SPORTS: Potent Highland baseball team features seven Prince William players. PAGE 15
May 18, 2023 | Vol. 22, No. 20 | www.princewilliamtimes.com | $1.00 Covering Prince William County and surrounding communities, including Gainesville, Haymarket, Dumfries, Occoquan, Quantico and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park.
Large parks missing from Digital Gateway rezoning applications
Gov. Glenn Youngkin visited Woodbridge Thursday, May 11 to help dedicate Prince William County’s future crisis receiving center.
By Peter Cary
Piedmont Journalism Foundation
PHOTO BY DOUG STROUD
A ‘model’ for the commonwealth Gov. Glenn Youngkin helps dedicate Prince William County’s future crisis receiving center By Anya Sczerzenie Times Staff Writer
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin visited Prince William County’s future mental health “crisis receiving center” Thursday, May 11 for a community dedication of what he called a “state-ofthe-art” model for mental health care across the commonwealth. Youngkin praised the CRC, slated to open in 2025, as a facility that will provide better and faster care for those suffering from mental illness. “People need help when they need (it), not a week or six weeks later,” Youngkin said. “The current system is hospital-centric and only helps when people are actively in crisis.” Youngkin said facilities like the CRC could be part of a plan to address mental health statewide. Youngkin’s mental health plan includes establishing more than 30 mobile crisis teams to respond to 988 suicide hotline calls; allowing people with counseling licenses from other states to work in Virginia; and educating Virginians about the fentanyl overdose epidemic. Youngkin’s initiative, which he has named “Right Help, Right Now,” was announced in 2022 and is slated to take about three years to implement at an estimated cost of about $230 million. See YOUNGKIN, page 2
Back in July 2022, when a comprehensive plan amendment that would turn northern Prince William County into a massive data center development was being considered, the plans depicted two large parks and hundreds of acres of green space as key to the project. The parks became a selling point. Board of Supervisors Chair Ann Wheeler, D-At Large, a long supporter of the project, touted them in a newsletter to constituents last October. More recently, Compass and QTS, two data center developers involved in the Prince William Digital Gateway, as the project is known, included the parks in their depictions of “800 acres of new connected open space” as they unveiled their plans to area residents. But a close look at the plans reveals no real plans for the parks. Instead, there are only hopes and promises that the parks will come to fruition. When Compass and QTS Data Centers recently applied to rezone the land for data centers, the final step in the approval process, their applications made it clear that the big parks are not part of their projects at this point.
PHOTO BY PETER CARY
A sign promoting the PW Digital Gateway along Pageland Lane. Critics of the digital corridor see this as a betrayal. “Now we can see what they are submitting for the rezoning, and all that parkland is gone,” said Chris Carroll, a Nokesville resident who has tracked the issue closely. See GATEWAY, page 4
Neighbors express shock, sadness in the wake of fatal stabbings 3 family members died after a domestic incident in their Bacon Race area home, police say By Jill Palermo
Times Staff Writer
Rodney Reams was a semi-retired real estate agent who once worked for defense contractor SAIC. His wife, Sandra Reams, was a retired schoolteacher who recently began teaching adult English classes in Prince William County. They’d lived on a quiet, leafy street near the banks of the Occoquan River since the mid-1980s. Their adult son, Nick Reams, 38, studied engi-
School meal debt rises to $350K at Prince William schools, page 3
TIMES STAFF PHOTO/JILL PALERMO
Three family members who lived in this brick, twostory home, tucked behind mature trees in the 5100 block of Cannon Bluff Drive in the Bacon Race area of Woodbridge, died Tuesday after a domestic stabbing. neering at George Mason University but didn’t have a job. He lived with Rodney and Sandy Reams, according to a longtime neighbor who declined to give her name but lived with her mother across the street from the Reams and described them as family friends for more than three decades. See STABBINGS, page 2
Dumfries senior olympian featured on public TV: Senior Living, page 7
88 DULLES, VA
It’s all about people . . . and always will be. www.vnb.com