At the end of a meeting that lasted nearly 24 hours, the Prince William County planning commission voted 6-2 to recommend against data centers in the western part of the county.
The debate brought hundreds of speakers to the commission meeting on Wednesday, all set to make their voices heard before one eventual vote killed recommendations on three separate rezoning proposals.
Notably, the commission was not voting approve or kill the highly controversial digital gateway project -- just whether they would recommend the proposed plans to the Board of Supervisors next month.
Officials at the marathon meeting spent most of the day going over the details of those proposals to bring more data centers to the Gainesville area.
Though they didn't start discussions until 2 p.m., some impassioned speakers on both sides of the issue arrived as early as 9 a.m. to get in line.
Public comment began at 10 p.m.
A grand total of around 333 people signed up to speak in total: 133 in-person speakers, and 200 remote speakers.
Some of those speakers, like J.P. Raflo, supported the digital gateway project.
"I think the county needs a good school system," Raflo said. "We need to pay gentlemen like this policeman a living wage. We need people to be able to live in our county and not have to commute, and I think revenue is what's going to get us there. And it's not getting any less expensive to live in Prince William County, so I think this is the kind of thing that's going to help us get there."
Melanie Williams also felt the data centers would provide more economic opportunities for county residents.
"I've lived in the area for my entire life on the farm that we live on now, and this area is no longer rural," Williams said. "And we've been condemned with power lines, we have a lot of commuter traffic in the area, people can no longer farm the farms. People are aging out in the area we're in, and we just feel that this is a really good use for our community. It's a way to get a good economic return on investment."
Other speakers, like James Burgess, were vehemently against the gateway project.
"This is the wrong project and the wrong area," Burgess said. "This is a rural residential area. It's not designed for industrial development and there's no buffers between this industrial development and the residential neighborhoods. And of course nobody is going to want to live next to these facilities."
The negative effects on living spaces near the centers also concerned John Lyver.
"Noise is a stress inducer, so it's going to raise the stress in my neighborhood," Lyver said. "Just normal, normal day-to-day stress. It's going to drop my property values. It's going to make my electric bill go up because of the extra infrastructure that's going to have to be done for the electricity. It's going to make my water bill go up because of the infrastructure cost."
Each speaker was granted up to nine minutes to talk -- raising concerns that the meeting could go until 10 a.m.
The meeting finally reached its conclusion even later than that, in the 1 p.m. hour on Thursday, nearly a full 24 hours after it began.
In a single vote, the planning commission voted against recommending all three proposed digital gateway projects to the Board of Supervisors.
The board's final decision is expected in December.
