Rebuffing concerns raised by residents on both environmental and transparency grounds, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has approved the sale of 41.7 acres of county-owned land in Chantilly for development as a data center.
Without making any comments, the supervisors voted 9-0 on Tuesday (March 17) to sell part of the police department’s training facility at 3721 Stonecroft Blvd to Starwood Capital Group under the name SCG Capital Holdings LLC.
Starwood offered the county $166.8 million for the property, part of a 128-acre training facility for the Fairfax County Police Department located south of Dulles International Airport and west of the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
County officials plan to use revenue from the sale to reconfigure and modernize the police training facilities on the remaining 86.2 acres of land.
The sale doesn’t guarantee approval of required zoning actions necessary to allow the property to be used as a data center, county officials said. The facility would need to go through traditional review processes, they said.
While supervisors offered no remarks during the March 17 meeting, community members and advocacy groups weighed in both for and against the proposed sale during 40 minutes of testimony.
Critics included those who said turning county property over for use as a data center would be detrimental to those living in the vicinity.
“Swapping human health for revenue is not a tradeoff we want to make,” Renee Grebe, the Northern Virginia conservation advocate for Nature Forward, said.
“We need our county to step up and prioritize climate and emissions considerations when considering land-sale proposals like the one in question,” said Ting Waymouth, the Northern Virginia organizer for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Douglas Stewart, chair of the Great Falls Group of the Virginia Sierra Club, was critical of the lack of public notice about a proposal that apparently was under consideration for months by county leaders.
Fairfax County first publicized the proposed sale to Starwood Capital Group on Feb. 11, days before the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to authorize a public hearing. However, a letter of intent outlining the data center developer’s purchase offer was signed by Deputy County Executive Jennifer Miller on June 20, 2025.
Ultimately, a sale might prove a reasonable step, Stewart said, but he argued “that decision should be made only after a transparent process that includes careful and public consideration of the pros and cons, possible alternatives of the property, and competitive bidding.”
Not all voices were in opposition to the plan.
George Landrith, a Chantilly resident, called the sale “a rare opportunity to strengthen public safety while also being good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”
Landrith said the funding would support “a more modern and efficient training environment for our [police] officers.”
“Better facilities mean better training, and better training ultimately means greater safety for both our officers and the public they serve,” he added.
But some of those against the sale raised the specter of county leaders giving up something it might need later — land.
“Once it’s sold, we don’t get it back,” said David Browning, calling the site a long-term community asset.
“This land exists to serve the public, not private industry,” he said.
The county doesn’t expect to conclude the agreement with SCG until the spring of 2027 at the earliest.
However, the design and permitting process for the planned police training facilities is slated to begin this spring, allowing construction to take place on the county’s remaining portion of the Stonecroft site coming from 2028 through 2031.
According to the county, the new facilities are expected to include:
- A new operations driving track for emergency vehicles
- A modern firearms-training center and firing ranges
- Support buildings and improved site infrastructure
A new Criminal Justice Academy, funded separately through the county’s Capital Improvement Program, also would be located at the site, under current plans.
In a statement after the vote, Fairfax County said bringing all the facilities together in a single location will “reduce long-term maintenance costs and improve training for both new recruits and current officers.”
The county also plans to lease temporary training space if needed, and training operations are not expected to be significantly disrupted, officials said.
Once sold to SCG, the property will become taxable both for the real estate and any commercial operations that ultimately are developed on the parcel. The county government estimates the tax revenue to start at $20 million a year and increase from there.
The property is located in an area of industrial properties and other data centers. County officials said the nearest existing residential properties are more than a half-mile from the site, and the nearest school is approximately 1.3 miles away.
According to the county, SCG — a London-based private investment firm — approached the local government with an unsolicited bid for the site. The county then had an appraisal conducted and reached out to other potential developers.
The SGC offer was higher than the appraisal, officials said.
The Sierra Club’s Great Falls Group decried the board’s vote and lack of comments in a statement shared yesterday (Wednesday) as an undermining of public trust in the local government.
The environmental group expressed concern about the Sully District’s industrialization and land getting “gobbled up by the data center industry,” which has faced increased community pushback and scrutiny by local and state lawmakers for the facilities’ energy and water usage.
Just last year, the Board of Supervisors approved new Dominion Energy substations to support the power needs of the Dulles Gateway and Renaissance Technology Park data centers under development in Herndon just east of Dulles Airport. Starwood is building the latter project for Amazon Web Services.
According to the Sierra Club Great Falls Group, over 8,000 diesel-fueled power generators have been approved for data centers in western Fairfax County, nearly 20% of them for “non-emergency” use.
“The impacts of this dirty energy infrastructure will affect the health and welfare of residents throughout western Fairfax and beyond, since air pollution and toxics have no boundaries,” the group said. “The Board is not taking seriously the fact that we are all at risk, as the cumulative health effects of toxic emissions increase over time, and it doesn’t appear that these impacts were at all considered in the transaction.”
