WASHINGTON BUSINESS JOURNAL: With the possibility of landing the FBI headquarters off the table, Lerner Enterprises is moving forward with plans for a big data center campus on its former Landover Mall site.
Brightseat Associates LLC, a Lerner affiliate, filed anearly-stage application Wednesday for what’s called a preliminary plan of subdivision with Prince George’s County’s land use regulatory agency for more than 4.1 million square feet of new “industrial development,” dubbed the Brightseat Tech Park, on the 87-acre site. Details available through the county’s Development Activity Monitoring System are extremely limited, with no details yet forthcoming.
Lerner couldn’t be reached immediately for comment. But in August we reported on an earlier filing by the same applicant for the same property for a “qualified data center” there.
Lerner’s Jaclyn Cohen told me in an email at the time the company, while it still hoped to get the FBI, was “working to establish an alternative tax generating plan for the County.”
The Landover Mall site was one of three finalists for the new FBI headquarters. The GSA picked Greenbelt, but Virginia lawmakers are pushing the feds to put it in Springfield instead. Presidential hopeful Donald Trump says he wants it in neither, but to get rebuilt in D.C. In any case, wherever itgoes, the FBI is pretty clearly no longer in the cards for Lerner.
In a September report, Nina Albert, who was at the time commissioner of the GSA’s Public Buildings Service, rated Lerner’s Landover Mall site as having the greatest schedule risk of the three possibilities, saying in the memo the owner “has offered theproperty for a price that significantly exceeds GSA’s assessment of the fair market value,” such that negotiating an agreed price could take a long time.
The Prince George’s Economic Development Corp. has previously identified the Landover Mall site as a place where data centers could go. And the county has long been hungry to get a bigger piece of the extremely lucrative data center pie.
An undated but clearly earlier concept from Lerner, linked through the Prince George’s EDC website, shows an illustration of mixed-use development and says the site’s zoning designation would allow up to 8.2 million square feet of development there.
