Redevelopment initiatives are gaining momentum at Amherst County’s former Central Virginia Training Center campus, but local government and business leaders are still on a long path to bring the site back to life.
When plans for closing the state-run medical facility for people with developmental disabilities began in 2012, it was the largest facility of its kind in Virginia and was Amherst County’s largest employer. Since the institution officially closed in 2020, its vacant 95 buildings have sat untouched on a quiet 350-acre campus.
About this story
This is the second installment in a two-part series on the redevelopment of the former Central Virginia Training Center campus. The first story, published Tuesday, took stock of the site’s long and nuanced history.
Amherst County officials’ plan is to redevelop the Madison Heights site into a mixed-use neighborhood fit for the region’s 21st-century needs and future economic growth. Now that some buildings are slated for demolition, a plan for a new road into the property is in the works, and other steps are being taken to attract developers to the property, the vision is starting to take shape.
The plans are emerging against the backdrop of the site’s complicated history. The institution opened in 1910 as an asylum, and in the first half of its history, it served as an epicenter for eugenics — the now-discredited movement that sought to eliminate so-called social ills, such as intellectual disabilities, by controlling human reproduction through forced sterilization and other methods. Later in its history, the facility provided long-term medical care, education and rehabilitation for people with developmental disabilities that families across the region grew to trust and rely on.
The combination of the site’s heavy past stories and significant future potential means there’s much at stake in the redevelopment process, said state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville.
“It’s an unbelievable economic opportunity for Central Virginia, probably one of the best that’s going to be available for a long time,” he said. “We have to get this done right.”
A vision for a site ‘tailor-made for economic development’
The training center closed after Virginia reached a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice to shut down four of its institutions for patients with developmental disabilities.
As a state-owned property, the Central Virginia Training Center is not on Amherst County’s tax rolls. Megan Lucas, CEO of the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance, said that while the site once created jobs — more than 1,600 for regional residents at its peak, according to the site’s redevelopment plan — and brought families to the area, it now contributes nothing to the local economy.
Nothing except acres upon acres of redevelopment potential, she added.
In 2022, a redevelopment master plan for the site was published after a multi-year study, which included a feasibility analysis, spearheaded by the business alliance and contributed to by Amherst County officials, state representatives and other local and regional partners. The master plan proposes that the site be transformed into a mixed-use, walkable neighborhood with a combination of residential, retail and office spaces, along with a set of light industrial buildings.
The site along the James River is connected to downtown Lynchburg via the James River Heritage Trail, making it prime real estate in the region’s urban core, Lucas said.
“It’s tailor-made for economic development,” said Deeds about the vacant site’s location and layout.
If the master plan comes to fruition, Lucas said, the commercial and industrial spaces would create jobs, new housing would keep more families in the region, and more property would land on the county’s tax rolls. All together, she said, that generates more revenue for the county that can be invested in even more economic growth for the Lynchburg area.
“The goal of this redevelopment plan is to telescope a vision for the future of the region,” Lucas said. “And in order for this region to grow, our urban core has to be fed and watered.”
“It’s a success getting a master plan adopted, it’s a success getting people engaged, thinking about the property,” said Jeremy Bryant, Amherst’s county administrator, while taking stock of the planning steps made in recent years. “But we have a lot of work to do.”
The state’s Department of General Services has jurisdiction over the site and is responsible for selling it, Bryant said. In the meantime, the Amherst County Board of Supervisors adopted the redevelopment master plan into the county’s comprehensive plan to exercise some local control over the future of the site.
“The state’s in charge,” Bryant said. “But this plan gives reassurance to a developer: ‘If you buy this land and you need a rezoning, this is what the county sees and will support.’”
Developers likely wouldn’t invest in the property if they didn’t know whether their project plans would even make it through the planning commission, he explained.
Even so, the master plan is not set in stone, Bryant said.
“If another good project came along that was different from the master plan, I’m sure we would be open-minded to learn if it could benefit Amherst County,” he said. “Right now, having 95 buildings that are vacant, that aren’t on the tax rolls, that’s not a good thing, and it remains not a good thing until they’re bought.”
Buildings coming down and a road coming up
When Lucas markets the site to developers now, she said, they see dozens of buildings in various levels of disrepair on a secluded lot — and that’s a tough sell.
“Nobody is going to just do it out of the good of their soul. We are a free-market country, and this site needs a lot of cleanup,” Lucas said.
The property’s buildings were constructed at various points throughout the training center’s more than 100 years of history, leaving some fit for reuse today and others outdated and asbestos-filled.
The Department of General Services has identified about one-third of the buildings, 31 of them, as priorities for demolition, according to a January report from the department.
“Buildings that have exceeded their useful life and are no longer suitable for occupancy or repurposing were determined to be of the highest priority for demolition. Removing larger groupings of buildings to create opportunities for development was also a key consideration,” said Jackie Lipford, communications director for the Department of General Services, in an email to Cardinal News.
To execute the demolitions, the department only has $6 million — a sum acquired when the site’s outstanding bonds were paid off early, Lucas said.
There are no estimates available for how many of the 31 buildings can be demolished within the $6 million budget, Lipford said. Environmental surveys are expected to start soon and continue through the fall, she added, and survey findings will determine the extent of the hazardous materials present and associated abatement costs needed.
Demolitions should be completed by the fall of 2027, Lipford said.
County officials are also hoping to make the property more desirable by building a new road to it. Developers want their developments to have easy access and curb appeal, Lucas said — something that is currently lacking with the site’s one entrance road, which runs through a neighborhood.
The new road would cost about $20 million and would enter the campus from Virginia 210, Bryant said. County staff are currently working on an application for the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Smart Scale funding to cover the cost of the project. They’ll find out if they’ve been awarded the grant by next spring, Bryant said.
There’s work happening beneath the surface of the property, too, to prepare for future development on the site, said Tim Castillo, director of the Amherst County Service Authority. He said he’s in the process of shifting control of the property’s water and sewer systems from the state to the service authority so that “as redevelopment occurs over there, we can have a place at the table.”
Meanwhile, the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services is maintaining security and general conditions of the property. That cost about $670,000 in DBHDS’s 2025 budget, the department’s communications director, Lauren Cunningham, said in an email.
While the progress may seem slow, Lucas said, the property has come a long way in terms of marketability since the training center closed in 2020, when it had more than $25 million in outstanding bonds.
“When developers used to look at the site, they only saw millions in debt, old buildings, cemeteries, millions in cleanup. They couldn’t see the vision,” Lucas said. “As this moves forward, what they’ll see is old buildings and cemeteries still, but also some buildings that are coming down, and a clear vision for the future, and willing partners who are cleaning up the site.”
More site cleanup is on pause until more state funding can be secured, Lucas said.
Deeds made a state budget request this year for $10 million to remediate the property, but it didn’t make it through the General Assembly.
“We’ll try again next year,” Deeds said. “I’m not giving up. There’s just a limited amount of state money available, and there are a lot of people that want it, and the people that have the best laid plans are usually the people that get it. I think once we get the road figured out, the rest of it will fall in place.”
