[Update, 9/4/24:]
Fairfax County supervisors plan to hold the delayed public hearing on data centers at approximately 4:30 p.m. on their Sept. 10 meeting.
CLICK HERE to access the staff report on the item and other related information
[Original coverage:]
Because of a staff error in complying with a recent state-code update for legal advertising of public hearings, Fairfax supervisors on July 30 deferred a full slate of hearings on the agenda and scheduled rehearings for items discussed two weeks earlier.
The July 30 hearings – which included a much-anticipated decision on new data-center policies and proposals to raise taxicab rates and expand a residential-parking-permit district around James Madison High School – now will be held Sept. 10.
Public hearings held at the board’s July 16 meeting – including one on data centers, which took more than four hours – also will need to be held again Sept. 10 because they did not meet the state’s new advertising requirements.
“We apologize to anyone impacted and will conduct a complete review of our public-hearing-advertisement process moving forward,” county officials said in a media release July 30.
The new advertising rules took effect July 1. County officials did not detail which of the new code provisions had not been complied with. But supervisors, who learned about the snafu the previous day, seemed irked by the mixup.
“This is a really unfortunate circumstance,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay (D). “I’m not happy at all about it. In fact, I’m angry about it and we’ll get to the bottom of what happened.”
County Executive Bryan Hill “has assured us that he has commenced a complete review of the county’s public-hearing-advertising processes so that this type of significant clerical error never happens again,” McKay said.
Supervisor Patrick Herrity (R-Springfield) said he shared the chairman’s anger and disappointment about the mistake and the need to hold reschedule and rehear multiple public hearings.
Herrity inquired whether the board could hold a special meeting before Sept. 10 so as to lessen inconvenience for the affected applicants, but McKay demurred, citing “major transparency concerns.”
“I do not want to call a special meeting in the dead of August, when no one is paying attention, and have somebody come forward and complain that the board acted on items out of order during a recess, without a lot of notice, when we normally, historically, have never done that,” McKay said.
None of the deferred items needed to be acted upon before Sept. 10, the chairman said, adding he had “made it clear to county staff that they need to do what they need to do to make whole any of the expenses associated with any of the public hearings, and the applicants associated with them, at county expense.”
Regarding the proposed zoning-ordinance amendment on data centers, when the supervisors deferred decision July 16, the board directed that any data-center applications received after that date would be subject to the new regulations to be adopted in the near future.
That policy remains unchanged despite the need to rehear the zoning-ordinance amendment, McKay said.
“All testimony received on July 16 will be included in the public record for the respective public hearing, so there is no need to re-testify,” he said. “But the board will take testimony again on Sept. 10 for all public hearings held July 16, and [those] who testified previously are welcome to re-testify.”
