Residents in one Virginia retirement community spoke out Tuesday over plans to build a data center complex near the Manassas National Battlefield Park.
The rally, held by residents of the Heritage Hunt community, came moments before the developer, Compass Datacenters, held an open house for neighbors at Bull Run Middle School, so people could see the plans for themselves and ask experts questions.
The company is asking the county to rezone nearly 900 acres to build the commercial complex with data centers, pump and natural gas stations, offices, retail and green space.
“Data centers are basically the cloud. A data center is a building that has adequate power that doesn't go out, fiber that never goes down and a building that doesn't fall down and a lot of cooling that houses a lot of servers, computer servers that basically make our world we live in today work, make our phones work, our banking work our Netflix, etc.,” Chris Curtis, the senior vice president of development and acquisitions at Compass Datacenters, said.
The proposal is getting a lot of pushback.
“We’re not happy with it,” resident Bill Wright said. “We’ve told them that. We’re going to continue to tell them that.”
“What attracted me to this community is the very thing that they’re going to destroy. It was the landscape. [In this area] you have the benefits of a developed area, and you have a rural area, and you have the best of both worlds. But they are destroying the other world,” he continued.
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Organizers of the open house said they want to clear up confusion over the project before they go back to the planning commission and eventually, the county board of supervisors.
“The project’s also going to generate a tremendous amount of tax revenue for the community, for making schools better and transportation better,” Curtis said. “So I think this is a really great opportunity for people who have heard things to come out and see for themselves.”
But winning over some of the neighbors may be an uphill battle.
“We’re not buying it,” Wright said. “We want them to go away. We don’t want to hear all of their sugar-coated promises, which we don't believe.”
