Supervisors' land-use update eliminates 'rural crescent' development rules

After another all-night meeting that stretched until 4:30 a.m. Wednesday, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors approved the “Pathway to 2040,” a controversial update to the long-range land-use plan that eliminates “rural crescent” protections while paving the way for at least 36,000 new housing units and more commercial and data center development throughout the county.

The plan is aimed at boosting the county’s economic prospects and housing stock to fulfill regional goals aimed at keeping up with the predicted population growth. According to state law, all jurisdictions are required to update their long-range comprehensive plans every five years. The plan is a land-use blueprint. Specific projects would still require rezonings in most cases.

The vote came after a sometimes spirited nearly six-hour public hearing during which more than 50 speakers mostly voiced concerns about sprawl that would worsen traffic congestion, increase carbon emissions and overcrowd schools.

About 15 people spoke in favor of the plan, mainly in support of its effort to boost the housing stock amid a years-long shortfall that has driven up rents and housing prices.

Many of those speaking against the plan identified themselves as residents of the Gainesville District. They urged the board to delay the vote until after a special election to replace Supervisor Pete Candland, who resigned three days before the meeting. 

Candland said his decision was prompted by an opinion from Commonwealth’s Attorney Amy Ashworth who advised he not vote on Pathway to 2040 or any data centers while rezonings for new data centers in the gateway are under review to avoid running afoul of Virginia’s conflict-of-interest act.

Candland and his wife, Robyn, signed a contract in October 2021 to sell their Gainesville home and five acres to one of two data center companies seeking rezonings to develop the Prince William Digital Gateway, a massive new tech corridor adjacent to the Manassas National Battlefield Park that the county board approved last month. 

Supporters of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, a pro-rural crescent advocacy nonprofit, decried the Pathway to 2040 as a “developers’ debauchery” during a news conference before the vote and spoke against it, in some cases multiple times, during the five hours of public hearings held during the meeting. 

The supervisors held separate hearings on each of the five “chapters” of Pathway to 2040 on the agenda that night – land-use, housing, mobility, sanitary sewer and electrical utility services – before approving each in a party-line, 5-2 vote. All five Democrats voted for the plan while Republicans Jeanine Lawson (Brentsville) and Yesli Vega (Coles) voted against it.

Before the vote, Lawson said she planned to suggest the supervisors defer their vote because the Gainesville District lacked representation, but said she “honestly forgot” once the supervisors launched into a four-hour discussion about the plans’ details, including road projects and last-minute requests from landowners seeking designations for numerous parcels.

“This is a land-use chapter that goes against the grain of everything I believe in for land use [and] smart planning,” Lawson said before the 4 a.m. vote on the land-use chapter, which was the most contentious.

Lawson has been a longtime supporter of the county’s 25-year-old “rural crescent” zoning rules that limited development in the rural area to one home per 10 acres and largely prohibited the extension of public sewer lines. The ordinance creating the rural area was passed by the board’s predecessors in 1998 to limit sprawl. The new plan allows sewer extensions throughout the county and permits higher-density cluster-type development in areas once within the rural area.

“This plan does nothing meaningful to diminish the concerns over greenhouse gases,” Lawson said, adding: “I think the board’s adoption of this is going to set the county, and particularly the  Brentsville District, up for repeated failure, which we finally crawled out of because of years of sprawl.”

Lawson called the board’s vote “disappointing” and said she would be “sure to tell [her] neighbors what’s planned and that we’re probably going to be sending their children to high schools that will once again be busting at the seams.”

Vega said she tried to make the plan “as palatable as possible” for her mid-county constituents, but similarly could not support it.

During each of the public hearings, Coalition to Protect Prince William County Executive Director Elena Schlossberg took the mic to explain her support for the rural crescent. At one point, she played a 2019 recording of Supervisor Kenny Boddye, D-Occoquan, praising the rural crescent as a worthy strategy to avoid having to pay for new roads and schools necessitated by residential development. “Every dollar not spent in the rural area is a dollar we can spend in the development area,” Boddye said in the recording.

 Afterward, Schlossberg delivered a Santa bag “full of coal” before the dais, saying the ongoing data center sprawl is too big to rely on anything other than “dirty coal.” Boddye did not comment on the recording. 

Bill Wright, a Gainesville resident who became a land-use activist over his opposition to the Digital Gateway, wore a Santa hat during his public remarks and sang his version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” enumerating the plan’s “gifts,” including “eight shady contracts, seven bulldozed graveyards, six toxic rivers -- five made-up minds -- four party hacks, three done deals, two sham reports and a backhoe uprooting a tree.”

Board Chair Ann Wheeler, D-At Large, pounded her gavel during Schlossberg’s delivery of the Santa bag and admonished against clapping and cheering at some points during the meeting.

When it came time to vote, some supervisors said they were proud of the plan and the possibilities it held for addressing the county’s affordable housing and economic development challenges. Boddye called the mobility plan a “gamechanger” for its emphasis on alternatives such as mass transit and trails.

Wheeler countered concerns raised by residents about the final plan being released only four days before the meeting by saying drafts have been available since August and the planning commission reviewed nearly the same land-use map in late September.

Wheeler did not acknowledge, however, the numerous changes the supervisors finalized at the dais during their four-hour discussion, most of which were deep inside the 675-page plan and staff recommendations and had never been publicly discussed.

Wheeler also downplayed concerns about sprawl and school overcrowding.

“I think it’s a good plan,” Wheeler said. “I’m excited for the areas that people want to develop, and I think we’re going to get a lot of really great development in all different parts of the county as a result of this plan, and I’ll stand by that.”

“I don’t think we’re going to get overcrowded schools,” she added. “…It was a perfect storm in terms of why schools couldn’t keep up, including not building schools because the debt service was being used on roads. I don’t think that’s going to happen in this environment. And you know, it’s not all happening tomorrow--it’s happening over the next 20 years.”

Reach Jill Palermo at jpalermo@fauquier.com