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Residents want something done with the old Landover Mall site. But they don’t want data centers.
Prince George’s County residents concerned about the environmental and energy impact of data centers rallied ahead of a meeting of a county council task force studying and working to come up with recommendations for a proposed data center.
The planned data center project at the old Landover Mall site just off the Beltway isn’t a done deal yet. But critics say the project was given the green light without any transparency, and it’s a lot further along than people might have thought.
The rally had been in the works for days, with social media and online petitions firing people up about the development and the regularly scheduled task force meeting — which didn’t include any discussion about the Landover site on the agenda.
In fact, the task force has no authority over that project, or any other potential or proposed data center. The committee, which has been meeting for months, is only working on putting together a list of recommendations that would, if the county council adopts them, guide the future regulation of data centers. But approval or authority over those projects is beyond the group’s power.
Data centers offer tax revenue
County leaders want to land more data centers in the county because of the tax revenue they generate. But they also don’t want to see them built where a mall used to sit during the 20th century rather than developing a project to help the community.
“It’s been gone for 25 years — 25 years that land has sat there,” said Council member Shayla Adams Stafford, whose district includes the land where the mall once stood. “What has been on that land? Tell me! Nothing. Rocks, dirt, overgrown grass. That’s what we call ‘intentional blight.’ It was intentionally blighted and left there undeveloped.”
She said the proposed data center would “intentionally harm” the residents who live near it, including those in an apartment building right across the street from the empty crater. She vowed to fight against the project from going any further.
“These centers cannot be near schools,” she told the crowd. “They cannot be in residential areas.”
Another local resident leading the fight against that particular project is Taylor Frazier McCollum, who started an online petition that has racked up thousands of signatures around the county.
“Yes, we need to develop the site, but are we willing to take the bottom of the barrel offer from a company that cares nothing about our community?” she asked the rallygoers.
‘More positive things’ could be added to the community
Frazier McCollum expressed frustration that the project was much further along than most people thought.
“I feel like there’s so much more positive things that we could put in our community,” she said. “I feel confident that the data center will be stopped and that we’ll be able to bring something to the community that will be empowering and uplifting.”
Environmental concerns, as well as the potential energy and water use, are among the reasons for the opposition, and it’s believed some of those infrastructure concerns could prove too difficult and expensive to make a data center feasible in the Landover site.
WTOP reached out to Lerner Enterprises, which owns the land, for comment but got no response.
Other members of the Prince George’s County Council spoke during the task force meeting to make clear they were against the project moving forward in Landover, and said they would work to find ways to prevent it from happening.
“We know that you were wronged, that you did not have the right leadership at that time,” Council member Krystal Oriadha said. “They made decisions that didn’t center you, that didn’t include you, and we apologize.”
Council member Wala Blegay, who is on the task force, said she plans to introduce legislation next week that would put a moratorium on data centers from going forward until the task force completes its recommendations.
“It wouldn’t make sense to have data centers popping up all over the place while we are in the midst of an actual task force,” Blegay said. “It would make our task force useless.”
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