Take Action on Prince George's Data Center Bill Before November 19th!

UPDATE AS OF NOVEMBER 19TH:
On Tuesday November 19, the Prince George’s County Council unanimously voted to HOLD on CB 52 until next year thanks to your outpouring of letters, and the many advocates who stood up for constituent’s voices. Collectively, we sent 230 letters to the Prince George’s County Council! You can watch the full oral testimonies and Council discussion here, or these news articles here and here. Thank YOU SO MUCH! Look out for more actions to ensure that we get commonsense guardrails on data centers early next year.

Why should you be concerned about County Bill 52?

When I attended the recent Data Center Frontiers Summit, I heard data center developers say over and over that we need to regulate the industry AND have more community input. Prince George’s County’s Council County Bill 52-2024 does just the opposite. CB 52 erodes the last vestiges of community input that residents have, leading to a quicker development pipeline for data centers in Prince George’s County. Notice how I said “quicker” not “better.” We have seen time and time again that excluding how not including communities and neighborhoods in the public process lead to worse projects. Simply put, they want to remove public accountability from the data center development process.

CB 52 eliminates the need for a preliminary plans of subdivision. From the Citizen’s Handbook, this is what CB 52 would eliminate:

The first step in the subdivision process consists of reviewing a preliminary plan. One of the
major purposes of reviewing preliminary plans is to ensure that adequate public facilities are
available, or will be available in the foreseeable future, to serve the proposed development.
Determination of adequacy is made for fire and rescue facilities, police facilities, public roads,
public water, and sewer facilities. The Planning Board determines adequacy based on an analysis
of information generated by staff, submitted by the applicant, or submitted by the agencies
responsible for building required facilities or supplying the necessary services. Preliminary plans are also reviewed for environmental issues, such as woodland conservation, sensitive environmental features, and stormwater management; proper legal description of lots; and the general design of the subdivision including access, circulation, and lotting pattern.
Certain residential subdivisions are required to provide land for public parks and recreational
facilities or money to supplement existing facilities. The majority of preliminary plans are heard
at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Planning Board. These are known as major subdivisions.
https://www.pgplanning.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Citizens_Handbook_2014.pdf

Instead, developers would need to hold a pre-application neighborhood meeting prior to the application for a final plat of subdivision and obtain approval for a certificate of adequacy.

What’s a final plat of subdivision? According to the same Handbook:

Final plats include all pertinent engineering data necessary to locate every street, lot, block, and
boundary line on the ground. Final plats are reviewed by staff to ensure conformance with the
approved preliminary plan. They are approved by the Planning Board at regularly scheduled
meetings, but advertised public hearings and preapplication notices are not required.
https://www.pgplanning.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Citizens_Handbook_2014.pdf

You might notice that these two different approaches to the development process address, shocker, very different issues. The public deserves to understand a proposed data center’s needs for energy, sewer, water, and other public amenities. Those concerns are NOT addressed by simply looking at engineering data. The Council is creating a by-right situation for data centers, without the input of the subject manner experts we need to ensure that Prince George’s County gets by development it deserves.

Lerner Enterprises is developing the old Landover Mall into a hyper-scale data center. The land was previously proposed for a hospital, as well as a mixed use complex include office space, a hotel, residential opportunities, and commercial spaces. Large data centers take away land that could be so much more to a community.
Article Source: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/lerner-files-to-develop-4-million-sq-ft-data-center-campus-on-maryland/

How We Got Here:

CB 52-2004 did not happen in a vacuum. In 2020, CB 55 – 2020 exempted data centers from property taxes, depending on how many new jobs they brought to the County. This bill passed with complete support, despite the Fiscal Policy Note stating that this bill would have a negative fiscal impact due to the loss of personal property tax revenue. The County stated that it would take the risk, in the hopes that employees hired by these data centers moved into Prince George’s and bought property.

In 2021, CB 1 – 2021 allowed data centers by right zoning in residential, industrial, and commercial zones. It also exempted them from two of the three planning and land use review by the Planning Department, Planning Board, District Council, other agencies, and the public.

With these two previous bills, the last remaining land use review is the preliminary plan of subdivision, which CB 52 seeks to do away with.

Angie speaking to a group of Chesapeake Bay Foundation Stewards on the commonsense guardrails we need for data centers; including plenty of community notice and opportunities for engagement.

Get Involved

We need YOU to let your councilmembers know that we need community input in the data center development process. If we remove people from the public process, we risk building data centers that are more harmful to our communities and nature. This is an environmental injustice that we cannot allow to happen. We get better data centers when we plan and take into account neighborhood input. Take these two actions before the November 19th hearing on CB 52.

Sign up to testify against CB-52

You can sign up to testify at this link. Please note that you have to create an account to testify or to submit written testimony.
Are you a first-time testifier? Click here to download a quick reference guide that has more details on how to testify and more talking points about data centers.

2. Write to your Prince George’s County Councilmember. Use our letter writing form below to email your Prince George’s councilmember, it will automatically send your letter to your councilmember based on your zipcode.

Need help writing comments? Download a copy of Nature Forward’s testimony opposing CB-52 below

CB-52_Testimony_AMcCarthy Download