Inside the Qualified Data Center Task Force, Part 4: Process, Public Trust, and Community Benefit

Process as the Public’s Safeguard

In earlier parts of this series, we examined where data centers should be located and what standards should govern their impacts. In Part 1, we explained why the Qualified Data Center Task Force was created, how it operated, and what its report set in motion. In Part 2, we assessed the Task Force’s siting recommendations against a priority-based framework designed to protect scarce redevelopment land. In Part 3, we evaluated whether the Task Force’s proposed performance standards are strong enough to manage perpetual impacts like energy use, water demand, and noise.

Part 4 turns to a different, but equally important question: how these projects are reviewed, approved, and held accountable to the public.

For infrastructure-scale uses like data centers, process is not a procedural nicety. It is the public’s primary safeguard. These facilities operate continuously, generate impacts that are often difficult to observe in real time, and lock in land-use and infrastructure decisions for decades. Once approved, they are rarely easy to modify.

Strong public process helps ensure that risks are identified early, that decisions are transparent, and that communities have meaningful opportunities to influence outcomes. Weak or ill-timed process, by contrast, shifts risk onto residents and erodes trust—particularly when controversial projects appear to move forward regardless of public concern.

Plan Prince George’s 2035 (Plan 2035) emphasizes predictable, transparent decision-making as a foundation for managing growth and protecting community trust. The question, then, is whether the Task Force’s recommendations meaningfully strengthen that decision-making for infrastructure-scale uses like data centers—or simply add procedural layers without real leverage.

Where the Task Force Moves the Needle

To its credit, the Task Force acknowledges that the County’s current approach has contributed to public frustration. The report recognizes that by-right approvals have limited opportunities for meaningful public input and that trust has been strained by recent data center proposals.

In response, the Task Force points to existing public hearing opportunities and established review stages as evidence that public input already plays a role in data center approvals, rather than proposing fundamentally new hearing requirements or review authorities. This emphasis reflects an effort to address concerns about transparency, even as it leaves the underlying structure of review largely unchanged.

This recognition importantly signals that the Task Force is not dismissive of procedural concerns and that it understands process failures as part of the problem. The more difficult question is whether the proposed remedies meaningfully change outcomes.

Special Exceptions: Discretion Without Guardrails

A central procedural recommendation in the Task Force report is increased reliance on Special Exceptions as a way to introduce review, conditions, and public participation for data center projects. For example, the Task Force recommends modifying existing zoning regulations to move data centers from by-right approval in certain zones to approval only by Special Exception.

In theory, Special Exceptions provide flexibility. They allow decision-makers to consider site-specific conditions and impose tailored requirements. In practice, however, their effectiveness depends entirely on the strength of the governing criteria.

Smart Digital Growth takes the position that public process should be predictable and rule-based, anchored in objective standards rather than broad discretion. That distinction is consequential, because discretion without clear benchmarks tends to produce uneven outcomes and heighten political pressure.

In Prince George’s County, Special Exception approval is fairly routine in development review. Rarely does the Planning Board find that the applicable conditions and justifications have not been met. As a result, Special Exceptions often function less as a gatekeeper and more as a forum for negotiating mitigation after the fundamental decision to approve a project has already been made.

When that happens, the focus shifts from whether a project is appropriate to how its impacts are managed—often after siting, scale, and opportunity costs are effectively settled.

Detailed Site Plans: Visibility Without Leverage

The Task Force also points to Detailed Site Plan (DSP) review as an existing point of public engagement, highlighting it as another opportunity for transparency and public input rather than proposing new authorities or expanded powers at the DSP stage. DSPs can provide value. They allow for closer scrutiny of design details and create additional opportunities for public comment.

But DSP review has clear structural limits.

DSPs cannot revisit fundamental siting decisions already resolved at subdivision or Special Exception. They cannot rebalance land-use mix, reduce intensity, or recover opportunity costs once parcels are locked in. Nor can they cure master plan nonconformity embedded in earlier approvals.

In practice, DSP review occurs after the most consequential decisions have already been made—when use, scale, and land-use structure are largely fixed. At that stage, public input may shape aesthetics or mitigation measures, but it rarely alters the core outcome.

The key question, then, is whether DSP review can meaningfully alter the trajectory of a data center development proposal, or whether it is simply a point to address issues that fall outside the core land-use, siting, and intensity decisions once public leverage has largely been exhausted.

Community Benefits: Encouraged, Not Ensured

Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are another area where the Task Force seeks to improve outcomes through process. The report expresses support for CBAs and encourages their use in connection with data center development.

Support and encouragement, however, are not the same as a requirement.

Under Smart Digital Growth, community benefits are treated as an integral part of project approval. Benefits should be required, proportional to impact, and enforceable over time. Without those elements, CBAs risk becoming uneven, project-by-project arrangements that depend more on bargaining power than on policy.

Voluntary CBAs can produce inequitable outcomes. Communities with more resources or political influence may secure meaningful commitments, while others receive little or nothing. This concern is particularly acute in the Greater Capitol Heights area, where longstanding disinvestment and capacity constraints make it harder for communities to negotiate on equal footing. From a public-trust perspective, that inconsistency is itself a problem.

Monitoring Without Consequence

The Task Force recommends increased reporting and monitoring to track data center impacts over time. Transparency is important, but it is only one component of accountability.

The Task Force’s recommendations provide limited clarity on who is responsible for enforcement, what consequences follow when standards are not met, and how communities can access or trigger enforcement mechanisms. Without clear answers to those questions, reporting risks becoming an end in itself.

Smart Digital Growth draws a sharper distinction. Monitoring and reporting matter only insofar as they are paired with clear enforcement authority and meaningful consequences. Standards without enforcement are not standards at all; they are aspirations.

Transparency without enforcement does not equal accountability. For long-lived infrastructure uses, accountability depends on clearly defined responsibilities, enforceable conditions, and consequences that are real, predictable, and applied when thresholds are crossed.

Process Without Policy Discipline

Taken together, the Task Force’s procedural recommendations improve visibility, but not necessarily leverage. They offer more opportunities to observe and comment on projects, while leaving the underlying policy framework largely intact.

This dynamic was on full display during subdivision proceedings for the proposed data center at the former Landover Mall site. GCHIC raised objections at the point of maximum leverage—subdivision review—when land-use mix, scale, and master plan conformity were still at issue. Those warnings proved prescient.

Process reforms that operate primarily downstream of subdivision and base zoning cannot compensate for permissive rules upstream. Over-reliance on later-stage review risks exhausting communities without changing outcomes.

Strong public process is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Without clear siting rules, enforceable performance standards, and required community benefits, process risks becoming performative—producing more meetings without more accountability.

The Task Force’s recommendations acknowledge the importance of transparency and trust. Whether they deliver on that promise will depend on what happens next: zoning text amendments, subdivision standards, and enforcement mechanisms that translate visibility into real leverage.

In Part 5 of this series, we turn to those implementation choices—and the policy discipline required to make them stick.