawsuit – expressed displeasure at the ongoing legal process.
"Any decision that was made for the county to join in that lawsuit was not made by the Board of County Supervisors," Haddow said, "but rather, either by the county attorney or legal outside counsel – none of which is representative of what the Board of County Supervisors ought to be doing. So that's reprehensible on any standard ..."
Haddow lamented the funding of the lawsuit's proceedings at taxpayer expense.
"Now, you have outside counsel – they didn't get the approval of the board – simply doing what is in their best financial interest at the expense of the taxpayers in Prince William County," Haddow said. "All we wanted, and all the judge said, with respect to the county's role in this was that the notice was not properly placed. It was the fault of the county, not the Washington Post – that was an evidence-based fact."
Haddow said he knows firsthand the board did not participate in the county's joining of the motion.
"When I disclosed to a a person who would have been involved in the decision-making by the Board of County Supervisors that the county had formally appealed," Haddow said, "that person was completely clueless that that happened, and this would have been a person that would have known ... I know for a fact, from the mouth of one of the supervisors, that they had no idea that that had taken place."
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