Digital Gateway in Jeopardy: How Notice Defects Could Invalidate Rezoning Approvals

Summary — In Board of County Supervisors of Prince William County v. Oak Valley Homeowners Association, Inc., the Court of Appeals of Virginia struck down three “Digital Gateway” rezonings, finding that the County’s failure to strictly follow required public notice and advertising procedures made the approvals legally invalid from the start. The decision highlights that even large, high-profile development approvals can be overturned if procedural rules on notice, timing, and document availability are not carefully followed, and that challengers will often be able to establish standing in major land use disputes.

In Board of County Supervisors of Prince William County v. Oak Valley Homeowners Association, Inc., a published opinion issued on March 31, 2026, the Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed the invalidation of Prince William County’s high‑profile Digital Gateway rezonings, underscoring the extent to which major development approvals can hinge on strict adherence to statutory notice and procedural requirements.¹ The case consolidated four appeals arising from challenges by landowners and homeowners associations to three zoning ordinances—identified as Compass, DG North, and DG South—that would have permitted the development of data centers on land previously zoned for agricultural use. 

Writing for the Court, Judge Stuart Raphael issued a comprehensive decision addressing standing requirements, the interplay between state statutory and local ordinance notice requirements, and the distinction between public advertising and individual written notice. For developers, the decision highlights the current reality of high‑stakes land use litigation in Virginia. While the substantive merits of a locality’s legislative approval receive significant deference by reviewing courts, entitlements remain vulnerable on appeal if the approval process itself falters or if challengers are able to establish standing. Even relatively minor, technical defects in notice or timing—or the presence of a single nearby landowner able to show particularized harm—can prove dispositive, regardless of the project’s scale, political support, or underlying land use rationale.

Key Holdings

Strict compliance with advertising statutes is mandatory. The Court held that Prince William County violated Code § 15.2‑2204(A) and its own zoning ordinance by failing to properly advertise the public hearing at which the rezonings were adopted. Among other defects, the County failed to ensure that two advertisements were published at least six days apart², failed to ensure that the proposed ordinances were available for public review when the advertisements ran, and conducted the hearing too soon after the final advertisement. These deficiencies rendered all three rezoning ordinances void ab initio.

The statutory “actual notice” provision does not cure advertising defects. Rejecting arguments by the County and the developers, the Court held that Code § 15.2‑2204(B)’s waiver provision—under which a party’s “actual notice” or participation can waive defects in written notice—does not excuse failures to comply with the public advertising requirements in subsection A. The Court emphasized the long‑standing distinction in Virginia law between public advertising, which protects community‑wide procedural rights, and ensures “broad community participation in important land-use decisions,” and individualized written notice to adjacent landowners , which protects specific property interests. The Court rejected the County and developers’ arguments that previous case law supported application of the actual-notice waiver to advertising defects, explaining that neither case relied upon involved allegations of the public advertising requirements in subsection A.

The newspaper “safe harbor” applies only when the newspaper is at fault. The Court addressed the statutory safe harbor provision in Code § 15.2-2204(A), which allows a locality to be “deemed to have met the notice requirements” when it “submitted a correct and timely notice request to such newspaper and the newspaper fails to publish the notice.” The Court held there are two prerequisites to the safe harbor provision: (1) the locality must submit a “correct and timely” request and (2) the newspaper is responsible for the failure. Here, the trial court’s finding that County staff failed to respond to the newspaper’s request for confirmation before publication was supported by the record Accordingly, the County, not the newspaper, was responsible for the failure to publish, and the County could not invoke the safe harbor to excuse the missed publication. The Court further clarified that the phrase “fails to publish,” when read in context with the requirement that a “correct and timely” request be submitted, “is best understood to require some sort of fault or mistake by the newspaper; the newspaper must ‘neglect to do something.’” This interpretation is supported by the legislative history in which proponents of the statute explained that localities should not be “punished because a newspaper is negligent” or because “the newspaper made a mistake.”

Standing must be analyzed rezoning by rezoning—but may still exist for multiple ordinances. The Court rejected the circuit court’s approach of treating the three rezonings as a single, aggregated “Digital Gateway” action for standing purposes, emphasizing that standing is “not dispensed in gross” and must be evaluated ordinance by ordinance. Because the three rezonings, although “processed on parallel tracks procedurally,” “were processed and approved as separate applications and resulted in three separate and independent ordinances,” each plaintiff needed to establish proximity and particularized harm as to each challenged rezoning. At the same time, the Court undertook a detailed factual analysis of proximity and alleged harms under Virginia’s two-prong standing test, which requires a plaintiff to (1) own or occupy property “within or in close proximity” to the subject property and (2) demonstrate “particularized harm to some personal or property right . . . different from that suffered by the public generally.” The Court  concluded that at least one plaintiff demonstrated sufficient proximity and particularized injury as to each of the three rezonings. Those harms included not only generalized concerns associated with data center development, but concrete, site‑specific impacts such as noise, viewshed disruption, light pollution, traffic increases, water and well impacts, and diminution in property values—illustrating that standing in large, multi‑parcel entitlement cases can turn on a careful, record‑driven assessment rather than broad characterizations of the project as a whole. 

The “where-to-review” requirement demands that documents actually be available. The Court addressed the statutory requirement that advertisements “identify the place or places within the locality where copies of the proposed plans, ordinances or amendments may be examined.” The Court held that this requirement means the documents must actually be available at the identified location when the advertisement runs and rejected the County’s argument that it could delay releasing the proposed ordinance.

Advertising defects are enforceable even by engaged participants. Importantly, the Court confirmed that landowners who actively participated in the public hearing may still challenge zoning decisions based on violations of the advertising statute, so long as they establish standing and file suit within the 30‑day limitations period in Code § 15.2‑2204(E).

Practical Implications

More broadly, the decision underscores that contested entitlement processes demand close attention to the legal architecture governing notice, timing, and public process throughout approval. The Court’s standing analysis reinforces that reality: in high‑profile rezonings involving industrial‑scale uses, standing is unlikely to function as a meaningful barrier to post‑approval appeals, even where approvals are segmented across multiple ordinances. Developers should therefore assume that challengers will clear the standing hurdle, and that appellate risk will turn less on who may sue than on whether the approval process can withstand exacting procedural scrutiny long after the vote is taken. Procedural precision is no longer a defensive consideration—it is the foundation of entitlement durability.

¹Bd. of Cnty. Supervisors of Prince William Cnty. v. Oak Valley Homeowners Ass'n, Inc., 2026 WL 873963 (Va. Ct. App. Mar. 31, 2026).
²The General Assembly has since acted to amend Code § 15.2‑2204(A) by eliminating the statutory requirement that at least six days elapse between the first and second published advertisements. See H.B. 1996, 2025 Reg. Sess. (Va.) (enacted Mar. 18, 2025) (amending § 15.2‑2204 to require only that the second notice be published no less than five days before the hearing). That amendment was not in effect at the time of the December 2023 Digital Gateway notices and did not affect the Court’s analysis.