Read more about the bills mentioned in this story — or any other legislation in the 2025 General Assembly session — at https://lis.virginia.gov/.
A House subcommittee on Friday tabled a bill that said land-use decisions around solar, wind, energy storage and data center projects should “belong solely to the locality and shall not be ceded to any state agency or state-sanctioned body.”
Del. Tom Garrett, R-Louisa County, said his HB 2068 was necessary to ensure that local governments can continue to extract proffers from developers of such projects.
Proffers are money or other concessions that a developer makes to a locality in exchange for project approval, and Garrett said they help fund the salaries of local teachers, firefighters and law enforcement.
“This is about helping our kids get an education and our public safety officials to provide that public safety,” Garrett told a subcommittee of the House of Delegates’ Counties Cities and Towns committee.
He referenced recent efforts to give the state more authority over approving renewable energy projects, including a proposal from the last General Assembly that could have allowed state regulators to override local government decisions on such projects.
“If you take from these localities the ability to make these decisions, then there is no reason on earth that the solar developer, for example, would proffer $2 million to Buckingham County. They wouldn’t need to. They’d come grease palms in Richmond and that’s not going to help our families,” Garrett said.
The state-versus-local tension over who should have the authority to approve or deny renewable energy projects comes as Virginia faces rapidly rising electricity demand, driven largely by the growth of data centers, as well as legislatively mandated clean energy goals.
Most proposed renewable energy projects have been solar, and some local governments are increasingly resisting them, whether by denying individual proposals or by enacting restrictive regulations.
Proponents of solar tout its carbon-free electricity generation and the revenue that solar projects can bring to landowners and localities, but opponents have cited concerns about solar farms’ impact on rural viewsheds, property values and the environment.
Earlier this month, a state commission focused on electric utility regulation recommended legislation to create a new board that would allow the state more sway over such projects and would require localities to adopt solar ordinances consistent with a statewide model. Del. Rip Sullivan Jr., D-Fairfax County, is carrying that bill in the House as HB 2126, while Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, is sponsoring it in the Senate as SB 1190.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin said during his State of the Commonwealth address this month that he believes land-use decisions about solar power and data centers should rest with localities.
Garrett’s bill initially applied to all land-use decisions. He proposed an amendment during Friday’s subcommittee meeting that narrowed the scope, saying at first it was “very broad.”
“Essentially, the bill said, ‘Land use decisions are local.’ People who are smarter than me came to me and said, ‘Tom, you’re going to kill your own bill because there are some land-use decisions that aren’t local,’” such as where an off-ramp for an interstate highway is built, he said.
Del. Katrina Callsen, D-Charlottesville, said that while she appreciated the amendment to narrow the bill’s scope, she didn’t think the bill was necessary because local governments currently have zoning authority to regulate such projects.
“I’m not sure what the purpose of this bill is other than a value statement for you that’s not required under the current code section,” Callsen said.
The Democratic-majority subcommittee voted 5-3 along party lines to table the bill, effectively killing it.
