Buckingham’s Stealth Office Hours: Highlights from the Empathy-Free Zone
- paulBVL
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
A young lady named Amy from Buckingham kindly shared the recording of her delightful sit-down at Valley Link’s “office hours” yesterday. Fair warning: some parts are painful to hear. She’s understandably distraught that this project is about to bulldoze her future in one tidy package. Her interlocutor? None other than Rob Richardson, chief PR shaman for Valley Link/Dominion Energy. The original recording ran a bracing 43 minutes. We’ve extracted the highlights; the full unedited version remains available on our web site. The edited audio/video highlights are further below.
Key takeaways and fresh revelations:
Listen VERY carefully around the 30-second mark. Rob helpfully clarifies that EVERY route on the table is still a “draft.” The actual preferred routes will be unveiled at some future virtual meeting vaguely scheduled for “this fall.” So for anyone still clinging to the comforting fantasy that today’s preferred routes won’t quietly morph back into the March versions, relax, they’re ALL still in play. As counties continue approving data centers in the coming months, expect this monstrosity to drift toward the power load like a moth to a particularly lucrative flame.
A swimming pool right next to a 765 kV line? Perfectly fine. Zero danger. Sleep well, kids.
If your livelihood depends on keeping your property pesticide-free, tough luck. They can’t even tell you which chemicals they’ll eventually douse the place with until after they’ve seized it. Transparency at its finest.
The Valley Link team has somehow never heard that there’s enough energy under a 765 kV line to light ordinary fluorescent bulbs. Stunning. Truly groundbreaking ignorance.
Once your land is taken, they’ll thoughtfully host construction open houses to explain, in soothing tones, exactly how they plan to permanently wreck what’s left. Rob even offers that if there’s someone trespassing in your woods you dislike, they’ll give you a number to call. How neighborly.
Temporary construction easements may be required depending on the terrain. Translation: even if the line itself misses your property, they can still temporarily seize land outside the 200-foot right-of-way so they can bulldoze a convenient path to reach it. Using the existing right-of-way for access would apparently be far too much trouble. Don’t worry, they’ll decide how much inconvenience is acceptable without any input from you.
The SCC timeline is getting charmingly “muddy.” First September, then October, now Rob says sometime in 2026. Our money’s on a neatly gift-wrapped filing the day before Thanksgiving, when everyone’s distracted by turkey and relatives.
Rob’s timeline for survey teams appearing on your property no longer matches what he said in earlier meetings, or what landowners actually experienced with the Golden-to-Mars line. Now he claims surveys happen after easement negotiations. Previously it was right after the SCC decision. In the Golden-to-Mars case, the survey letters went out immediately after the decision. Consistency is overrated, apparently.
In the final five or six minutes Rob launches into a passionate rant about how desperately “needed” these lines are. He helpfully confirms what we’ve said all along: this buildout is driven by new data centers, not Grandma dialing down her thermostat in July. One Stafford data-center campus alone will require nine substations. He then ticks off the projects in Louisa, Buckingham, Spotsylvania, Goochland, Richmond, and Stafford. Commercial purposes, pure and simple.
Rob is described by Amy as looking like “death warmed over.” Putting a cheerful bow on rural Virginia’s slow-motion apocalypse does appear to be exacting a toll. He’s clearly impatient with Amy; you can practically hear the corporate desire to be anywhere else. Get some rest Rob, you'll need it. Simple grade school math shows that MANY more high voltage transmission lines are going to be needed to feed all of these data centers.
This is likely the last public interaction we’ll get with the Valley Link team until that vague virtual meeting sometime this “fall.” Things will probably go quiet, though rest assured the Valley Link lawyers are already sharpening their pencils.
Oh, and one final note on the spirit of open dialogue: anyone who showed up to these office hours but declined to hand over their name and address, or whose property wasn’t already in the crosshairs, was simply turned away. Transparency, meet the velvet rope.