Never-before-seen levels of growth are forcing Pittsylvania County to make decisions over its planning documents, including some that haven’t seen a thorough revision in decades.
The county aims to finish its comprehensive plan update by early 2027, alongside two other economic development plans. The county’s zoning ordinance update process is on hold until the comprehensive plan is done.
The county was initially following an untraditional path, pursuing a zoning ordinance update before a comprehensive plan update, to get up to speed with emerging uses for land.
For example, several proposals for data centers have come before the county board of supervisors in recent years. These developments are not mentioned in the existing zoning ordinance.
A comprehensive plan is a long-range guiding document for the future, and a zoning ordinance is a more practical tool for future planning.
Since the zoning rewrite process began four years ago, Pittsylvania has changed course back to the more traditional route, said Dave Arnold, Pittsylvania’s assistant county administrator.
“The impetus for the zoning rewrite being undertaken in 2022 was that we’ve got archaic regulations in there, and we’re seeing new uses, and it’s difficult to apply that zoning ordinance to today’s local context,” he said. “But it became even more imperative and more obvious that the comprehensive plan needed to be updated. So adopting a totally overhauled zoning plan was tabled temporarily.”
At the same time, the county’s Industrial Development Authority and its Regional Industrial Facility Authority are each working on strategic plans.
These are separate efforts from the comprehensive plan rewrite, although all of the documents will be complementary, said Kelly Smith, director of planning for Pittsylvania.
The county’s goal is for all of these documents to align, to help Pittsylvania best prepare for and anticipate continued growth, Arnold said.
A vision for future growth
Pittsylvania’s current comprehensive plan was last updated in 2010, and though the plan has been revisited every five years since then as mandated by the state, it hasn’t gotten a thorough overhaul.
A comprehensive plan is a long-range guiding document, outlining a vision for the locality’s future, including all pieces of county operations: infrastructure, parks and recreation, housing, transportation and economic development.
Pittsylvania hired Line and Grade, a Charlottesville-based civil engineering firm, as a consultant for the rewrite.
In September, the county accepted a grant from the Danville Regional Foundation to hire a consultant for this process. The local nonprofit committed to provide a 50% match, up to $300,000, to support the plan rewrite.
The total cost to hire Line and Grade was about $304,500, said Smith. This includes a base fee of about $201,000 for the comprehensive plan update and a preliminary evaluation of the county’s draft zoning ordinance and an additional $103,500 for optional services outside of that scope of work.
Line and Grade is in phase two of a four-phase process.
The update began in earnest in fall 2025, and phase one included the establishment of a resident advisory committee and opportunities for community input.
About 40 people attended an initial community outreach meeting in April, and about 160 people responded to a survey sent by the county to gather feedback on the plan update.
“Everybody has their heart in the right place and wants to see what’s best for Pittsylvania County,” Arnold said. “Now we’re turning a corner where we can take this input and feedback and combine it with data analysis. Things are starting to come together and coalesce.”
Line and Grade has gathered data on community demographics, existing land use patterns, potential areas for future development, comparisons with peer cities and existing natural resources.
Combined with community feedback, the firm created a vision statement for the comprehensive plan: “Pittsylvania County will grow in a manner that successfully blends rural protection with proactive economic growth.”
The firm also identified six focus areas to advance this vision: housing and neighborhoods; infrastructure, facilities and services; local amenities and quality of life; governance and civic leadership; rural and environmental resources; and employment and economic growth.
Phase two is underway, said Rachel Falkenstein with Line and Grade at a joint meeting of Pittsylvania’s board of supervisors and planning commission June 16.
This phase will include setting policies around the six focus areas, a draft of a transportation plan and a draft of the future land use map, which identifies anticipated compatible uses for different pieces of land in the county and is one of the key pieces of a comprehensive plan.
The future land use map will guide decisions around zoning updates as that document is overhauled, she said.
“You can also use it to make decisions about where infrastructure should go, where to extend a water or sewer line, because say we want housing in a certain area,” she said.
The upcoming third and fourth phases of the plan update will involve implementing the policies set in phase two and adoption of the plan.
There will be continued opportunities for community engagement throughout these phases, Falkenstein said.
Arnold hopes the community engagement will also “help people understand what the comp plan is and what it’s not,” he said.
“Sometimes people think it’s a plan that spells out what’s going to happen in every little square foot of the county, but it’s a guiding document,” Arnold said.
He said the goal is to adopt the plan by early next year, after which the zoning ordinance update can proceed.
‘A relic’
When Pittsylvania’s zoning code was adopted in 1991, it did not provide guidance for battery storage facilities, solar projects or data centers. It didn’t need to — back then, the county wasn’t attracting those kinds of developments.
But Pittsylvania is now experiencing unprecedented growth, and zoning is lagging behind, as the code has not had a thorough update in the 35 years since it was adopted.
“There are things that exist today that simply aren’t even contemplated in the zoning ordinance,” Arnold said. “It has gotten cumbersome, because … other than a few one-off little updates here and there, it’s basically a relic from its original date of adoption.”
Zoning provides a way for local governments to regulate how land is used. It typically designates part of a locality for compatible uses, like residential, agricultural, industrial and commercial. These designations are guided by the comprehensive plan’s future land use map.
Pittsylvania’s outdated zoning code has created difficulties for the county in the past because it didn’t provide guidance on new types of development. That’s why the zoning overhaul was initially pursued before the comprehensive plan update, Arnold said.
But county officials realized that zoning needed guidance from the comprehensive plan first and wanted to make sure that both documents were in alignment, he said.
“Sometimes, when you try to just take something in its entirety and force it through the pipeline, you can get it wrong,” Arnold said. “There should be alignment between your comprehensive plan, which is your vision, and your zoning ordinance, which is the tool to help fulfill that vision.”
But the board of supervisors and county staff are making amendments to the zoning code as needed if there’s a piece that needs to be updated immediately, he said.
“I don’t want to say we’re doing it piecemeal,” Arnold said. “But we’re making our current zoning much more navigable and applicable on a case-by-case, point-by-point basis, and breaking it down into more digestible chunks.”
The rewrite is also intended to eliminate inconsistencies, clarify and streamline regulations, make the document more user-friendly and bring local requirements into compliance with state code — which hasn’t been updated since 1991.
The zoning rewrite is nearly finished and will likely be adopted around the same time as the comprehensive plan update in early 2027, Arnold said.
Two economic development plans in the works
As the comprehensive plan is updated, two other local bodies are working on strategic plans that focus on future economic development in the county.
The Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facility Authority is a joint economic development group that acquires, develops and operates industrial properties, with the goal to attract companies that create jobs in the region.
RIFA is creating a regional economic development strategic plan that will consider industrial sites, incentive policies, a data center analysis, a workforce analysis, and agriculture and forestry sector opportunities.
This plan will be an update from RIFA’s 2019 strategic plan, said Matt Rowe, economic development director for Pittsylvania, at a 2024 board of supervisors meeting.
At the meeting, Rowe presented the process for updating RIFA’s strategic plan, saying that the goal timeline for completion was fall 2025. The plan has still not been adopted.
Rowe has not responded to a request for comment about why the plan was delayed or what the new timeline is.
The industrial development authority, an economic development board that promotes and fosters industry, is also creating an economic development strategic plan.
Joey Fawcett, former president of the IDA, said at the same 2024 meeting that the IDA plan will focus more on Pittsylvania than the RIFA plan, which is more regional and includes Danville. The plan will pull data from RIFA’s plan and “see what’s good for uniquely Pittsylvania County-type projects,” Fawcett said.
The IDA’s plan focuses primarily on housing, a key component of economic development.
The Berry Hill megasite has recently attracted industry — lithium-ion battery separator manufacturer Microporous in 2024 and AI data center developer Stack Infrastructure this year. Workers moving into the area to work at the megasite will need places to live, but Pittsylvania wants to make sure that housing is located in conducive areas of the county, Fawcett said.
“What can we do to see where the best opportunities for housing are, based on our current infrastructure?” Fawcett said. “This will look at targeted areas and identify them so that we won’t just fall prey to whatever developer comes into our area.”
The plan will identify ideal places for housing, lay out specific types of housing needed and price ranges. It will also include strategies for talent attraction and retention, including job opportunities, quality of life amenities, workforce development programs, access to healthcare and housing, and childcare availability and affordability.
John Daniel, current president of the IDA, did not respond to a request for comment.
Fawcett and Rowe said that the economic development plans will inform the comprehensive plan, but Arnold and Smith said that while the documents will work in conjunction, they are distinctly separate efforts.
The consultants for the comprehensive plan and the economic development plans are not working together, Smith said.
“We’ve met with economic development to go over those plans and make sure they’re consistent with the comprehensive plan, but they aren’t necessarily going to be part of the comprehensive plan,” she said. “They’re separate and a little more targeted.”
Ideally, the RIFA and IDA economic development plans will be finished early next year, around the same time as the comprehensive plan and the zoning code, Arnold said.
“The right hand knows what the left hand is doing, but they still have their separate focuses and objectives,” he said.
Correction: Figures for the cost of Line and Grade’s services have been updated.
