The most politically fascinating place in Virginia right now might be Amherst County, with Campbell County coming in second.
Multiple forces are converging on both counties — and, admittedly, some others — that will require public officials there to make some decisions that most localities don’t have to. Many of these involve a subject that’s complicated, often misunderstood and usually politicized: energy.
Let’s start with Amherst County.
Many county taxpayers are still reeling from reassessments that are driving their tax bills higher. The board of supervisors reduced the tax rate but not by enough to hold tax bills the same. Just as the prices you and I pay at the store are going up, so, too, are the prices that governments must pay. That sticker shock from reassessments should make Amherst a prime candidate to hear options on how to hold down tax bills — and now it has some.
Off-track betting
Five years ago, Amherst voters were asked if they wanted to approve off-track betting for a Rosie’s Gaming Emporium. They said no, by a margin of 54.1% to 45.9%.
Now Rosie’s is trying again. Will the post-assessment political landscape in Amherst produce a different result? We’ll see. (Pulaski County also has its own referendum on off-track betting.)
A study by Mangum Economics commissioned by the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance forecasts that such a facility would generate $1.9 million in tax revenue during its first year of operation — $1.6 million from the tax on pari-mutuel wagering, the rest through other taxes such as meals taxes and sales taxes and whatnot. That $1.6 million figure for tax revenue seems on track with what other Rosie’s outlets have generated in smaller communities. The three most comparable ones are in Collinsville (outside Martinsville), Vinton (outside Roanoke) and Emporia.
Here’s what they generated last year:
Collinsville: $254,636
Emporia: $1,574,946
Vinton: $3,478,266
Those localities were allowed to keep half that money; the rest was shared with New Kent County, home of the Colonial Downs racetrack. That law has now been changed to allow host localities to keep all the tax revenue.
If Amherst were to reject off-track betting a second time, that would not be unprecedented: Manassas Park has voted it down three times, in 1996, 2004 and 2023.
The off-track betting question might be simple compared to the other issues coming before Amherst.
Data center
There are possibly two data center projects that will soon come before Amherst County supervisors.
Data centers have become politically unpopular, to put it mildly. However, they also generate enormous sums of tax revenues, which is why some localities prize them. Mecklenburg County’s Microsoft complex has generated so much revenue that the county has been able to build new schools — every school is now built in this century — and lower its real estate tax rate to the lowest in the state.
Some may see this as a Faustian bargain: Amherst could generate lots of tax revenue (the exact amount is unclear) with a data center. Is Amherst so opposed to data centers that it’s willing to turn away millions in revenue? If Amherst says “no” to both a data center and to Rosie’s, then how does the county propose to generate new revenues? That’s not an argument to approve either if people don’t want them, but it is an argument that Amherst will need revenue options if taxpayers don’t like their bills going up. If Rosie’s and a data center aren’t those options, then what is?
And then there’s this:
Nuclear reactors
Amherst and Campbell counties now find themselves in the middle of a nationwide debate over how we should generate electricity. Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s recent energy plan lays out some uncomfortable facts: Depending on which forecast you believe — low, moderate or high — Virginia will need to double, triple or quadruple the amount of power it produces.
And yes, data centers are a big factor in what’s driving those energy demands.
Under every option the governor’s plan lays out, Virginia needs more nuclear energy. The advantage of nuclear is that you can produce a lot of power in a small space — unlike, say, solar energy, which requires a lot of land to produce power only part of the time. The disadvantage is that nuclear has been expensive and time-consuming to build. And then there are those who are freaked out by the idea of splitting atoms.
Nuclear development slowed to almost nothing after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. It’s also been politically polarizing, with the right more receptive to it than the left. Now nuclear is seeing something of a renaissance with a push for small reactors that, in theory, can be built more quickly and cheaply. We’re also seeing a political realignment, with some on the left coming to see nuclear as the only realistic way to retire lots of carbon-belching energy facilities.
There are now three proposals to build small nuclear reactors in Virginia: Dominion Energy and Amazon are exploring one that would go at Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear station in Louisa County. That seems about as non-controversial as you can get. The place has two big reactors now and is authorized for a third anyway. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can become a donor and test that proposition.)
The other two reactor proposals are both in the Lynchburg area: Appalachian Power is looking at one at its Joshua Falls substation in Campbell County, and now a Charlotte, North Carolina-based energy company is pitching a facility that could involve multiple small reactors (sounds like two from the energy estimates) in Amherst County, almost directly across the James River from Joshua Falls.
If there’s any place in Virginia that understands nuclear power — or, at least, isn’t automatically spooked by it — it should be the Lynchburg area. The region has long been home to not one but two nuclear companies, BWX Technologies and Framatome. These two proposals will test just how open-minded the Lynchburg area is about nuclear.
With all these proposals, the questions start mounting: If Amherst approves a data center, can it realistically oppose the Beck Creek Energy project? It seems hypocritical to approve a big energy-drinking facility and then reject an energy generation site. After all, energy has to be produced somewhere. The two projects are separate and not a package deal — Amherst could easily approve a data center and oppose a nuclear facility, but that’s just creating a problem for somebody else that will have to host some kind of energy production. Amherst could reject all three things — Rosie’s, the data center, the nuclear site — but it still hasn’t answered the revenue question.
The questions get trickier on the other side of the James River in Campbell County.
Transmission lines
The Campbell County supervisors recently voted to oppose the proposed Valley Link transmission line that would go from Joshua Falls to Culpeper County. This is completely understandable. Transmission lines are ugly. Nobody wants one near them. I don’t. You don’t. None of us do. Valley Link is said to have nothing to do with Appalachian’s nuclear proposal — this is simply envisioned as a way to move electricity from the Midwest to Northern Virginia, with Joshua Falls as one link in the chain before the power moves on to another utility, in this case, Dominion. If Appalachian builds a nuclear reactor in Joshua Falls, that power is going to have to move out, too.
The governor’s energy plan says we need more transmission lines. Campbell County may not like this particular governor — only 26.6% of the voters there cast ballots for Spanberger — but nobody is really disputing that we need more energy and more transmission lines. Campbell County may not like the idea of having to bear the brunt of moving energy to data centers in Northern Virginia, but 73.6% of Campbell County voters backed Donald Trump in 2024 and he’s been an enthusiastic champion of artificial intelligence, which will require more data centers somewhere and more energy production somewhere and more transmission lines somewhere. Back across the river in Amherst County, 67.6% of voters there backed Trump.
The remaining percentages of voters who backed Kamala Harris aren’t off the hook, either, because the Biden-Harris administration also pushed for more transmission lines — the only real difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration on this is that they had different preferences for what type of power they wanted to move over those lines. Biden wanted more carbon-free energy, Trump is quite fine with carbon-based energy. And yet … both administrations have strongly backed more nuclear development.
The point here isn’t to say that Amherst and Campbell have to be for all these things — a Rosie’s, a data center and a nuclear facility in Amherst, a nuclear facility and transmission lines in Campbell. However, it is to say that many of them are connected and none of them can be viewed in isolation.
If Amherst voters reject Rosie’s and/or a data center, then they either need to reconcile themselves to their current tax bills or find other ways for the county to generate revenue. If they approve a data center, they can’t blissfully assume that some other county somewhere else will host the power generation. If Campbell doesn’t want Valley Link, then it may need to ask whether it wants a nuclear facility that will produce power that has to get out to market. And all of us might want to ask exactly how we’re going to make a society work where we’re using an average of 58 to 87 data centers each day and power demands are rising geometrically but none of us want a data center, an energy production site or a transmission line nearby.
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