A huge crowd showed up at a data center task force meeting in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Wednesday — many of them voicing opposition to the potential development of a data center in Landover.
“We should all be incredibly proud of ourselves. The community has shown up 100-fold,” an organizer told the crowd outside the the Maryland – National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s Largo headquarters.
So many people lined up to go inside the building on McCormick Drive that dozens were turned away from the auditorium and overflow room.
“Hey, hey! Ho, ho! These data centers have got to go!” demonstrators chanted outside.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation group held a rally ahead of the meeting opposing plans to possibly build a data center at the Landover Mall site. They held signs reading: “Landover says no data center in our town!” and “Stop big tech’s war on Black communities!”
“We just want to make sure people are aware. We want there to be public accountability for a, you know, a facility that has immense air quality impacts, water quality impacts. It’s going to raise people’s energy bills. So people should be involved in, you know, how their land gets developed,” one of the demonstrators told News4.
Taylor Frazier started a petition against the proposed Landover data center. It’s gotten more than 15,000 signatures.
“I’m a resident in Palmer Park, Landover so I don’t want the data center in my backyard. I don’t want to be breathing air from generators. I don’t want to be having polluted water, or any of those things,” Frazier told News4.
County resident Darron Witten said he supports building data centers.
“A lot of things people say about data centers is, is not true to me. You know, from working at them for years and years and years out in Virginia, they’re not as bad as people think,” Witten said.
The county’s Qualified Data Center Task Force has been meeting for months, gathering information, hearing from experts and visiting data centers in other areas.
The group is expected to make recommendations to the Prince George’s County Council, but it has no authority.
Some council members have expressed general support for data centers to raise revenue, but they’ve not said where they should go.
Many residents told News4 they didn’t know the Landover Mall site could become a data center until very recently.
A law the council passed in 2021 allows the planning board to move forward with building a data center on the Landover Mall site without council approval.
Council member Krystal Oriadha, who is on the data center task force, said during Wednesday’s meeting that needs to change.
“It’s unconscionable that this would go without going to a public hearing, that it would be this far in the process,” she said.
Wala Blegay, another council member on the task force, said she plans to introduce a bill that would put a temporary moratorium on data center development until the task force submits its recommendations.
The council plans to have another public meeting for residents because many said they were unaware of the data center task force.
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