In 2024, Taylor Frazier McCollum was evicted from her rental home. She was a single mother, and her employer had cut her pay. Two years later her petition, with more than 25,000 signatures, is the reason a $5 billion data center campus planned for the old Landover Mall site in Prince George’s County, Maryland, is in trouble, as NPR reported this week.
The 90-acre site sits in a predominantly Black community, in a county where most residents are Black. A developer won county approval for the campus in 2024. Frazier McCollum and her neighbors say a data center would bring water pollution and diesel generators to streets where people live.
“I was like, oh, hell, no,” Frazier McCollum said of her first reaction. “Why would you want to bring water-polluting, diesel-generating…data centers right down the street from where people live?”
She does not own a home, and she says that was never a reason to stay out of a land-use fight. She testified at county meetings and at the state capitol. The petition drew crowds to protests and an unusual coalition of environmentalists and neighbors.
The county council acted on July 7, approving a two-year moratorium on new data center applications. It can end sooner if the county adopts zoning rules on where data centers may go. Council Chair Krystal Oriadha said the vote was meant to “create space to have time to continue those conversations.”
The project itself is not dead. As Fox Baltimore reported Nov. 2, the council has since closed a permitting loophole that let the Landover plan, known as Brightseat Park, move forward without another vote. It now has to come back to the council for approval, with a detailed site review and more chances for public comment. Council member Shayla Adams-Stafford, who represents Landover and opposes the project, said that could prove “extremely difficult” given the neighborhood’s resistance.
“Residents have made it very clear that they do not want the Landover Data center,” said Beth Landry of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Landover Mall opened in 1972 and closed in 2002. Neighbors have waited more than two decades to see what replaces it. A $5 billion figure is a lot to turn down, but the people who would live beside the generators have said no in the largest numbers a petition can show. The council should treat that as the answer and let them decide what goes on that land.
The two-year moratorium runs to July 2028 unless the county adopts zoning rules sooner.
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