Judge Halts, For Now, Digital Processing Center Proposed Next To Manassas

A county judge in Virginia has, for the time being, halted plans to build a massive digital processing center next to Manassas National Battlefield Park.

The ruling hinged on whether the Prince William County Commission had properly posted public notifications of a commission hearing at which zoning changes necessary for the Digital Gateway project were to be voted upon. 

Judge Kimberly Irving ruled that the notices had not been published as required by state law and so the rezoning applications that had been approved during the commission's December 2023 meeting were void.

"Additionally, the Court finds that the plans, ordinances or amendments referenced by the advertised notices were not properly made available to the public. This Court finds that while some of the Plaintiffs with standing were present at the December 12 hearing, there were others that did not actively participate in the hearing and did not have actual notice," the judge said in her August 7 ruling (attached below).

The companies behind the facility have until early September to appeal the judge's ruling.

The proposed data center has a footprint estimated to be about 22 million square feet on more than 2,000 acres adjacent to the battlefield. Opposition to the project came from the National Park Service, the American Battlefield Trust, the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks, and even documentarian Ken Burns.

"As a student and chronicler of American history for more than 40 years, I can attest to how fragile our precious heritage is and how susceptible it can be to the ravages of 'progress,'" Burns said in a January 2022 letter to the chairman of the commission. "I learned while making my documentary series The Civil War in the late 1980s—and again when I made my 2009 series on the history of the national parks—how crucial the preservation of our historic landscapes is, and I fear the devastating impact the development of up to 2,133 acres of data centers will have on this hallowed ground."

During the Civil War, the first and second battles of Manassas were fought over land that was largely open fields dotted with trees and farmsteads. Roads were laid with dirt and gravel, and it would have taken travelers the better part of a day to travel on horseback from downtown Washington, D.C., to the battlefield.

In late 2021 the superintendent of the battlefield wrote a long letter to the Prince William County planner in which he pointed out that "a 10-acre portion of the application area falls within what the United States Congress has designated as part of Manassas National Battlefield Park -- lands which can and should be part of a National Park. In addition, not all areas where soldiers fought and died are within the park boundary. Over 100 acres of land under consideration have been designated by the congressionally authorized American Battlefield Protection Program as part of the battlefield 'core area.'"

"These are lands where battle action took place and are typically thought to be 'hallowed ground,'" continued the superintendent. "Changing the planned land use of these areas would inhibit the mission of the Park to preserve and honor the sacrifices of the 4,000 Americans who died at Manassas."

Today, the battlefield sits only a mile north of Interstate 66, a major thoroughfare in and out of the nation’s capital. In the more than 30 years since preservationists successfully fought off a plan to build a Disney theme park within view of the battlefield, Manassas has been at the center of an ever-tightening chokehold of development. The surrounding Prince William County has more than doubled its population to just under 500,000 people in three decades, making it the second-most populated county in Virginia after Fairfax.

In recent years, the greater D.C. metro area has been an increasingly popular destination for major companies with huge digital footprints. In 2023, the granddaddy of them all—Amazon—opened its HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia, just outside D.C., and a subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is driving much of the data center development in the region. Millions of square feet of data and distribution centers are planned near the Wilderness Battlefield at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, just one other example.