Nearly 800 acres of forest and farmland next to the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant has become the latest flashpoint in Calvert County’s fight over data centers, after residents told commissioners the land was rezoned to heavy industrial in 2025 without their knowledge — a change they say cleared the way for Constellation Energy to potentially clear-cut up to 85% of the forest for hyperscale data center development.
The allegations came during public comment at a Sept. 22 Board of County Commissioners meeting, the same session where commissioners directed staff to pursue new restrictions on data centers before the current board’s term ends in December. One of the three options commissioners are weighing — alongside extending the county’s data center moratorium and removing data centers as a permitted zoning use — is reversing that 2025 rezoning and returning the land to its prior forest-and-farming designation.
Nancy Elwine, who lives on Camp Canoy Road, told commissioners she and her husband, Carl, learned this spring that the roughly 800 acres behind their property had been “quietly rezoned from forest and farming into heavy industrial.” She said the change would legally allow Constellation, which owns the land, to clear the majority of the forest.
“You see, Constellation made sure that land was rezoned illegally without due process so they could build massive hyperscale data centers,” Elwine told the board. “That threat has not totally passed because the zoning has not changed.”
Carl Elwine, speaking on behalf of neighbors in the Samuel Weems subdivision off Camp Canoy Road, told commissioners the rezoning “was not included in the original 2025 comprehensive plan” and was added, he said, at the request of a Constellation vice president at the Calvert Cliffs plant, Pete Moody. Elwine said he obtained the letter through a public information request and that it was not made public when it was submitted. (Neither the letter nor the request has been independently reviewed for this story.)
Elwine also said the neighborhood had scheduled meetings with Constellation about the company’s plans that the company later canceled, and urged the board to preserve what he described as roughly 1,000 acres of forested buffer between the neighborhood and the power plant — land he said is currently zoned “growth tier 4,” which does not permit building. “It should never have been put on a map to be zoned heavy industry,” he said. “It should be returned to forest and farming.”
A speaker identifying herself as representing a group called Citizens for Calvert, using the name Nancy L. Wine, told the board the rezoning was pushed through specifically at Constellation’s request without notifying adjacent landowners. “It was all done illegally,” she said, using pointed language to accuse the company of ignoring due process to secure the change — an allegation the Chronicle has not independently verified.
Not every commissioner is convinced reversing the rezoning is that simple. During the morning work session, one commissioner raised concern that the same parcels weren’t rezoned solely with data centers in mind — Constellation has also discussed expanding power generation capacity at Calvert Cliffs, and a broad rezoning reversal could complicate that. Other commissioners countered that moving forward on the moratorium extension and removing data centers as a permitted use would, on their own, block data center development on the land regardless of whether the formal rezoning is reversed — leaving that third option, the actual rezoning reversal, less settled than the other two by the meeting’s end.
Other speakers at the meeting connected the rezoning dispute to broader concerns about how the county communicates major land-use decisions to residents. Commissioner candidate Judy Peterson noted that both the data center rezoning and a separate, fast-moving effort to find a developer for the long-vacant Patuxent Business Park first came to residents’ attention through public advertisements — a help-wanted posting for a construction manager, in the data centers’ case — rather than direct outreach. “That trust has been badly strained, and I think it needs to be rebuilt,” Peterson told the board.
Not all public comment was adversarial toward Constellation. Commissioner candidate Patti Stuckler, who said she toured the Constellation facility with several other candidates, told the board she and fellow candidates remain committed to protecting the farmland and forest, but cautioned against reversing course without first gathering information directly from the company. Tom Peter, founder of an Ashburn, Virginia-based data center developer, urged the board to use the moratorium period to explore whether a lower-impact design — one using closed-loop cooling and on-site power that wouldn’t affect residents’ electric bills — could be a model the community would accept, rather than rejecting data centers outright.
The rezoning reversal remains one of three options county staff was directed to begin advancing, alongside the moratorium extension and the permitted-use removal, with a formal vote left to the incoming Board of County Commissioners, which is sworn in Dec. 15.
