Campbell County Says 'NO'
Campbell County finally joined the club last night. Four to three, the Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution opposing the Valley Link 765 kV line, the billion-dollar corridor that would turn rural Campbell into a high-voltage extension cord for Northern Virginia’s data centers and a bulk energy distribution hub with a massive new substation. Supervisor Matt Cline put the resolution on the table and carried it. Every other county on the proposed path had already said no. Campbell was the last holdout. It is no longer.
The resolution does what resolutions can do and no more. It tells the State Corporation Commission, Valley Link, and anyone else listening that Campbell County does not want to be the pass-through. It opposes the Joshua Falls–Yeat line as currently drawn, objects to the county being used as a utility corridor so Loudoun can keep the lights on for server halls, and urges the company and the SCC to abandon the project and find an alternative that does not land on local farms, forest, and viewsheds. Structures on the order of 160 to 170 feet, a permanently cleared right-of-way, and a massive new substation footprint would start at the relocated Joshua Falls. The power would keep going. Campbell would keep the towers.
Residents showed up to say the obvious out loud. Shelly Evans warned that the line would erase farmers’ memories of the past and families’ plans for the future. Beckie Nix asked why the county should deface its landscape to feed Northern Virginia. Meghan Leatherwood said the substation and lines would wreck the character of the place. Rick Summy put it more bluntly: electricity moved from West Virginia through a rural community to Northern Virginia, with no benefit he could see for his property or the county. A petition with 446 names sat alongside them. None of this was subtle. It did not need to be.
Valley Link’s response, delivered through AEP spokesman George Porter, was the usual tutorial. Communities that object, he suggested, simply need to be educated about the benefits. The area needs more power, the company says. What it does not say is that the load growth driving a 115-mile, 765 kV project is concentrated in Northern Virginia’s data-center cluster, not in Campbell’s fields. Education, in this telling, means explaining why other people’s demand should be met on your land. The board, or at least four members of it, declined the lesson.
Cline’s hope, stated after the vote, is that the SCC will take the resolution, and the fact that all nine counties on the route have now opposed the project, seriously enough to deny it. That is the correct hope and also the limited one. The county has no zoning authority over the route. Valley Link still has three paths under consideration and plans to file one with the SCC this fall as the preferred route. A 4–3 vote is a message, not a veto. It is also the message the earlier call for a clean, unsoftened resolution was written to produce.
The line vote is not the only lever the county has, and it is not the strongest one. AEP wants to relocate and expand the Joshua Falls substation onto roughly 500 acres of timberland at Stage Road and Paradise Hill Road in Concord, because the existing site cannot handle Valley Link and because the company has bigger plans for the new one. That site is not zoned for power transmission. Unlike the line itself, which the SCC controls, the relocated substation needs a special use permit from Campbell County, with hearings at the Planning Commission and then the Board. Supervisor Cline has already said as much. A resolution rejecting that substation would not be another polite note to Richmond. It would be the county using authority it actually possesses. Denying the permit, or stating in advance that the board will not grant one, would be a harder stop than any resolution aimed at a route the county cannot zone. If four supervisors were willing to object to a line they cannot block, they should be willing to take up the facility they can.
The fight, as neighbors noted on the way out, is not over. Filings, hearings, and route tweaks are still ahead. What changed on October 6 is that Campbell is no longer the county that stayed quiet while everyone else objected. The line is still proposed. The data centers are still hungry. The difference is that the last local government on the map has now said, in writing, that it would rather not be the extension cord. The next question is whether it will say the same thing about the substation, where the answer actually counts.
Comments