The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed to sell 41.7 acres of land, currently part of a county police training site, to a private data center developer for $166.8 million on March 17.

The revenue from the sale, as well as other funds from the county’s Capital Improvement Plan, will cover costs of modernizing the remainder of the police training facilities. At its Feb. 17 meeting, the Board of Supervisors first publicly announced its consideration to sell the 41.7 acres of land, located in the county’s Sully District. The property will be sold to data center developer Starwood Capital Group, identified as SCG Global Holdings L.L.C. in the Purchase and Sale Agreement. 

“We’re really saving the community a lot of money to be able to replace those facilities by the sale of the property,” Sully District representative on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Kathy Smith said. “Then, by selling the property, we will get tax money from that property. All of those things help with the revenue that we need to run the county by bringing in revenue from a different source.”

The Board of Supervisors first received a letter of intent—a preliminary agreement between two parties—from Starwood in June 2025. The letter of intent established the agreement that Fairfax County would not pursue further offers from other interested parties and that each party would keep the terms of the letter confidential. 

“That was work that started with [county] staff, maybe around a year ago,” Smith said. “I was not involved in the process with them getting other offers, and they definitely followed all the requirements to bring this forward. Once staff knew that they had the interested party, that’s when we announced it for Feb. 17.” 

However, various organizations and residents voiced concerns regarding data center development and the sale’s transparency. At the public comment hearing preceding the vote, Chair of the Great Falls group of the Sierra Club Douglas Stewart was one of the individuals who testified to the Board of Supervisors against the sale.

“It was clear they had already decided what they were going to do,” Stewart said. “They’d already gone through so many steps. The purpose of this hearing was just to satisfy the barest formality of public input requirement. There was no public sunlight on this deal. It was entirely made behind closed doors for land that is owned by the public, not owned by the Board of Supervisors.” 

On March 4, six representatives from various environmental organizations, including Stewart, emailed a letter to the Board of Supervisors with a list of questions regarding the sale’s sustainability and public transparency. Chesapeake Climate Action Network organizer Ting Waymouth was one of the individuals who signed the letter.

“We did just a few days before the hearing receive an answer from the county, but many of the answers we received were still very vague,” Waymouth said. “We asked if there were any [environmental] requirements that data centers on the land have to follow, and all we got was: ‘We don’t have a data center proposal for this land’ and ‘Virginia state law doesn’t require us to use non-carbon emitting sources of energy,’ which were disappointing answers.” 

The Board of Supervisors approved a new zoning ordinance to regulate property development, particularly regarding data centers, on Dec. 9, 2025. The ordinance set requirements for how close data centers and related infrastructure could be built near residential areas, though the Board declined some of their Planning Commission’s recommendations for stricter safeguards, rejecting a proposed 200-foot minimum distance in favor of a 100-foot one.

“This area is increasingly vulnerable to air pollution and health impacts from data centers, especially from the backup diesel generators that are used when the data centers need power,” Stewart said. “Related to that, diesel generators are greenhouse gas emitters. Fairfax County has adopted a climate action plan, but we don’t really see how they are reconciling this push to build more data centers with their plans for reducing greenhouse gases.” 

Fairfax County adopted multiple climate and sustainability targets, known as the Joint Environmental Taskforce (JET) goals, in 2020. These goals include decreasing total energy use by 50% and being carbon neutral by 2040. Modern data centers are energy-intensive, requiring large amounts of electricity—often supplied by fossil fuels—to power cooling systems, run data processors and facilitate internet traffic data at high speeds, as stated in a study by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI).

“The environmentalists talk about the generators; a lot of those requirements aren’t things that we oversee, but there are requirements,” Smith said. “I think there’s a misunderstanding with the generators and how much they get used. They get tested a few times during the year, but typically they’re not running unless there’s some kind of problem that occurs.” 

Northern Virginia, known as “Data Center Alley,” is the largest data center market in the world according to Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. The commission predicts that Virginia’s demand for power could double by 2033 with the data center industry being the main driver. 

Community members also expressed concerns at the March 17 hearing against the developer that Fairfax County partnered with. Starwood Capital Group is currently also pursuing a development known as the Plaza 500 data center project, which would include a potentially noisy, high-voltage electrical substation located 67 feet away from Fairfax County’s Bren Mar residential neighborhood.

“Starwood Capital Group has shown a pattern in proposing data center developments really close to schools, residents [and] mobile home communities,” founder of the Save Bren Mar coalition Tyler Ray said. “When you look at Plaza 500, this developer made a specific decision to place an electrical substation as close as possible to residents. These are decisions that no one else forced them to make. The county is now rewarding those decisions by selling them county-owned land.” 

The letter of intent from Starwood set a price of $4 million per acre of the Stonecroft police academy property, totaling $166.8 million. Additionally, the county has $88 million in its Capital Improvement Plan allocated for a new criminal justice academy. 

“They could have used that $88 million and other funds from the sale to both achieve the police training facility goals and a lot of other county goals,” Ray said. “They just didn’t, because they appeared to give special treatment to Starwood.”

In his testimony to the Board on March 17, Ray also cited Starwood’s current data center project on private property across from FCPS’s newly acquired Skyview High School. This site is undergoing development through a streamlined “By-Right” procedure where projects are approved by county staff without public involvement in the review process. 

“There are so few guardrails right now on how these data centers can operate that it’s becoming a dangerous situation for our air and our climate,” Waymouth said.

ESSI states that roughly 56% of the electricity used to power data centers nationwide comes from fossil fuels, with projected data center energy demand set to represent nearly 12% of total U.S. energy demand by 2030. According to Smith, for the Stonecroft development, there will be a contingency period for a year where the county’s planning commission and the developer go through an approval process for public facilities. If all guidelines are met, then the property would go through the By-Right process, with on-site development starting in a few years. 

“My message to the public is you need to make your voice heard,” Ray said. “I think that same message is what I would say [to] the Board of Supervisors: potentially looking forward to the 2027 Board of Supervisors elections, your decisions now are going to have consequences, and are having consequences right now to the residents and environment.”