How data centers came to dominate politics in Maryland’s purplest county

Long before much of Maryland knew what a data center was, Frederick County looked like it could be the industry’s next hub.

A Washington, D.C. exurb of rolling farmland, Frederick sits just across the Potomac River from Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” and boasts fiber-optic connection to the industry capital. When County Executive Jessica Fitzwater was elected four years ago, she promised policies and regulations to make Frederick “a national leader” in responsible data center development.

Today, Frederick is home to Maryland’s only large-scale data center development, and its leaders are learning the hard way about the hazards of navigating the charged and changing politics of the industry, which critics decry for devouring energy, water and land.

The divide over data centers has all but consumed Frederick politics. Fitzwater, a Democrat, faces a surprisingly strong challenge from the former Frederick Mayor Jeff Holtzinger, and the race has turned into a reckoning over her handling of the industry.

Over two weeks last month, Fitzwater touted — then spiked — a $110 million agreement with the county’s lead data center developer, and she has extended the county’s data center moratorium from the end of this year to next summer.

Next week’s election could help shape the county’s — and Maryland’s — longer-term approach to data centers. While most of the state lives under a data center freeze, the outcome in Frederick will be an early test of just how resilient the state’s grassroots backlash will be.

A secret courtship

Four years ago, developers broke ground on a sprawling campus at the site of an old aluminum smelting plant outside Adamstown, a quaint village in southern Frederick. Known today as Quantum Maryland, the data center complex spans hundreds of acres and draws busloads of construction workers a day.

County leaders once flirted with an even bigger vision. In 2019, Frederick officials entered a nondisclosure agreement with Amazon. The county then held closed-door meetings for close to a year with the company on a proposal they called “Project Holiday,” which would have set aside three areas of southern Frederick County for a $30 billion venture with as many as 15 data centers.

The extent of these exchanges is public because the Sugarloaf Alliance, a group dedicated to preserving Frederick’s rural character, successfully sued over access to the records.

“Everybody [was] looking at us like we’re wearing tinfoil hats,” Steve Black, a southern Frederick farmer and president of the alliance, said about the early days of his anti-data center advocacy. Black said he knows many loyal Democrats who are torn over whether to support Fitzwater in the general election.

At the time of Project Holiday, Fitzwater served on the County Council and was briefed on the Amazon talks months after they happened.

She was elected county executive in 2022 and is quick to point out that her administration hasn’t approved any new data centers. Instead, she appointed a task force to study the industry and has imposed a series of moratoriums, the latest of which expires in July 2027.

Nevertheless, Fitzwater has drawn the ire of the county’s anti-data center coalition in part because of zoning changes enacted by the county council. The changes, similar to a proposal introduced by Fitzwater, expanded a designated data center zone from roughly 1,600 acres to 2,600, including several hundred acres of farmland.

In an August interview, Fitzwater said her job is to ensure the industry is strictly regulated and brings benefits to her constituents. Frederick has collected more than $55 million in property and land transfer taxes from the Quantum campus, and industry boosters say the project could eventually net over $200 million annually for the county.

For some neighbors near the Quantum campus, the upside is hard to see.

Where Hope Green once looked out over mountains and deer from her yard, she now sees a hulking warehouse and stacks of diesel generators. She says construction on the Quantum site has tarnished her well water, and Maryland environmental regulators have cited developers there for repeated discharges into a local creek and other violations.

A spokesperson for the site’s master developer, Catellus Development Corporation, declined to comment on environmental issues but said in a statement that the company remains committed to the project.

“For years, we have operated in good faith through the County’s legally established land-use process,” a Quantum Maryland spokesperson said.

Born and raised on an Adamstown farm, Green had hoped to spend her retirement in her house. Now she insists the county or developer should buy her and her neighbors out of their homes.

“What’s left of my family is here. My church is here. My friends are here,” she said. But “if I want to have peace of mind for the rest of my life, I have to leave.”

A political landmine

Last month, Frederick County officials announced a proposal they said would squeeze the local data center industry for a transformative infusion of cash.

The agreement with Catellus, valued at $110 million, would pay for renovations to an elementary school near the county’s sole data center campus; a new community recreation building; a jobs-training facility; and protections for farmland. It would also freeze parts of the county’s rezoning and bar changes to noise and environmental regulations for at least eight years.

Fitzwater called the agreement “unprecedented” and touted it as among the largest commitments of its kind in the country.

But instead of plaudits, the county’s anti-data center faction condemned the package for provisions that threatened to lock in some of the project’s most controversial aspects.

The announcement inflamed a debate that had dominated the primary contests in June.

In that election, a pro-data center super PAC backed County Council President Brad Young and two other candidates supportive of the new zoning, all of whom Fitzwater endorsed. But two of the candidates, including Young, lost to opponents who campaigned against the rezoning.

Fitzwater has vastly out-raised Holtzinger — amassing nearly $770,000 compared to his $45,000 — and Frederick has only gotten bluer since her victory four years ago.

But the subject of data centers has dogged her campaign.

Holtzinger, Frederick’s Republican mayor from 2005 to 2009, criticized his opponent for a platform he said put a statewide political agenda ahead of Frederick residents. He said the Fitzwater administration’s behind-the-scenes dealings with Quantum developers have bred mistrust.

“There’s a lot of repair to be done for the public to have faith in their local government,” he said.

In interviews, Fitzwater said she has adapted as she’s learned more about the data center industry and pointed to her administration’s efforts to publicize information on industry regulations. Still, she said, misinformation has made it challenging to have “real conversations” with constituents.

“I think it’s very much still possible,” she said. “But the kind of the atmosphere that we’re living in right now makes it hard to have those types of conversations.”

A few days after Fitzwater debuted the $110 million developer package, demonstrators gathered outside a Frederick community center to protest it. Inside, Fitzwater and other officials fielded questions at informational booths.

Three people approached Fitzwater and grilled her with questions and complaints. The agreement looked like a “back-door operation,” one activist said as another filmed.

Fitzwater listened calmly. She hadn’t committed to anything yet, she told them.

Four days later, she turned down the money.

‘Too high a price’

For Catellus, the rejection and moratorium extension proved a final straw.

The developer filed a 67-page lawsuit against Fitzwater this month, alleging that she illegally overrode the county’s zoning to block data center development purely to boost her reelection campaign — a swerve attorneys claim has cost the company $500 million.

“When an agreement with Quantum served her politically, she negotiated it and celebrated it,” Catellus attorneys wrote. “When the political winds shifted, she did too.”

Fitzwater said she rejected the deal because the benefits came at “too high a price” for her constituents. She struck a populist chord in a Facebook post that called the developer’s lawsuit “rife with factual errors and outright lies.”

“Data centers and the billionaires behind them think they can buy special treatment and use their money to silence anyone who disagrees with them,” she said. “They can’t stand that I’m using my authority as your County Executive to protect our community.”

For Daryl Boffman, an Adamstown IT contractor who served on Fitzwater’s data center task force, the rancor is disheartening. A Frederick resident of three decades, Boffman supports the AI buildout and hopes tempers will eventually cool when the rest of Maryland sees the benefits data centers can deliver for his community.

His neighbors deserve walking trails, workforce training and a place to gather, Boffman said, and the county might not have the chance to secure those benefits from the industry again.

“The data centers are still being built. They’re still operating,” he said. “They’re going to still be in our backyard.”