Prince William Ends By-Right Data Center Development

The item before the Prince William Board of County Supervisors at 2:00 p.m. on September 22, 2026, at 1 County Complex Court, was DPA2026-00006, a zoning text amendment to the Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, County Code Sec. 32-509.01 et seq., with corresponding map amendments. The county’s record traces a stop-start year. The board initiated a data center text amendment on March 3, 2026 by Resolution No. 26-125. On May 19 it issued Directive DIR 26-11 telling staff to pause that work and postpone the Planning Commission hearing then set for June 10, to allow time to refine the draft against community, industry and board feedback. On June 9 the board adopted Resolution No. 26-374, initiating a revised amendment and rescinding the March initiation outright. The Planning Commission held its public hearing on September 9 and voted to recommend approval, adding two changes of its own: extend the eligibility period in Sec. 32-509.02(2)(e) from 90 days to 120 days after adoption, and require a minimum 500-foot setback between data center structures and existing homes and schools for development qualifying under that section.

The amendment restructures approval rather than banning a use. Under the revised ordinance the overlay is closed to any future expansion and functions, in the Planning Office’s own description, as a limited eligibility boundary recognizing a defined set of qualifying properties. Only parcels inside it may still use the by-right data center provisions. Outside it, new data center proposals in the B-1, O(L), O(H), O(M), O(F), M-1, M-2 and M/T districts, plus designated office or industrial land bays in the PBD and PMD districts, must go through the special use permit process and come before the board. Local outlets covering the hearing report that supervisors adopted the amendment unanimously with a 90-day transition rather than the Planning Commission’s recommended 120 days, and that parcels leaving the overlay include the Jiffy Lube Live venue, a school division site for a fourteenth high school, and the roughly 2,100-acre former Prince William Digital Gateway property. As of publication the county had not posted the adopted ordinance, an action summary or minutes, and its own project page still described the Planning Commission’s 120-day and 500-foot recommendations as the pending changes. The vote tally, the 90-day figure and the fate of the setback are therefore reported facts, not yet county records, and PSV flags them as such.

The headline number is the shrinkage. Staff’s analysis, measured as of June 30, 2026, puts the proposed overlay at approximately 214 qualifying parcels totaling roughly 3,504 acres, a reduction of about 6,194 acres, or approximately 64 percent, against the existing boundary. Those two figures sum to 9,698 acres, which computes to the roughly 9,700-acre overlay described in coverage of the hearing. But the composition matters more than the total. Of the 214 parcels, staff counted 1 meeting Criterion 1, approved proffers, covering 22 acres; zero meeting Criterion 2, an approved preliminary plan; 82 meeting Criterion 3, an approved final plan, covering 1,899 acres; 1 meeting Criterion 4, a final zoning determination, covering 12 acres; and 130 meeting Criterion 5, filed and accepted for quality control review, covering 1,570 acres. That is 212 of 214 parcels and 3,469 of 3,504 acres from two pathways, about 99 percent on either measure, by PSV’s arithmetic on the county’s figures.

Read that distribution and the practical rule falls out. Surviving by-right status in Prince William means one of two things: a final plan already approved, or paperwork already in the county’s queue. Criterion 5 is the larger by parcel count and it is a deadline, not a status, which is why the length of the transition period was the contested question at the hearing rather than the boundary itself. Each of the five pathways in Sec. 32-509.03(2) is written in the language of Virginia vested rights, requiring that the applicant relied in good faith on the approval and incurred extensive obligations or substantial expenses in diligent pursuit of the specific project. That construction is deliberate. The county’s Design and Construction Standards and Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee asked staff in writing for a detailed explanation of what “extensive obligations or substantial expenses” means in thresholds and administration, and other written comments argued that anchoring eligibility to Virginia Code §§ 15.2-2307 and 15.2-2303.B, while keeping at least one district where new data centers may still be considered by special use permit, supports the ordinance’s legal defensibility by showing the county is not foreclosing the use entirely. The board amended under Virginia Code §§ 15.2-2285 and 15.2-2286.

The artifact worth building is a parcel eligibility register, one row per Prince William parcel a firm owns, lends against, has optioned or is bidding, assembled from public records. Inputs: the DPA2026-00006 staff report with its Attachment C and Attachment D property lists and the eligibility map; the adopted ordinance and map once the county posts them; the county’s land management records for each application, with acceptance dates; and the parcel’s zoning district. Output: columns that decide something. The GPIN, and whether it appears on the adopted eligibility list at all. Which of the five criteria it claims, since Criterion 3 and Criterion 5 carry very different certainty. The acceptance date for any quality control filing, measured against the transition deadline the adopted ordinance actually sets. The zoning district, which determines whether a special use permit is even available outside the overlay. Evidence on file for the good-faith reliance and substantial-expense test, which is the column most registers would skip and the one most likely to be litigated. And a blank column for the 500-foot setback until the adopted text settles whether it survived. Every populated cell cites a page of a county record.

The reviewer is the development or acquisitions lead with land use counsel on the eligibility and vested-rights columns, and the approval gate is narrow: no valuation, bid, option exercise or loan sizing uses by-right status for a Prince William parcel until counsel has checked it against the adopted ordinance and the adopted map, not the June 30 draft. An assistant does the volume work well here. The staff report runs to seventy pages and its property attachments are long GPIN tables; extracting them, joining them to a portfolio, tracking a transition deadline and diffing the initiated text against staff’s recommended changes against the Planning Commission’s amendments is exactly the work to hand off. What it should not do is decide whether a given parcel satisfies the vested-rights test, predict how the county will administer the phrase, or treat hearing coverage as if it were the ordinance. PSV ran no model on this record, tested no product, and promises no entitlement, schedule or valuation outcome.