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For a brief period, it seemed like the political animosity that has consumed Prince William County would evaporate with county board chair Ann Wheeler’s (D) surprise primary election loss to relatively unknown challenger Deshundra Jefferson earlier this year.
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Jefferson and Supervisor Jeanine Lawson (R-Brentsville), the GOP nominee for chair, appeared mostly aligned on key issues facing the Northern Virginia community — including a mutual desire to rein in data center development and to reverse a spike in crime and a higher cost of living that have some county residents on edge.
But after a polite start in their race to replace Wheeler, the contest has grown increasingly bitter as the Nov. 7 election approaches for the county board, where Democrats hold a 5-3 majority.
“The gloves have come off,” Lawson’s campaign said in a late August email blast that criticized Jefferson for delivering an impromptu campaign speech at a town hall meeting about a 144-unit affordable housing development project in the Haymarket area that the supervisor warned could lead to overcrowded schools.
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“Lawson won’t listen,” Jefferson’s campaign charged in its own email blast earlier this month, lambasting the supervisor for her inaction when an African American brother and sister were asked to leave a neighborhood meeting about a different development project in Bristow that includes land owned by their family.
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The two candidates are vying to lead a blue-trending county of 487,000 residents whose steady growth has made it a rising economic force in the region, with some of the downfalls of being a former D.C. exurb that is now becoming more urban.
Crime in Prince William has surged, reaching its highest level last year since 2015, at 37.7 incidents per 1,000 residents, according to the county police department’s most recent data. Homicides in 2022 doubled in one year to 20, while aggravated assaults have steadily climbed toward 1,000.
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Meanwhile, the region’s rising cost of living has left some residents feeling as if they are being priced out of the county.
“The rich don’t pay taxes, the poor can’t pay taxes; that leaves the rest of us to pay it all, you know?” said Ian Fraser, 74, a voter in the Woodbridge area, indicating the escalating tax bills he’s received from the county due in large part to the rising values of his home and his car during the economic fallout of the pandemic.
In an election where all but two of the county board’s eight seats have contested races, Jefferson and Lawson argue that the other is ill-equipped to address such concerns.
Jefferson, who would be the first African American to lead the county board that has four Black supervisors, contends that Lawson, who is White, is out of step with the demographic changes sweeping through the majority-minority county.
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She criticized the supervisor for not attending a candidates forum attended by other Republicans seeking office that was hosted by the local NAACP chapter, which Lawson called too partisan, noting that the chapter’s president, Rev. Cozy Bailey, is married to Supervisor Andrea O. Bailey (D-Potomac).
Lawson skipped another forum hosted earlier this month by the Dar Alnoor Islamic Community Center, which she said conflicted with another event she had promised to attend.
Jefferson also pointed to Lawson’s frequent opposition to matters related to LGBTQ rights and a 2020 training session on implicit bias that the supervisor and two of her Republican colleagues walked out of in protest because, they argued, it suggested that White people are inherently racist.
“The diversity we have in this county, for her, is not an asset; it’s a threat,” Jefferson said. “You can’t just speak to people who you agree with or who look like you or who may not ask you questions that you prefer not to answer.”
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Lawson — a county supervisor since 2015 who, so far, has raised $434,607 compared to $251,463 for Jefferson — called those attacks “dirty politics,” saying she embraces the county’s diversity.
She said that Jefferson, a former national Democratic Party strategist who has not held elected office, is naive about how local government works. Since defeating Wheeler, Lawson said, Jefferson sounds more like her; Wheeler now supports Jefferson.
“I was very supportive of the idea of somebody challenging Ann,” Lawson, a frequent Wheeler critic, said about Jefferson. “But I don’t think she’s measuring up to what she promised in the spring to her primary election supporters.”
Each candidate now calls the other weak in their promises to curtail the county’s plans to capitalize on the data center industry’s rapid expansion in Virginia by allowing the industry to increase its presence in the mostly rural western portion of the county.
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They both gained political prominence by criticizing those plans, especially a proposed “Digital Gateway” that would place as many as 34 data center buildings near Manassas National Battlefield Park and surrounding residential communities in the Gainesville area. That project, projected to generate at least $400 million in annual county tax revenue, is scheduled for a board vote in December.
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Jefferson says she opposes any data center project near homes, schools or national and state parks. Lawson, who has supported data center projects in the past, says she has soured on the industry after developers began placing their buildings closer to residential areas with requests for higher height limits on the buildings while also not being completely open about potential impacts.
Both candidates say they intend to limit the need for revenue from more data centers by raising the county’s business computers and peripherals tax rate, through which the county collects about $100 million in annual revenue from the industry. The board increased that rate by nearly a third earlier this year to $2.15 per $100 of assessed value.
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But, with voters on the eastern end of the county expressing concerns about the potential impacts from the industry’s spreading footprint, the two candidates began attacking one another on their commitment to the issue.
Jefferson says Lawson “stuck her finger in the wind” and reversed course amid the rising backlash after helping the industry gain a foothold in the county.
“I feel like her conversion is a little late,” she said. “She’s already done a lot of damage.”
Lawson points to a $10,000 donation Jefferson’s campaign received in August from Stanley Martin Companies, a residential and data center developer with a pending application to build as many as 14 data centers near several residential communities in Bristow, in what would be known as Devlin Technology Park.
The August donation, which Jefferson said she accepted because she agrees with the developer’s approach to building affordable housing, caused her some friction from a community group that had supported her primary election candidacy and is now backing Lawson and every other Republican in the county board races.
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It came at about the time when Jefferson approached members of that group — Say No To Devlin Tech Park — and suggested that they meet with a Stanley Martin executive about the Devlin project, which includes an offer to donate some land to the county for parks and recreation services.
Jefferson, who said she still opposes that project, said she made the suggestion because she learned that the board’s vote was approaching and wanted the residents to get what they could from the plan that appears likely to be approved.
But Bethany Kelley, one of the group’s leaders, said she was taken aback by Jefferson’s recommendation, which, she said, the group took as a plea to concede to a campaign contributor’s plan to build data centers on land that had previously been slated for more homes.
“You could have bowled me over,” Kelley said. “That was not what I expected to hear from her.”
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Jefferson said the group, which publicized its subsequent endorsements, mischaracterized an exchange meant to help them.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say I wasn’t a little hurt by all of this,” she said. “I’ve been very clear about where I stand on that project.”
Lawson has also had to defend herself against allegations made by residents that have since been widely circulated.
Earlier this month, Allen Thomas and his sister Geralene Thomas-Freeman held a news conference outside the county government building — coordinated by Jefferson’s campaign manager — to accuse Lawson of kicking them out of a neighborhood meeting,
The siblings hope to sell 80 acres of land that their family has owned for about a century in a historically African American portion of the Bristow area to a developer seeking to build a residential development there that Lawson opposes.
The meeting was private, hosted by residents potentially affected by the project who had invited Lawson to attend, its organizers said.
But, seeing a social media announcement for the event that, before it was corrected, made it appear as if it were public, the Thomases said they decided to attend.
One of the meeting organizers noticed that the developer was also there and asked anybody not living in the affected communities to leave. Lawson did not intervene.
“We found it truly embarrassing that our supervisor chose to exclude us and others,” Allen Thomas said at the news conference. “Aren’t we considered part of the Bristow-area community, given our status as neighbors?”
Jefferson’s campaign and other Democrats seized on the confusion to call Lawson noninclusive.
“You can’t make this stuff up. It falls under ‘What was she thinking?’,” Wheeler wrote in a Facebook post that included a photo of the initial version of the announcement, which used a template for one of the supervisor’s regular town hall meetings.
Both candidates say they hope to move the county beyond divisive political rhetoric to better address Prince William’s pressing problems.
Tom Noonan, 68, said he is eager for some bipartisanship.
Noonan, who owns a pizza restaurant in a Woodbridge shopping plaza whose restaurants have experienced several burglaries in recent months, said he’s frustrated with the county’s general direction in an era of intense partisanship that has filtered from Congress to state and local governments.
After talking to Lawson about her pledge to lead an effort to repeal the county’s 4 percent restaurant meals tax — an idea Jefferson said she also supports if the tax on data centers can be raised — Noonan said he is unsure how he will vote in the election.
“I’m just fed up with both sides,” he said. “The hate and the back and forth; it’s just ridiculous. Nothing gets accomplished.”
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