When Pittsylvania County’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 these kinds of developments.
But Pittsylvania is now experiencing never-before-seen levels of growth, and zoning is lagging behind. The code has not had a comprehensive update in the more than 30 years since it was adopted.
“There are a lot of uses that are prevalent today that were not even a thought in 1991,” said Emily Ragsdale, the county’s director of community development.
The county is at the tail end of a three-year process to completely overhaul zoning to provide a framework for the county’s present reality — and anticipate its future.
Zoning provides a way for local governments to regulate how land is used; it typically designates parts of a locality for compatible uses, like residential, agricultural, industrial and commercial.
Pittsylvania County’s outdated zoning code has created difficulties for the county in the past because it didn’t provide guidance on new types of development, Ragsdale said.
Data centers, for example, were not mentioned in the 1991 zoning ordinance.
“That was something that we added to our current ordinance because we’ve gotten a lot of interest, but it was not in there initially,” Ragsdale said. “There are a lot of impacts of those kinds of projects that people may not realize” without a zoning framework.
The county board of supervisors voted April 15 to deny a rezoning request for a data center project after months of controversy and resident opposition. Chairman Robert Tucker said at the meeting that zoning guidelines and an updated comprehensive plan would have made this process easier.
“Hopefully, as we move forward in the future, when we come up against these types of decisions, if we have an up to date comprehensive plan, it does not put as much heartache and pressure on this board,” he said.
The county wants to be more prepared in the future for other projects and industries it might attract, Ragsdale said.
Pittsylvania partnered with the Berkley Group, a local government consulting firm, for the overhaul process.
The rewrite is also intended to eliminate inconsistencies, bring local requirements into compliance with state code, clarify and streamline regulations, make the document more user-friendly and ensure that it is consistent with the county’s comprehensive plan.
That plan is scheduled to be updated after the zoning ordinance process.
These updated documents will ensure that Pittsylvania continues to grow in a “sustainable and smart” way, Ragsdale said.
Changes in the county but not its zoning
Since 1991, Pittsylvania County’s population has grown by about 3,500 people. Elected officials have come and gone, businesses have opened and closed, and local agriculture has shifted away from its longstanding reliance on tobacco farming.
In 1991, the local chamber of commerce did not yet exist. Dan River Mills, the economic engine in next-door Danville, was still up and running. The Berry Hill megasite, which is now home to the largest economic development project in Southside Virginia’s history, would not even be conceptualized for another 15 years.
Time has marched on, and life looks different in Pittsylvania County — but the zoning code does not.
That means that newer types of development, like short-term rentals, utility-scale solar and agrotourism, had no initial regulation.
As these projects popped up, the county added ordinances to address them.
“We’ve made a few modifications periodically to add some uses or to change language to meet state codes, but not a major overhaul,” Ragsdale said.
These modifications were reactionary measures, Ragsdale said. This has led to some regulations that aren’t as well-thought-out as they should be, she said, as well as to some inconsistencies in the county code.
The rewrite will “clean a lot of that up,” Ragsdale said.
It will also bring the local regulations into compliance with Virginia state code, which has been updated since 1991.
The current ordinance “largely does not comply” with state code, Caroline Vanterve, with the Berkley Group, told the board of supervisors in November.
Mirroring state code will protect the county from legal challenges and will keep staff from having to make judgment calls that could be arbitrary or inconsistent, Vanterve said.
Public perception around zoning has also changed since 1991, Ragsdale said. Several public input periods were held at the beginning of the zoning overhaul process so the county could learn about residents’ preferences.
“People would like to see some uses regulated a bit more stringently than they did when the zoning was adopted,” she said. “When it was originally adopted, zoning was seen as more of a regulation on what someone can do on their own property, rather than a tool that can help protect it.”
One example of this is public utilities, like water, sewer or power lines, which often fall under by-right zoning.
By-right means that a project is automatically approved if it complies with existing zoning regulations, without needing a stamp of approval from the locality.
“People don’t always want utilities to be by-right now, because they understand how it’s going to impact them,” Ragsdale said. “They want to protect their property and its value and their ability to enjoy it.”
Anticipating new uses
To date, Pittsylvania County has signed off on at least 20,000 acres of solar development, including one project that encompassed 1,555 acres.
The current zoning code, however, didn’t initially account for solar at all. Thirty years ago, using solar power to generate electricity wasn’t nearly as popular or as feasible as it is today.
In 1990, utility-scale solar electricity generation capacity in the United States was about 314 megawatts, enough to power about 314,000 homes for a day. In 2023, that capacity had risen to 91,000 megawatts, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act, enacted in 2020, requires Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power to produce electricity from 100% renewable sources by 2045 and 2050, respectively.
[Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.]
Utility-scale solar facilities began to proliferate in the state, especially in rural areas like Pittsylvania — the largest county in Virginia by size, spanning about 1,000 square miles.
These projects caught local government officials off guard when they started popping up in Pittsylvania County, Ragsdale said.
“We weren’t prepared,” she said. “We started getting approached with projects, and we didn’t know how to regulate it.”
Without existing zoning for solar projects, the county added solar ordinances to the zoning code as projects began to appear.
The minimum distance between projects required by the impromptu ordinances was initially only 1 mile. And before an ordinance was added in 2021, solar developers did not need to submit a site plan and landscape plan before receiving permits.
“People didn’t know what the impacts were going to be, and then by the time those impacts were realized, the cat was already out of the bag and we had approved all these projects,” Ragsdale said. “Now, we’re trying to reel that back in.”
In March 2023, the county approved a 2% cap on the total acreage that could be used for utility-scale solar in any zoning district. The minimum distance between projects is now 5 miles.
This came after years of complaints from residents about the perceived negative effects of solar projects, including increased stormwater runoff, aesthetics and fire hazards.
A similar situation arose when developers began to file data center proposals in Pittsylvania.
This happened for the first time last summer, while the zoning rewrite process was underway. Language around data centers had already been drafted for the rewrite, Ragsdale said, and it was needed sooner rather than later.
“We basically pulled that section out of the draft ordinance and baked it into our current ordinance because we were getting so much interest around data centers,” she said. “It has setbacks, it requires a special-use permit, it’s only allowed in industrial zoning districts, it regulates noise.”
The ordinance also includes water-use and aesthetic requirements and prevents the construction of new transmission lines for the purpose of serving a data center, Ragsdale said.
“We have basic standards that [developers] have to meet,” she said. “And then, during that special-use permit process, the board of zoning appeals has the ability to apply additional conditions over top of what those minimum standards are, to make sure that it doesn’t have any negative impacts on the adjacent areas.”
However, this process still allows a rezoning application to convert a piece of land to an industrial designation to permit a data center.
This is where the comprehensive plan and the zoning ordinance should be in lockstep, Ragsdale said.
“We don’t consider rezoning property unless either the comprehensive plan’s future land use identifies it as industrial, or it’s adjacent to existing industrial properties,” she said. “Otherwise, we would consider it spot zoning, and that’s not something we would entertain.”
The zoning rewrite process includes trying to anticipate future developments like solar and data centers so that Pittsylvania doesn’t find itself unprepared like this again.
“We’re on the verge of a lot of growth,” Ragsdale said. “It’s important to make sure that we not only have regulations in place to protect our residents as we move through these periods of growth, but also that we can grow in a way that’s going to be sustainable and smart.”
In its drafting process, the Berkley Group made sure that land-use permissions lined up with the county’s economic development goals, as well as development patterns over the past few years, Vanterve said.
Aligning the new code with those goals “allows the county to mitigate potential impacts on residents and agriculture appropriately, while being flexible to consider new industry and employment opportunities.”
A three-year process
The overhaul process began in 2022 when the county hired the Berkley Group. Since then, there have been community input meetings, bimonthly work sessions with local governmental bodies, many rounds of drafting and revisions and opportunities for public review.
The public was especially interested in whether existing properties would be grandfathered in, Vanterve said — whether the previous zoning code would continue to apply to them, once the updated version was published.
The new zoning ordinance will only apply to new applications or uses, structures or lots that plan to substantially change or expand, she said. “Anything that has already been approved … this new ordinance will not apply.”
A finalized draft of the updated code is with the board of supervisors, Ragsdale said. The planning commission recommended that the board approve the draft.
The board has postponed this vote several times, most recently in January, saying that supervisors needed more time to look over the proposed changes.
The vote is now scheduled for August.