When the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors denied a proposal last month to build a data center campus on a large swath of farmland after months of controversy, Chairman Robert Tucker said the process would have been easier with an up-to-date comprehensive plan.
Updated documents would have better reflected the county’s recent growth and vision for the future, he said, providing a framework for the board’s decision about a large industrial project.
The county’s comprehensive plan was last updated in 2010, long before data center developments were being proposed in Pittsylvania.
Though the plan has been revisited every five years since its last update as mandated by the state, it hasn’t gotten a thorough overhaul.
A comprehensive plan is a “vision for what you want the locality to look like in the next 20 or 30 years,” said Emily Ragsdale, Pittsylvania’s director of community development.
It takes into account all pieces of a county’s operations: infrastructure, parks and recreation, housing, transportation, economic development.
“All the areas that would need to be developed in order for us to reach that long-term vision,” Ragsdale said. “It lays out a roadmap of where we want to be.”
A locality’s comprehensive plan and zoning code are meant to work hand in hand to create a roadmap for the future.
While a comprehensive plan lays out an ideal for growth in a locality, a zoning ordinance is a practical, step-by-step manual for how to get there, Ragsdale said. The zoning code includes specific guidelines for land-use designations that are identified in the comprehensive plan.
In Pittsylvania, a county seeing recent economic growth, both documents desperately needed an update.
With a rewrite of the zoning code awaiting approval, the county is beginning the work to update this other framing document.
When both documents are updated, Ragsdale said that Pittsylvania will have a better framework to guide future decisions.
“There will be more informed decisions being made about land use, about development, about the best place to make investments,” she said.
Changing goals for a changing county
Ragsdale leads the community development department, which did not yet exist the last time the county’s comprehensive plan was rewritten, she said. Now, the department oversees this process.
One of the most outdated pieces of the plan is the future land use map, she said, which identifies anticipated compatible uses for different pieces of land in the county.
Parts of the county have seen infrastructure developments and increased demand for utilities since the map was adopted. This means that the current comprehensive plan’s designations for the “highest and best use” of land don’t always match reality, Ragsdale said.
An up-to-date future map would make it “easier for zoning to guide development, so that it’s not as impactful on citizens or as taxing on county resources,” she said. “We can place things where we have been planning for them to be a good fit from the start, and we’re not having to play catch up to make a fit.”
One example of that is determining where new housing construction would fit in, said Dave Arnold, assistant county administrator.
As Pittsylvania’s population grows, especially in the southern portion of the county, new housing will continue to be needed, he said.
Since 2010, the population in the county has actually declined by about 4,000 people. But recent economic growth in the region is expected to increase population again.
“The future land-use map should hopefully give us some good ideas for appropriate locations for housing, and for the public utilities that come along with it,” Arnold said. “It’s hard to build a 300-home subdivision off of private wells and septic tanks. We want to try to do that off of public water and sanitary sewer infrastructure.”
In 2023, the county approved a rezoning request to change about 580 acres from an agricultural designation to a residential planned unit development district to allow for a 1,900-unit residential community in Axton.
The staff report in the meeting agenda said that because adjacent properties were medium- and high-density residential, this rezoning would “be in accordance with the comprehensive plan and would meet a housing need,” even though the land was originally designated for agricultural use.
Many residents opposed the project, saying the land should remain agricultural.
Growth in the county will continue to necessitate new housing, and an updated comprehensive plan and future land use map will likely make that a higher priority than the existing document, Arnold said.
Finding appropriate places for future industrial development will also be important, he said.
The Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill is the largest industrial park in the Southeast U.S., and it has been competitive in attracting major industry in recent years. It landed the region’s largest-ever economic development project in the fall.
In addition to the megasite, “there is other interest in Pittsylvania County for industrial growth … and that’s going to need access to utilities as well, in a different way than residential development,” Arnold said.
The recent data center proposal stirred up controversy because it involved a rezoning request to change about 750 acres from an agricultural to a heavy industrial designation.
Balico, the developer, was attracted to the parcel because of a natural gas pipeline that cut through the area, which could be used to power the campus. The company said that this specific site alone could support the operations of the data center campus, even though it was designated for agricultural use in the outdated comprehensive plan.
“We were kind of caught between a rock and a hard place,” Tucker said.
When he began his term as chairman in January, he said that updating the comprehensive plan was one of his main goals.
With the county’s recent growth, “we cannot allow a comprehensive plan to languish that long,” Tucker said.
Pittsylvania isn’t alone in its recent growth. The entire Southside region has been working toward increased economic development.
Ragsdale and Arnold said that this will impact the rewrite of the comprehensive plan as well. The updated document will need to consider how Pittsylvania’s vision for growth complements or contrasts the goals of nearby localities, Arnold said.
“As Danville grows to the south and Lynchburg and Campbell County grow to the north, we feel pressure from both sides,” Ragsdale said. “We need to plan for that. We don’t want to get caught off guard when we start feeling those impacts.”
A new plan will ideally be more user-friendly and accessible to residents as well, Arnold said.
Engaged residents might consult the comprehensive plan to learn about the envisioned growth for the county, he said.
During public hearings about Balico’s data center project, many residents referenced the comprehensive plan, saying that the county should adhere to the agricultural designation it had attached to that parcel.
“[The plan] should be utilized by the community as a whole, not just community development or the board,” Arnold said. “It really should be a county document.”
Early stages of a long process
Normally, a locality’s comprehensive plan would be updated before its zoning code, Ragsdale said.
But because Pittsylvania’s zoning code was in even greater need of an overhaul — it had not been thoroughly updated since its adoption in 1991 — the county started there. A rewrite of the code is drafted and will go before the board of supervisors in August.
Ragsdale said she expects that the zoning rewrite will be approved before the comprehensive plan overhaul is finished.
Then, a consultant will take a look at the updated zoning document and identify any areas where rezoning might be needed to match the new comprehensive plan, she said.
But Tucker said that he’d like to see the comprehensive plan adopted first.
“I personally want to delay the adoption of new zoning and try to get as far as we can down the road with the comprehensive plan so that we’re all on the same page,” he said.
The board of supervisors has already postponed a vote on the updated zoning code draft several times. It will go before the board again in August.
Arnold said that a consultant will likely be selected by the summer. After that, the process will probably take between 12 and 18 months, Ragsdale said.
It’s a time-intensive process that involves many different parties, she said.
“Since VDOT [the Virginia Department of Transportation] maintains our roadways, we’ll work with them, and they’ll have to review the transportation section,” she said. “We’ll work with economic development and our partners there to make sure that we’re adequately planning for the growth they’re seeing. Parks and recreation, public works … a lot of different partners.”
The consulting firm will study demographic changes and projections, housing demand and stock, projected jobs, potential new types of employment and other trends.
Opportunities for residents to participate will be built into the process, Ragsdale said.
“We want public input from the beginning all the way through to adoption,” she said. “We’ll have [community meetings] on the front end and then again once we have a draft of the document. Then at the end of everything, there’s a public hearing, which is another opportunity for people to voice their opinions.”
Pittsylvania is the largest geographic county in Virginia, spanning almost 1,000 square miles. It has three towns, Chatham, Hurt and Gretna, and several other unincorporated communities, each with different identities.
Some Pittsylvania communities have “a whole different character and look and feel” than others, and are “facing different pressures for additional growth and development,” Arnold said.
This can present a challenge in rewriting the comprehensive plan.
“You want a holistic and comprehensive plan, but you have to recognize the uniqueness of these individual communities, so striking the right balance is going to be the trick here,” he said.
That’s where public input will come in, Arnold said, though that can also be a challenge due to the size of the county.
Ragsdale said there will likely be both in-person and virtual public input sessions. The in-person sessions will be held in various locations throughout the county.
In some ways, however, the vastness of the county can make decisions easier, especially when it comes to land use, Ragsdale said.
There are areas of Pittsylvania that are well-suited for some types of development, and not at all suitable for others.
“A lot of times, we can look at things like utilities and we know where it’ll never be feasible to have access to public water and sewer, or the level of broadband service that some companies need, and we know that area is going to remain largely agricultural for those reasons,” Ragsdale said. “It makes it easier to say we know that this area is not right for development for these reasons.”
Once a new comprehensive plan is adopted, the county should continue to be diligent about updating it to reflect current and future goals, Arnold said.
“This is going to give us a more effective tool for guiding land use decisions … and it’s got to be able to reflect the current times as well as the vision that stakeholders have for the next 20 years,” he said. “But you can’t foresee everything, and there should be certain planning efforts to update the plan accordingly.”
