A judge's dismissal of a lawsuit aimed at halting a digital data center from being built next to Manassas National Battlefield Park has been appealed/Kurt Repanshek file

A circuit judge's decision to dismiss a lawsuit aimed at halting construction of what's described as the world's largest data center next to Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virgina has been appealed.

"There is no question that the Prince William County Board of Supervisors violated state law and its own code in approving these rezonings," said Chap Petersen, a former Virginia state senator who represents the American Battlefield Trust and nine individuals in the matter. "I am confident the Court of Appeals will recognize the merit of our case and order the board to reconsider its shortsighted decision.”

While the plaintiffs maintain that a lame-duck Prince William County Board of Supervisors illegally approved a trio of rezonings to clear the way for the data center, the circuit judge who dismissed the lawsuit earlier this fall said it failed to raise substantive questions to merit a trial. 

The Trust and nine citizens originally filed the lawsuit in January against the county Board of Supervisors and two tech companies, arguing that there was a lack of required information about the development; inadequate public notice and hearings; unlawful waivers of key analyses; submissions and approvals; failure to consider key environmental and historical facts; and unlawful delegation of rezoning power through failure to identify which of the more than 1,750 acres could be put to what uses.

Read about local efforts to block the data center from being built.

"The Trust has been fighting this ill-conceived proposal for years and has no intention of standing aside in the face this setback,” American Battlefield Trust President David N. Duncan said Thursday. “While disappointed by the Circuit Court’s dismissal, we firmly believe that our case has merit and deserves to be heard at the appellate level. The Trust has been in this position before and we are determined to see this battle through.”

Elena Schlossberg, executive director of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, which supports the citizen plaintiffs, emphasized the stakes of the fight: “The Digital Gateway proposal encapsulates the threat digital industrialization poses to protected historical lands, plus access to clean water, reliable affordable power, and a predictability in the local democratic process. The lack of transparency from its inception is only amplified by the distorted process, or lack thereof, that clouds its final approval. We will continue to fight because this kind of destruction cannot go unchallenged.”

Although not directly party to the lawsuit, the Coalition joined with five other leading conservation groups — the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Parks Conservation Association, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, Preservation Virginia and the Piedmont Environmental Council — to file an amicus curiae brief in support of the challenge to the Prince William Digital Gateway. 

Attempts to develop on and around Virginia’s battlefields are nothing new. The Trust says that "since the 1980s northern Virginia has experienced increasingly frequent attempts at inappropriate development near these hallowed grounds — from a plan to develop 60 acres near Manassas National Battlefield Park, including land that was Robert E. Lee’s headquarters during the Second Battle of Manassas; to a Walmart superstore near what Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James McPherson dubbed 'the nerve center of the Union Army during the Battle of the Wilderness' in Orange County, 15 miles west of Fredericksburg. These near-catastrophic losses, however, turned into victories for historic preservation."