Bobbie Jo Morton drives an hour from her home in Crimora to her flower shop, Rock Mountain Silks, in Craigsville a couple of times a week. She knows the other shop owners along Craig Street, the central highway through town. Hers is one of fewer than two dozen businesses with a Craigsville address.
The 2-square-mile town lies about 30 minutes southwest of Staunton. It does not have a stoplight and is home to just over 900 residents, according to the latest census data. It has three restaurants, an IGA grocery store, a dollar store, a pharmacy, a few auto shops, nine churches and a couple of other small businesses.
Craigsville is put on the map as home to one of the area’s largest employers: the Augusta Correctional Center, which currently employs 222 people and houses just under 461 inmates as of early January — a drastically lower number than its capacity of 1,300.
But the level 3 maximum-security prison is set to close this year, and Craigsville’s economic livelihood is at stake. The town will lose key water revenue from the prison, and local businesses like Morton’s could also take a financial blow with fewer people coming into town.
Morton said the closure is “very heart-wrenching” and will be “devastating” for local businesses, not to mention the impacts on the families that depend on their jobs at the prison. She and other Craigsville residents hope the government will step in to stop the closure — state legislators say they’re trying, but it’s still a shot in the dark.
The ACC’s permanent closure was announced in December by the Virginia Department of Corrections, and it will be joined by three other facilities statewide in 2024: Sussex II State Prison, Haynesville Correctional Unit No. 17 and the Stafford Community Corrections Alternative Program.
With the ACC’s doors set to officially close June 30, the Department of Corrections says it will help reassign some employees to other facilities in the commonwealth. Now, local prison employees face a decision: find a new job in town, or move away to work at another correctional facility.
Craigsville is sure to face an economic hit, said its mayor, Richard Fox. But the town has come back from factory closures and other major employers leaving before, and it’ll survive this time, he said.
“The people are people that are tough, and they bounce back from things and move on,” Fox said. “That’s what I’m hoping: Everybody remains positive on this so we can get some things moving and hopefully get some type of employment in here for them.”
Why is it closing?
As the state makes plans to shutter the ACC, there’s a monthslong buffer period — no one will be forced to leave or relocate right away, said Thomas Meyer, the Department of Corrections’ regional administrator.
The sole catalyst behind the closure is a yearslong struggle to maintain staff, Meyer said. The ACC currently has about 60 security staff — at full capacity, or 1,300 inmates, the ideal number would be around 270. Right now, the ACC employs about 222 people total.
Current employees will have the option to relocate and stay with the Department of Corrections, which Meyer said is his No. 1 goal. Whether it’s a local facility, a different branch like parole or community corrections, or a farther-away institution with barracks that can house commuters for several days at a time but allow them to keep living in or near Craigsville, Meyer said he hopes to help every employee who wants to stay with the department to do so. For those who don’t, he said, employees would have retirement packages or one to nine months of severance pay available.
“This closure has nothing to do with the people who worked here. There just wasn’t enough,” Meyer said. “The one, I guess, bright side is, we do have a six-month window to place our folks, and that’s really what we’re focused on, is everybody gets a landing spot that works for them and their family and their situation.”
It’s too early to tell how many employees will relocate; Jan. 19 was the first deadline for employees to give the department an idea of where they’d like to move to, said Timothy Back, the ACC’s acting facility head.
The plan for now is to keep operating as usual, Meyer said. While inmates may transfer out naturally, no more inmates will be moved into the ACC, so the population will slowly decline. Depending on staffing levels, the state plans to wait until late April or early May to begin relocating inmates and employees.
What happens to Craigsville?
Come June 30, Craigsville could be strapped for cash. The ACC held up the town economically in two main ways: with its water bills and the stream of employees coming to town and spending money at local businesses.
The town operates “pretty much mainly” on water revenue from the prison, said Fox, the mayor. The town used to receive $38,000 annually in water payments when the prison was at full capacity; now it’s down to $23,000 as the inmate population has reduced over the years.
Craigsville’s best chance at survival, Fox said, will be finding another occupant to take over the building and replace the prison as a major employer.
Fox said about two dozen ACC employees live in Craigsville and the immediate area surrounding the prison. That’s roughly 14% of the ACC’s employees and 2.5% of the town’s population.
Craigsville residents are upset about the closure and worry that it’ll leave people either jobless or forced to move. There are other major employers in Augusta County, like the Hershey, Little Debbie, Hollister and Amazon facilities, but none in the immediate Craigsville area.
At a Jan. 4 town hall, employees and their families expressed frustration with the timing of the announcement, too. Several said they felt that announcing it right before the holidays was cruel and even “slimy,” according to reporting by the Staunton News-Leader.
“We’ve heard a lot about concerns, prayers, empathy,” Tracy Pyles, a former county district supervisor, said at the meeting. “What we haven’t heard is what we want to hear: ‘This prison needs to stay open.’”
As Craigsville faces a likely dip in its population and visitors, business owners are concerned it could affect their livelihood, too. Morton predicts that the closure will be “devastating” for local businesses. Cardinal News attempted to contact more than a dozen other Craigsville business owners about the closure but received no response.
Morton said it feels as if the rug has been pulled out from under them.
“It’s going to cause panic and trauma,” she said. “We’re fighting a force that we can’t battle.”
Is there any hope for Craigsville?
Morton’s only hope is a long-shot chance that the government could step in to stop the closure — but Craigsville’s representatives in the state legislature face an uphill battle to do so.
The closures of ACC and other prisons are written into Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed budget. Sen. Mark Obenshain and Del. Chris Runion, both R-Rockingham County, have asked Youngkin to reconsider.
Neither Obenshain nor Runion has introduced a budget amendment that would remove that language from the budget and fund the prison, but Runion said he believes the conversations with Youngkin will be more productive.
“The money is there,” he said, it just depends how it’s used.
Despite the legislators’ attempts to save the ACC, Obenshain made it clear that a reversal is unlikely.
“While I favor keeping the prison open,” he said, “I want to caution employees, their families and members of town that that still remains a long shot, and they should not pin their hopes on that process.”
Obenshain called the closure “gut-wrenching” and said people who’ve worked there for years and are close to retirement are facing displacement.
The Department of Corrections also drew criticism for initially asking new employees to repay their $6,000 sign-on bonus once the closure was announced. Obenshain said the state has reversed that and will no longer ask employees to repay the bonus.
He also said he hopes the state will use some debt relief funding to retire the debt acquired to build the prison’s water tank, and he’s introduced a bill to convey that tank to Craigsville so the town doesn’t lose its water access.
Craigsville is currently seeking a new tenant for the soon-to-be-vacated 399-acre campus, one that’ll bring revenue for the town’s operations and serve as a major employer, but the mayor wasn’t able to share any leads as of early January. In the meantime, he’s hoping to get some financial help from Augusta County and the state to help Craigsville “over the hump,” but he hasn’t received any word on if or when that could come through.
Despite its impending troubles, Fox said, the town survived when the cement factory closed in 1968, and it survived the closure of the local Stillwater Worsted Mills division. Fox said he doesn’t doubt Craigsville will survive this, too.
“It’s a tight-knit community,” he said. “We’re going to pull through this. We’re going to come back.”