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A greenhouse that represents a $100 million investment in Carroll County is bringing its first tomatoes to stores a little more than a year after the project was announced.

At Pluck’d, automated systems optimize water quality and fertilizer usage, while sensors continuously monitor the indoor growing conditions of rows upon rows of tomatoes.

The company’s pesticide-free, climate-controlled greenhouse, the first of two planned for the Southwest Virginia property, measures 32.5 acres, or about 1.4 million square feet.

“You go in it, you can’t even see the end,” the company’s Charlotte, North Carolina-based CEO Ben Alexander said in an interview, adding that the employees who work there “put in a lot of steps.”

The company chose Carroll County because of its favorable climate for the plants and their pollinators, Alexander said.

He said that the company’s processes represent a deliberate choice to prioritize quality over quantity.

“There’s this tendency for tomato suppliers to choose either yield or quality,” Alexander said. “Most people go for yield — get the numbers, get the volume. We have gone the opposite direction. We have gone for quality over anything.”’

Pluck’d tomatoes are now heading to Walmart, Weis Markets and other retailers. 

The company hopes consumers will look to its quality even as inflation and tariffs have made Americans increasingly price-conscious about the cost of groceries. 

Pluck’d suggests retail prices for its products of $4.99 for a 24-ounce package of “Preemos,” which consists of five or six tomatoes on the vine; $3.99 for a 12-ounce package of smaller cocktail tomatoes called “Plucculents;” and $4.99 for a 12-ounce package of snack-size “Plucklings.”

Pluck’d uses existing tomato varieties, but the company says its products are differentiated by its growing methods, quality control and some proprietary technology used to produce them.

A recent review of competitors’ prices at a Walmart store in Lynchburg showed tomatoes on the vine were $1.97 per pound, or about $2.96 for 24 ounces. NatureSweet Cherubs grape tomatoes ranged from $2.78 for a 10-ounce package to $5.98 for 24 ounces. Topline brand cocktail tomatoes were $2.98 per pound.

Alexander said the prices that Pluck’d suggests are “squarely in the ballpark” when compared to its rivals.

Pluck’d also says its domestically grown tomatoes have a longer shelf life because they get to stores faster than the imports that make up a majority of tomatoes sold in the United States.

About three-quarters of tomatoes sold in the U.S. are imported, and nearly 90% of those imports come from Mexico, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Part of the marketing for Pluck’d is to emphasize, as its packages state, that its tomatoes are “always grown in the USA.”

“I suppose there’s often this fixation on price,” Alexander said. “But with our products, you know, it lasts a whole week, maybe even 10 days longer, once you’ve bought it. So there’s this argument to say it’s not just about price, it’s about value. You’re getting a fresher product than you can otherwise buy.”

Growing its products domestically could offer Pluck’d a competitive advantage if rising fuel costs, the recently increased minimum wage in Mexico and recently increased import taxes weigh on the price of imported tomatoes.

Pluck’d development continues in phases

In early 2025, officials announced that United Kingdom-based Oasthouse Ventures would invest more than $100 million to bring Pluck’d to Virginia, supported by $800,000 in state grants. Alexander was a senior development manager for Oasthouse.

It joined a list of indoor farming — also known as controlled environment agriculture — companies in Virginia. Others include Red Sun Farms, which cut the ribbon on a tomato greenhouse in Dublin in 2014, and AeroFarms, which opened in Pittsylvania County in 2022 and recently said it would continue operating after warning of a potential shutdown for several months.

Pluck’d marks the first greenhouse investment in the United States backed by Oasthouse Ventures, but the company has developed others in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Today, Pluck’d operates as a separate company. It’s building out its facility in three phases at the Wildwood Commerce Park near Interstate 77. 

The first phase is the 32.5-acre greenhouse that is operational and producing tomatoes after Pluck’d planted its first crop of tomato plants on Feb. 5. The company announced on April 16 that its products were available in some stores.

Alexander declined to provide details on the company’s annual production except to say that it will produce “millions of punnets,” referring to the containers that hold the tomatoes. 

A February 2025 news release announcing the project said that it would produce and package 45 million pounds of tomatoes over three years.

The second phase, slated for next year, is another 32.5-acre greenhouse on the same property, which would bring the company to the 65 acres touted in its initial announcement.

The third phase, slated to begin next year, is to build infrastructure to heat the greenhouses by burning residuals from Virginia’s hardwoods industry.

“If we can decouple, or at least partially decouple, our energy supply from reliance on fossil fuels, I’d say that’s a bonus for the consumer because it affects price spikes by not being part of that,” Alexander said.

The greenhouse employs about 125 people. Once Pluck’d is fully built out, Alexander estimates it will employ about 270 people.

High-tech greenhouses have traditional jobs, including growers and crop workers, but also more technical positions, including climate-control technicians, pollination experts, and systems specialists to manage sensors and software.

Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County, whose district includes Carroll County, said Pluck’d will become one of Carroll County’s larger employers, providing stable, year-round jobs.

“When an international company with options across the Eastern Seaboard picks Carroll County, Virginia, it tells every other company watching that Southwest Virginia is serious,” Williams said in an email. “This won’t be the last investment of this kind if we keep building on it.”

Alexander hopes that the presence of Pluck’d will attract more greenhouses to Virginia, which in turn could boost the development of related industries providing lighting, fertilizer, seeds and more. 

“The more we can build, the more attractive it becomes to the satellite industries to move in, and ultimately, Virginia would benefit as a result,” he said.

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I invite you today to come with me on a journey of exploration. You need no safari kit, no hiking boots, just a curiosity about Virginia politics.

Every election gives us a new understanding of what Virginians are thinking. With that in mind, I’ve been exploring the recent special election results from different directions. I’ve looked at how important Northern Virginia is to Democrats by showing how increased pro-Republican margins on the “no” side in rural Virginia still couldn’t make up for the margins the “yes” side got out of Northern Virginia, particularly Fairfax County. I’ve looked at overall turnout across the state, which made the case that the “no” side missed an opportunity to win because of low turnout in Southwest and Southside Virginia.

Before I pose the question I’ll explore today, let’s set the stage. The “no” vote in the special election (essentially the Republican side, augmented by some Democratic dissidents and independents) exceeded the Republican vote for governor in last fall’s election by 3.4%, while the “yes” vote (most definitely the Democratic side) ran below November’s tally by 18.8%.

The reason why the vote was so close was, mathematically, because many Democratic supporters last year simply didn’t vote. The “no” vote was consistently above last year’s tally across the state in almost every locality (Lynchburg was a notable exception), while the “yes” vote ran below the 2025 Democratic vote everywhere. That made me wonder several things. Since the dominant theme here was the Democratic vote being down, was it down consistently or inconsistently across the state? (Spoiler alert: It was down inconsistently.)

That prompted four other questions: Where were Democrats most enthusiastic about the amendment? Where were they the least enthusiastic? Did Democrats in parts of the state now represented by Republican U.S. House members, but who would be moved into a district designed to go Democratic, show any special enthusiasm for the redistricting amendment? Did Roanoke Valley Democrats show any reluctance in supporting the amendment, given that redistricting would put their hometown congressional candidate, author Beth Macy, into a district where she’d be the underdog against former U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello?

The answers to these questions can be found in math — and mapping. This map shows how much the Democratic vote in each locality declined in raw numbers from November 2025. I’ve keyed the map to a midpoint of 81.1% since that’s the statewide average — the “yes” vote came in at 81.1% of last year’s Democratic vote. If you’re a stickler for math, you’ll notice 0.1% disappeared into the ether of rounding and the hazards of using just one decimal place.

That means any locality in green was above the state average (although still below last year’s numbers), while any in whatever shade of red that is came in below the state average.

As you can see, there are some clear geographical trends. Here’s what they are and what they mean.

Black voters appear to have been the most enthusiastic about the amendment

I base that on the fact that the localities (with a few exceptions we’ll get to) with the highest retention rate from last November are the ones where Black voters have the highest share of the population. Of Virginia’s 133 localities, eight have a Black majority population. All eight finished in the top 15 for retention rates, while all but two of the other seven localities on that list were neighboring localities in eastern Southside with large Black populations. It’s notable that most of those Black-majority localities had nothing to gain from the amendment in the sense that they’re in a congressional district represented by a Black Democrat now, and would still be under redistricting.

We also see these same trends when we look at the precinct level. In Roanoke, the retention rate in the Eureka Park precinct, in a Black neighborhood, was 88.2%. In South Roanoke, a predominantly white (and affluent) precinct, the retention rate was 79.7%. In East Gate, a predominantly white, blue-collar precinct, the retention rate was 77.3%.

Once again, Democrats are indebted to their Black supporters for showing up when many of the party’s white supporters did not.

The Democrats least enthusiastic about the amendment were in Southwest Virginia

The locality with the lowest Democratic retention rate was Buena Vista, where the “yes” vote was just 64% of the vote for Abigail Spanberger last fall. Buena Vista’s not in Southwest Virginia, so we’ll come back to BV, as the locals call it. With that exception, of the 11 localities with the lowest retention rates, 10 are in Southwest Virginia.

Buena Vista 64%
Buchanan County 64.8%
Wise County 64.4%
Norton 65.3%
Smyth County 67.8%
Lee County 68.3%
Dickenson County 69.4%
Scott County and Tazewell County 70.4%
Bland County and Russell County 70.5%

There seem to be two easy explanations for this, in whichever order you want to put them. Democrats in these localities had nothing to gain. They were in a Republican-dominated district to begin with; redistricting would still leave them that way. Also, the “yes” campaign devoted no visible effort to Southwest Virginia — or anywhere else west of the Blue Ridge, for that matter. All the big events were in the urban crescent. That’s understandable — that’s where the Democratic base is. This, though, is the consequence of Democrats ignoring the western part of the state. Many of their voters simply stayed home. It seems hard to believe that Democratic voters in Southwest found the map more objectionable than Democrats elsewhere; they likely just saw they had nothing to gain either way. That brings us to this observation.

Democrats in the future 9th District also didn’t have much enthusiasm

This lack of enthusiasm among western Democrats extended beyond Southwest Virginia — and into almost all of the localities not in the current 9^th District that would be under the new map, most noticeably Buena Vista. In the new configuration of the 9^th District, only two localities had retention rates above the state average: Floyd County, which at 81.2% was just 0.1 percentage point above water, and Martinsville, a rare Democratic stronghold in that district, at 82%. These “new” localities for the 9^th are currently in the Republican 6^th District, so Democratic voters there would see a change in district, but not really a change in representation. Maybe there are other explanations for this western drop-off, but this seems the most likely one. On the other hand …

The prospect of moving into a Democratic district was not a motivator for some Democrats

Under the new map (which still awaits the Virginia Supreme Court’s word that the election was lawfully placed on the ballot), Augusta County will be moved from a Republican district and split into three pieces, two of them placed in Democratic districts. Rockingham County will also be split into three pieces, all in Democratic districts. That did not seem to inspire Democratic voters there — both Augusta and Rockingham had below-average retention rates.

Democrats in the Republican-voting Piedmont counties that will get moved into the so-called “Lobster District” — formally, the 7^th — also had below-average rates. This feeling was not universal, though. Counties in the northern Shenandoah Valley had slightly above-average retention rates, which suggests that maybe other factors were at play. Still, the fact remains: Democrats in Augusta and Rockingham, even when faced with the prospect of having Democratic representation, were still less enthusiastic about voting than Democrats in Grayson County, which had no prospect for Democratic representation.

On the other hand, Democratic voters across Southside saw some of the highest retention rates in the state — many of those are currently in the Republican-dominated 5^th District but would be in Democratic districts with redistricting.

Without more data, it’s hard to explain why Shenandoah Valley and Piedmont Democrats weren’t excited while Southside Democrats were — other than race. There are simply a lot more Black voters in Southside and, as we saw, they were enthusiastic supporters for the “yes” side.

College towns saw lackluster turnout

Democrats cranked out large turnouts from college campuses (and college towns in general) last fall. They did not this time around. All the easily identifiable “college towns” came in below average: Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Radford and Williamsburg. Montgomery County was below average, with Blacksburg contributing to that. In Lynchburg, the college town skews conservative thanks to Liberty University, but both Democratic and Republican votes were down there — that’s why Lynchburg was one of the few places that produced fewer “no” votes this year than Republican votes last fall.

Roanoke Democrats did not seem to mind putting Macy into a primary with Perriello

One of the ironies of redistricting is that Democrats have something they rarely have — two well-funded candidates in mostly rural districts — but redistricting meant that one of them would have to go. I refer, of course, to former Rep. Tom Perriello of Albemarle County (in the current 5^th District) and Roanoke author Beth Macy (in the current 6^th District). The new map puts them in the same district, which will squeeze out one of them in a primary. Effectively, a “yes” vote by Roanoke Democrats was a vote to consign their hometown candidate to a likely early exit (the only public poll on the new district showed Perriello with a wide lead). Did that prompt any Roanoke Democrats to have second thoughts about the amendment? If so, they don’t show up in the returns. Roanoke had a slightly above-average retention rate. Either those “yes” voters were unaware of the implications or thought about them and ranked creating a new map as a higher priority than giving Macy an easy shot at the party’s nomination.

Westmoreland County is the real outlier

Scroll back up to take a look at the map. That bright green county on the Northern Neck is Westmoreland County. It had the second-highest retention rate in the state: 88.6%, just below Surry County at 88.7%.

Surry fits in geographically with those other counties in eastern Southside that have a large Black population. Westmoreland County doesn’t fit that profile. It has the lowest Black population of any county on the Northern Neck, with the exception of King George County. So racial demographics aren’t what has driven Westmoreland’s high retention rate. What could it be? Unless we go interview all 3,310 “yes” voters in the county, we won’t know with absolute certainty. However, Westmoreland Democrats mounted an unusually aggressive “yes” campaign for a rural area. 

“We specifically targeted strong Democrats and went to Black churches to refute the misinformation being lobbed at them by Republican operatives,” Westmoreland Democratic chair Victoria Luna told me by email. “Also, we held a Town Hall Meeting with over 60 participants and sent out 1,500 post cards with our contact information so voters could see what side we are on. For the first time we targeted strong Democrats who own property along key highways, and then we launched a barn sign campaign. We installed 15 barn signs throughout Westmoreland County at the best possible locations. We target[ed] strong Democrats and canvassed door to door with a focus on early voting. And lastly, we had almost 30 volunteers at the polls on election day, whereas Republicans had very few.”

If more Democrats had been like the Westmoreland variety, the special election would not have been as close as it was. If Republicans had higher turnout from their voters, especially in Southwest and Southside, they might have won.

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The first branded hotel in the River District broke ground Tuesday, launching about a year and a half of construction on the Hyatt Studios property that will be geared toward long-term stays. 

The hotel on the banks of the Dan River near the Main Street Bridge will have 122 rooms, designed for guests who are in town for weeks or months at a time, like construction crews and students in the U.S. Navy’s Accelerated Training and Defense Manufacturing 12-week program. 

There was pent-up demand for this type of lodging, said Rory Dowling, owner of 1st & Main Development, the Durham-based company behind the project. 

Construction on big projects in the city and county continues to require crews to stay in the area for longer periods of time. In March, Italian rocket manufacturer Avio announced a $500,000 investment for a new facility in Hurt in Pittsylvania County, and lithium-ion battery separator company Microporous began construction this week at its new facility at the Berry Hill megasite. 

And many students at the ATDM program are living in River District apartments for months at a time, taking those units off the market for people who are looking to move to Danville amid an ongoing regional housing shortage. 

“You’ve got this demand for people that are either coming here to build or to train, and there’s just not really that type of true extended-stay offering right now,” Dowling said. “This will hopefully alleviate some of the backlog of that residential demand as builders try to catch up and get more units here.”

On top of housing demand, Danville continues to see lodging demand grow beyond its current supply. The city is working on meeting this need — two other hotels are being built on Riverside Drive, a few miles from the Hyatt site, and a new boutique hotel opened in February in the Schoolfield neighborhood.

There are nearly 1,300 hotel rooms in Danville today, according to information provided by Lisa Meriwether, Danville’s tourism director. Since 2020, the Bee Hotel, the Holbrook Hotel, Caesars Virginia and the Laurel Hotel have opened, adding over 400 rooms to Danville’s lodging supply. 

Nightly stays in Danville were up about 10% during the first half of this fiscal year over the first half of last fiscal year. The city has seen an increase from 21,500 to 23,700 stays per month, according to the city’s chief financial officer, Michael Adkins. 

This Hyatt Studios Riverfront will be the first branded hotel in the River District area, located between downtown and North Main Hill, a neighborhood that the city is working to revitalize. 

It marks the third project in Danville for 1st & Main Development, which builds both apartments and hotels. 

The $35 million project is “a significant investment along our riverfront, one of Danville’s natural assets,” said Danville Mayor Alonzo Jones during the groundbreaking. 

“It’s another step in strengthening the River District as a destination for visitors, businesses and residents alike,” Jones said. “This project really speaks to the moment and the momentum we’re establishing here in our city and our region. We’re seeing more opportunity, more investment, more people choosing Danville.”

The rooms will have amenities for longer stays, like larger room spaces including a seating area, a larger refrigerator and a hot plate for cooking. The hotel property will also connect to the riverwalk, a paved walking trail that runs along the Dan River for more than 10 miles and a pool that overlooks the trail. 

From a vision to a reality 

Conversations about this project started about two years ago, Dowling said. Because of the location along the river at a former Dan River Mills site, the property required a thorough environmental analysis before work could begin. 

The developers had to make sure there was no groundwater contamination at the brownfield site from previous mill operations. They also had to conduct flood analysis and build up the ground at the site about 7 feet above ground level to mitigate flood impacts, Dowling said. 

“They had to go through the same thing with the YMCA on the other side [of the bridge],” Dowling said. “It’s definitely not easy, it adds cost, it adds time.”

But after several delays, the project is now expected to finish construction in about a year and a half, opening in late summer or fall of 2027.

Hyatt launched its Hyatt Studios properties for extended stays in 2023. Five of these properties are open across the country, 10 more are under construction and 70 are planned, said Jared Riccio, regional vice president of development for Hyatt. 

In addition to the larger rooms, the property will also cater to long-term guests with a market for grab-and-go food, where guests pay at a kiosk rather than waiting to be helped at a register. 

Dowling said that the outdoor pool and connection to the riverwalk will encourage guests to “take advantage of outdoor recreation” in Danville.

Tina Leone, executive director of the River District Association, said she’s hopeful that guests will also patronize local businesses in the River District and North Main neighborhood. 

“They’ll be bringing overnight visitors directly to the doorstep of our downtown,” Leone said at the groundbreaking. “More visitors means more feet on the street, more customers and more opportunity for our local businesses to thrive. … This is exactly the kind of investment that puts the River District on the map as a destination, not just for locals, but for visitors.”

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Scott County supervisors must figure out how to close a nearly $2.5 million gap between projected income and spending requests in the next fiscal year.

On Wednesday, the county board will discuss the budget that will take effect July 1.

Supervisors earlier worked on the proposed budget during April 1 and April 29 meetings. According to meeting documents, projected income for fiscal 2026-27 is nearly $36.43 million, but departmental spending requests total more than $38.9 million.

Among major income sources, real estate tax income for the coming fiscal year is projected to be about $12.12 million, compared to about $12.32 million in the current budget. Personal property tax income is projected to be about $3.16 million, compared to about $3.04 million in the current budget. Local sales and use tax income is projected to be almost $2.47 million, compared to about $2.42 million in the current fiscal year.

Miscellaneous revenue is projected to be $3.07 million, down from $3.32 million in the current budget.

Significant potential spending increases include:

• County administrators have not received a final funding request from the school system, but for planning purposes, the current draft budget includes $11.75 million for schools. The current budget includes more than $11.15 million for schools, or about $597,000 less.
•  The sheriff’s office seeks $3.1 million, compared to a current budget of $2.74 million. The funding request includes $260,000 for vehicle replacement.
• The elections budget request is nearly $304,000, compared to a current budget of nearly $136,000. The department needs more money to comply with federal and state mandates to upgrade voting machine software and hardware.
• County funding requests for volunteer fire departments total $715,500. The current budget allocates $645,500.
•  County funding requests for rescue squads total nearly $297,000. The current budget allocates nearly $270,000.

Among projected decreases in spending, the most significant is regional jail costs at about $2.64 million. The current budget for jail spending is $3.16 million. Among the departmental changes, jail operating costs are projected to drop from about $2.47 million in the current budget to about $2.18 million, while debt payments on regional jail facilities are expected to decrease from nearly $509,000 in the current fiscal year to about $453,000.

The board has not made any final decisions on the real property tax rate or other taxes. The draft budget includes a 2% cost-of-living adjustment for county employees, according to Josh Wilson, the county administrator.

The budget meeting will follow the board of supervisors’ regular monthly meeting, which begins at 9 a.m. Wednesday in the county administrative building, 190 Beech St., Gate City. View the agendas for the regular meeting here and the budget workshop here.

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Hi Cardinal readers, and thanks for scoping the latest edition of Tech Briefs, a weekly batch of items covering the digital and life sciences landscapes. The roundup goes live on Wednesdays.

Got tips and/or questions? Reach out to me via tad@cardinalnews.org.

Hackers’ work stealing, exploiting images is cheaper, simpler in generative AI era 

There is no guarantee that a hacker with store-bought artificial intelligence models and a knowledge of simple commands can’t snag your publicly posted images for a myriad of unauthorized uses, a research team has found.

The team, led by Virginia Tech cybersecurity expert Bimal Viswanath, delivered findings in March during the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning in Munich, Germany, according to a university news release.

Once images are acquired, hackers can use them for artificial intelligence training, style mimicry and deepfake manipulations, according to the release.

“We stress the urgent need to develop robust defenses and establish that any future protection mechanism must be benchmarked against attacks from off-the-shelf GenAI models,” Viswanath wrote with a Virginia Tech colleague, assistant professor Peng Gao; doctoral students Xavier Pleimling and Sifat Muhammad Abdullah; a University of Texas at San Antonio professor; and two professors from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

According to the paper’s abstract, generative AI model advances have fostered the development of multiple strategies to protect images from unauthorized use. Those strategies employ so-called “protective perturbations” — imperceptible sounds embedded onto images to thwart models from “learning” and misusing them. Previously, attackers required made-to-order methods to neutralize such protections, but now someone can give a text prompt to an “off-the-shelf image-to-image GenAI” model to “denoise” images.

In eight case studies with six diverse protection schemes, the team’s general-purpose attacks breached the noises better than more specialized attacks “while preserving the image’s utility for the adversary,” the documents read. “Our findings reveal a critical and widespread vulnerability in the current landscape of image protection, indicating that many schemes provide a false sense of security.”

Read the entire paper online.

“As GenAI models continue to grow in capability, this threat will only become more severe,” the team wrote. “Therefore, we stress the urgent need for the research community to develop a new generation of robust protection schemes. We posit that resilience against this simple denoising attack must serve as a fundamental benchmark for any future defense mechanism.”

Entrepreneur Resource Center opens in Blacksburg

Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center leaders cut the ribbon Tuesday for a new hub focused on business founders in Blacksburg.

The Entrepreneur Resource Center, ERC for short, was designed to change how founders start, navigate and grow their businesses, VTCRC spokeswoman Danielle Akers said in a recent email.

“At a time when entrepreneurs are often navigating fragmented resources and unclear pathways, the ERC creates something different: a structured, accessible entry point into the innovation ecosystem,” Akers wrote, describing it as one “place where ideas can gain traction, where founders can connect to the right people faster, and where momentum can turn into real companies.”

Programming, mentorship and connections to capital will be available at ERC, which is open to entrepreneurs at every stage, including faculty innovators and Virginia Tech alumni and students, as well as founders from the region, according to its website. 

Get more information, including a link to participate, at vtcrc.com/entrepreneur-resource-center.

Second state-funding round set for EV charging assistance

The Virginia Department of Energy has announced a new round of funding for electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the commonwealth’s underserved communities, according to a department news release.

Applications are due June 30 to participate in a program designed to broaden access to EV supply equipment, fill gaps in charging availability and deliver community benefits meant to broaden EV adoption. 

Virginia Energy will make up to $510,000 available to applicants that include for-profit businesses and government-industry partnerships to purchase and install EV charging equipment in projects expected to continue through the end of 2027, according to the news release.

This is the second round of Electric Vehicle Charging Assistance Program funding, focusing on historically underserved areas, including financially and environmentally disadvantaged communities, brownfield sites and previously mined areas.

“Expanding EV charging access in underserved communities is essential to ensuring that Virginia’s transportation future is reliable, practical, and accessible to everyone,” said Michael Skiffington, Virginia Energy’s acting director, in the news release. “Through this funding opportunity, Virginia Energy is working to support projects that meet community needs, strengthen local infrastructure, and help more Virginians benefit from the transition to cleaner transportation options.”

According to the release, funded projects would provide data on charging usage, operational performance, user accessibility, and economic and community impacts while complying with federal requirements. 

Deadline for applications through the Virginia Energy Grant Portal is due by 11:59 p.m. June 30. Questions submitted through the portal’s help questions tab are due by June 23.

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Governor Spanberger has now made two trips to western Virginia in her first hundred days. On April 16 she was in Abingdon. On April 27 she was in Roanoke. The visits happened. The way they happened is the story.

In January, before the inauguration, Cardinal’s Dwayne Yancey gave the incoming governor five pieces of advice. The third one was “show up — a lot.” He coined what he called the Roanoke Rule: a Roanoke address does not count as Southwest Virginia. Some don’t believe the New River Valley counts either. The advice was specific and the test was clear. Three months in, the test has been run.

The Regional Readiness Summit on April 16 brought more than 100 senior public safety leaders to Abingdon. Sheriffs, fire chiefs, emergency management. The kind of room a governor uses to build standing in a region she does not represent politically. The Abingdon stop was the inaugural event in what the administration is calling a Unified Readiness Framework, executed under Executive Order 12. It is exactly the kind of substantive, region-specific event Yancey was asking for.

The governor’s public schedule listed the April 16 event as closed press.

The press release came out of Richmond the next day. The local coverage ran a few days later off that release. There were no photos of the governor with a sheriff in front of a courthouse. There was no on-camera moment of her listening to a fire chief explain what crisis response looks like in coal country. The standing accrued to the administration’s internal record. It did not accrue to the region’s sense of being seen.

Closed press is a choice. It is not a scheduling accident. Governors close events when the substance is sensitive or when the room needs candor that cameras would chill. A regional readiness coordination meeting is not that kind of event. The administrative goal of the meeting and the political function of a governor showing up in Washington County are not in tension. They are complementary, and they are both available, if the governor wants both. Spanberger took the administrative goal and skipped the political function.

On April 27 the governor signed twelve bipartisan education and workforce bills in Roanoke at the 100-day mark, at the Roanoke Higher Education Center. A real list of bills, including one that makes the Roanoke Community Builders Pilot Program permanent. The event was open press. It generated the kind of regional coverage southwest Virginia rarely gets from a sitting governor.

Protesters from Botetourt County drove to Roanoke to confront the governor about the data center sales tax exemption and the recently approved Google data center in their county. Asked about the exemption, Spanberger said it was “wholly appropriate for the legislature to continue having conversations” about whether it should exist into the future. That is the kind of sentence a governor uses when she does not want to take a position in the room she is standing in. It is defensible in Richmond. It reads differently in Botetourt, where the people asking the question had to leave their county to ask it.

The Botetourt protesters did the work the governor’s schedule would not. They closed a presence gap by traveling. The closing of that gap, by them, is the evidence of the gap.

Two visits. One closed press in the place where the visit would have mattered most as a regional signal. One open press in a place that, by Yancey’s own rule, is not southwest Virginia. The pattern is consistent and it is not subtle.

None of this is to argue the governor has done nothing for the region. Her appointments to the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors and her early decisions on data center policy are substantive interventions with consequences. The question is whether a governor who has made those moves can afford to keep making them without the standing that comes from showing up.

Mark Warner launched his 2001 campaign in Abingdon, the same town where Spanberger held her closed-press summit twenty-five years later. The choice of place was deliberate. Warner spent the next eight months working southwest Virginia hard enough to win a majority of Virginia’s counties, the last Democratic gubernatorial candidate to do so. The permission was still cashable a decade later.

Spanberger won the governorship by 15 points — the largest gubernatorial percentage margin since 2009. The margin came from federal worker fury in Northern Virginia and from a Republican opponent who never found a message. It did not come from southwest Virginia and it did not come from Southside. The governor knows this. Her schedule reflects it.

Earning the room is not complicated. Bring the cabinet to a community college in Wise County and let the workforce funding conversation happen in front of cameras. Sign the next gun bill at a sheriff’s office in a county where the sheriff supported the legislation, with the sheriff at the podium. Hold an open-press version of the Abingdon summit in Tazewell or Norton. Visit Botetourt before the protesters drive to Roanoke to find you.

What happened in April was none of that. A closed-press administrative briefing in Abingdon and an open-press bill signing in Roanoke do not, taken together, constitute a regional strategy. They constitute a calendar.

There is still time. The 100-day mark is a media event, not a political ceiling. The Regional Readiness Summit series will continue. The bill signings will continue. Where to hold them. Who appears on the podium. Whether the press is invited. The administration makes those choices one event at a time. Each of them is legible from this end of I-81.

By the Roanoke Rule, the governor has been to southwest Virginia once in three months. The visit was closed press. The region can read a calendar. 

Tommy Turner of Christiansburg is a researcher whose analysis of institutional governance and Virginia policy has appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Virginian-Pilot, Roanoke Times, and Virginia Mercury.

The post Researcher: Spanberger visited Southwest Virginia. The way she visited tells the region what she thinks of it. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Here are some of the top headlines from other news outlets around Virginia. Some content may be behind a metered paywall:

Politics:

Virginia joins 21 states in opposing USPS gun mailing proposal. — Virginia Mercury.

Spanberger appoints new leader at Department of Motor Vehicles. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

Economy:

Breeze Airways to launch Richmond-Cancun nonstop service. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

Permit sought for Spotsylvania data center. — The (Fredericksburg) Free Lance-Star (paywall).

Weather:

For more weather news, follow weather journalist Kevin Myatt on Twitter / X at @kevinmyattwx and sign up for his free weather email newsletter. His weekly column appears in Cardinal News each Wednesday afternoon.

The post Headlines from across the state: Virginia joins 21 states in opposing USPS gun mailing proposal; more … appeared first on Cardinal News.

For years, residents of Chase City watched nostalgically as a historic school and a historic theater fell into disrepair. But they will soon see both buildings rehabilitated — one transformed into something new and the other restored to its former glory — as part of a larger revitalization effort in the town.

Just a few blocks apart in the Mecklenburg County town are the former Robert E. Lee Elementary School and the former Mecca Theatre. Both built in the early 1930s, these buildings played crucial roles in the community over the course of their vibrant lifespans, but eventually they became vacant and dilapidated. 

“Historic schools are psychologically very important to a community,” said Edwin Gaskin, the developer for the project to turn Lee Elementary School into apartment units. “Beyond the brick and mortar, beyond the structure, there are stories and lives and memories that have been housed there.”

The building closed as a school in 1980, and it was used for various community purposes after that until closing to the public about six years ago due to structural concerns. 

This will be the ninth historic school redevelopment for Gaskin’s company, Echelon Resources, which is based in South Boston.

With financial support from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, the school will be rehabilitated into a 17-unit apartment building through an almost $4 million project that retains historic features from the building’s past life. 

The Mecca Theatre has been vacant since its closing in the 1980s, though owner Beverly Wood is working to transform it back into an operational theater. The multi-year project will likely cost between $4 million and $5 million, she said.

Wood, a native of Chase City, has fond memories of seeing movies at the Mecca as a young girl — though she had to watch them from the balcony seats during segregation. She returned to the town to restore the theater after decades of working in the film industry in Hollywood. 

Together, these projects represent the start of a larger revitalization effort as the town works to bounce back from a decline in the tobacco industry and accommodate and attract new industries.

From classrooms to apartments

The Lee Elementary School was “the heart of the town for a long time,” said Town Manager Dusty Forbes. 

It’s a one-story brick building with a clerestory, or a section higher than the rest of the roofline with windows to let in extra natural light. The school is part of the Chase City Warehouse and Commercial Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. 

After its life as a school, it was used as a community center and food bank. More recently, it was empty, wet from pipes that burst and a leaky roof. 

“It wasn’t maintained the way it should’ve been, and a lot of that was due to lack of funding in the town,” Forbes said. “We lost manufacturing jobs and those businesses left, and then tobacco fell out of favor. … That was a big economic hit for the town, so that added to the deterioration of the building.”

But the town didn’t want to tear it down — or use it for something that didn’t contribute to the future of Chase City.

“People didn’t want it to be a throwaway project,” he said. 

The town broke ground on the Chase City Lofts project on April 24, kickstarting 12 to 18 months of construction to transform the building into apartments. 

The developer, Echelon Resources, has done similar projects throughout Virginia and North Carolina. Echelon Resources is an owner-developer company, which means it will operate the property after construction is done, Gaskin said. 

After a few years of design work and community feedback, Echelon Resources went under contract to purchase the building in fall 2025. 

“There was a really laudable effort by the town to explore alternative options, to hear concerns, to really vet this through the community,” Gaskin said. “And I was OK with that because I’d rather have a project that people support after thinking about various options.”

Mostly, people were concerned about the preservation of the building’s history and legacy, Forbes said. 

“The older generation who have always lived in Chase City, they didn’t want to see something that takes away the memories, the good times,” Forbes said. 

These conversations have happened in other places where Gaskin has worked on school redevelopment, he said. 

“You touch a nerve when you’re addressing the next chapter of a building that was extremely important for so many people,” Gaskin said. “They want it to be honored, they want it to be redeveloped with integrity.”

The building will look exactly the same from the outside, and inside, historic features will stay, as mandated by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for the use of historic tax credits. Historic chalkboards and built-in cabinetry, doors and trim won’t be altered, Gaskin said. 

New housing will make a large impact on Chase City, said Gaskin and Forbes, as the town works toward economic growth. 

The 17 apartments will be mostly one-bedroom units, with a handful of two-bedroom apartments, Gaskin said. There’s no information yet about rent prices. 

“Even though it’s not going to be a school again, the way it’s going to be made relevant to future generations is just as worthy,” he said. 

Like many other communities in Southwest and Southside, Mecklenburg County is experiencing a housing shortage, and it’s working to create housing from both new construction and adaptive reuse projects. To keep up with growth and fill existing housing shortages, the county needs more than 1,500 new units in the next five years, according to Community Scale’s housing forecast, which provides housing data on localities nationwide. 

The Microsoft data center in Mecklenburg County is about 10 miles away from Chase City, and its over 700 employees — and others moving to the area for work — need places to live, Gaskin said. 

“If they don’t have that professional-grade housing stock, then essentially they’re losing a large portion of that economic value to other localities that have more competitive, more modern housing stock,” he said.

Still, the rehabilitation of historic buildings is expensive, and communities can struggle to finance these projects even when the infrastructure and the desire are there. 

That’s where the tobacco commission stepped in, said Jordan Butler, public relations director for the commission. 

Usually, the commission awards grant money for economic growth in the counties affected by the decline of the tobacco industry, like Mecklenburg. For this project, it took a different approach, providing a low-interest loan for the first time.

The total project cost is just under $4 million, and in exchange for the commission’s loan to the Chase City Industrial Development Authority, 25% of units will be reserved for workforce housing, or people making between 80% and 150% of the area’s median income. 

Gaskin initially approached the commission about its existing grant program, said Stephen Versen, deputy director of the tobacco commission. When the commission learned that the project had a funding gap, even after participating in state and federal historic grant programs, it started talking about the possibility of a loan, Versen said. 

“Over the life of the project, that’s going to have a much bigger impact on a developer’s bottom line than a grant would,” he said. “And from the commission’s perspective, that allowed us to make this project happen with less of a cost to us. It’s a new model.”

Gaskin and Forbes said the tobacco commission was essential in making this project possible. They called it “a pilot project” for the commission, and Butler said it’s something that could be replicated in other localities. 

“The tobacco commission coming in and not just doing a grant, but funding this at an interest rate that would not break the developer, that can be a road map going forward,” Forbes said. “Not just for us, but for other places in Southwest Virginia. I’m really excited to see where that goes, knowing that Chase City was the first stop on the train.”

The project is expected to spur additional development in Chase City. 

“It’s a small project. 17 units aren’t going to change the world,” Gaskin said. “But what it should do, like we’ve done in other rural Southwest and Southside communities, is show that market-rate, high-quality upscale housing can succeed and thrive. When that happens, because it’s a when not an if, other investments will be made, either by us or by other groups.” 

Outside of this project, the town IDA is purchasing buildings on Main Street to fix them up or sell them to developers, said the town’s mayor, Alden Fahringer. The goal is to bring life and vitality back to Main Street and fill all of the vacant storefronts, he said. 

“First and foremost, we have to have people who live here in Chase City, who do life here, who spend their dollars here and who want to stay here,” Fahringer said. “That’s a very pressing thing for us.”

The resurrection of the Mecca Theatre

Bev Wood’s parents were serious about their children’s education. The kids went to school, did their homework, did their chores and participated in sports. 

“Going to somebody’s house and hanging out was not part of our routine,” Wood said. “But we could go to the movies.”

Like most other establishments in the 1960s, the Mecca Theatre was segregated. 

As a young girl, Wood bought her ticket outside and then watched the movie from the balcony seats. It didn’t bother her at the time, she said. 

“If that’s all you know, then that’s all you know,” she said. “The whole place had rats, it’s not like there were only rats in the balcony. And we got to see our friends and our cousins.”

Wood loved all movies and saw everything she possibly could, but she especially loved Elvis Presley movies. She’s 69 years old now, and she still loves Elvis. 

The theater is part of a strip of buildings on Main Street, with a partial brick facade and a marquee above the double door entrance. 

“My whole life, I’ve always had good feelings about the time spent at the Mecca,” Wood said. 

After studying chemistry in college and grad school, Wood moved to California for a job in the film industry. She eventually became vice president of technical services for Deluxe Laboratories, which works with film clients on technical and production services. 

“I had done some work with something called silver retention, where you change the processing of a film and you give it a particular look,” Wood said. “They couldn’t believe that I knew how to do it, and it looked amazing. After that, people started mentioning my name.”

Over her 36-year career, she worked on movies like “Se7en,” “Braveheart,” “Skyfall,” “O Brother Where Art Thou?” “Angela’s Ashes” and “Sleepy Hollow.” 

Every summer, she visited Chase City.

“When I came home, I would always look at the Mecca and go, ‘Damn, why is it still just sitting there empty?’” she said. 

By 2016, Woods was ready to leave the industry.

 “I’m going home to Virginia,” she told her company. 

“When I came back, I knew I was going to do something to get that place renovated,” she said. 

The former owner of the Mecca donated the building, which had closed in 1980, to local nonprofit Save Our Heritage, which Wood is part of. 

“Oh my God, it was in such disarray with leaks in the ceiling,” Wood said. “But it was still amazing. It was still standing and I could tell that it was in good shape.”

The first phase of construction is underway to restore the front entrance of the theater. After that, Wood wants to restore the marquee. 

The project will probably take about three more years and cost between $4 million and $5 million when all is said and done, she said. Wood is also using historic tax credits and has been awarded multiple grants to fund the project. 

Even though the project is in its early stages, Wood has already heard from residents who are excited to see the Mecca restored, she said. 

“Any day that I’m depressed, I just go walk up and down the street, and people will approach me and say, ‘Bev, I think it’s so great what you’re doing, I have these wonderful memories of the Mecca,’” she said. 

When it’s finished, it’ll contribute to the growing vibrancy of Chase City’s downtown, and Wood hopes to see other projects spring up around it, she said. 

“I’m completely overwhelmed by the number of people, the traffic that we have going through, and I know it’s because of Microsoft and all that,” Wood said. “But if we just had a few more stores that people could come by, some more places to eat … it would be fantastic for the community to have people coming in and spending their money.”

Having these amenities, including the Mecca, downtown, near new housing like the Chase City Lofts, will make the area attractive for existing residents, new residents and visitors, said Forbes. 

And that’s part of the reason that Gaskin and the tobacco commission are investing in the town. 

“If this school building were five miles out of town, just on a rural road, I would have zero interest in it,” Gaskin said. “The whole point of the project is the connectivity, the walkability. In a way, the town is the amenity. The Mecca redevelopment, the restaurants, the fact that you can step outside and walk your dog and scoot around town without driving your car is incredibly appealing.”

The post Chase City revitalization efforts will see historic school and theater transformed appeared first on Cardinal News.

For years, residents of Chase City watched nostalgically as a historic school and a historic theater fell into disrepair. But they will soon see both buildings rehabilitated — one transformed into something new and the other restored to its former glory — as part of a larger revitalization effort in the town.

Just a few blocks apart in the Mecklenburg County town are the former Robert E. Lee Elementary School and the former Mecca Theatre. Both built in the early 1930s, these buildings played crucial roles in the community over the course of their vibrant lifespans, but eventually they became vacant and dilapidated. 

“Historic schools are psychologically very important to a community,” said Edwin Gaskin, the developer for the project to turn Lee Elementary School into apartment units. “Beyond the brick and mortar, beyond the structure, there are stories and lives and memories that have been housed there.”

The building closed as a school in 1980, and it was used for various community purposes after that until closing to the public about six years ago due to structural concerns. 

This will be the ninth historic school redevelopment for Gaskin’s company, Echelon Resources, which is based in South Boston.

With financial support from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, the school will be rehabilitated into a 17-unit apartment building through an almost $4 million project that retains historic features from the building’s past life. 

The Mecca Theatre has been vacant since its closing in the 1980s, though owner Beverly Wood is working to transform it back into an operational theater. The multi-year project will likely cost between $4 million and $5 million, she said.

Wood, a native of Chase City, has fond memories of seeing movies at the Mecca as a young girl — though she had to watch them from the balcony seats during segregation. She returned to the town to restore the theater after decades of working in the film industry in Hollywood. 

Together, these projects represent the start of a larger revitalization effort as the town works to bounce back from a decline in the tobacco industry and accommodate and attract new industries.

From classrooms to apartments

The Lee Elementary School was “the heart of the town for a long time,” said Town Manager Dusty Forbes. 

It’s a one-story brick building with a clerestory, or a section higher than the rest of the roofline with windows to let in extra natural light. The school is part of the Chase City Warehouse and Commercial Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. 

After its life as a school, it was used as a community center and food bank. More recently, it was empty, wet from pipes that burst and a leaky roof. 

“It wasn’t maintained the way it should’ve been, and a lot of that was due to lack of funding in the town,” Forbes said. “We lost manufacturing jobs and those businesses left, and then tobacco fell out of favor. … That was a big economic hit for the town, so that added to the deterioration of the building.”

But the town didn’t want to tear it down — or use it for something that didn’t contribute to the future of Chase City.

“People didn’t want it to be a throwaway project,” he said. 

The town broke ground on the Chase City Lofts project on April 24, kickstarting 12 to 18 months of construction to transform the building into apartments. 

The developer, Echelon Resources, has done similar projects throughout Virginia and North Carolina. Echelon Resources is an owner-developer company, which means it will operate the property after construction is done, Gaskin said. 

After a few years of design work and community feedback, Echelon Resources went under contract to purchase the building in fall 2025. 

“There was a really laudable effort by the town to explore alternative options, to hear concerns, to really vet this through the community,” Gaskin said. “And I was OK with that because I’d rather have a project that people support after thinking about various options.”

Mostly, people were concerned about the preservation of the building’s history and legacy, Forbes said. 

“The older generation who have always lived in Chase City, they didn’t want to see something that takes away the memories, the good times,” Forbes said. 

These conversations have happened in other places where Gaskin has worked on school redevelopment, he said. 

“You touch a nerve when you’re addressing the next chapter of a building that was extremely important for so many people,” Gaskin said. “They want it to be honored, they want it to be redeveloped with integrity.”

The building will look exactly the same from the outside, and inside, historic features will stay, as mandated by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for the use of historic tax credits. Historic chalkboards and built-in cabinetry, doors and trim won’t be altered, Gaskin said. 

New housing will make a large impact on Chase City, said Gaskin and Forbes, as the town works toward economic growth. 

The 17 apartments will be mostly one-bedroom units, with a handful of two-bedroom apartments, Gaskin said. There’s no information yet about rent prices. 

“Even though it’s not going to be a school again, the way it’s going to be made relevant to future generations is just as worthy,” he said. 

Like many other communities in Southwest and Southside, Mecklenburg County is experiencing a housing shortage, and it’s working to create housing from both new construction and adaptive reuse projects. To keep up with growth and fill existing housing shortages, the county needs more than 1,500 new units in the next five years, according to Community Scale’s housing forecast, which provides housing data on localities nationwide. 

The Microsoft data center in Mecklenburg County is about 10 miles away from Chase City, and its over 700 employees — and others moving to the area for work — need places to live, Gaskin said. 

“If they don’t have that professional-grade housing stock, then essentially they’re losing a large portion of that economic value to other localities that have more competitive, more modern housing stock,” he said.

Still, the rehabilitation of historic buildings is expensive, and communities can struggle to finance these projects even when the infrastructure and the desire are there. 

That’s where the tobacco commission stepped in, said Jordan Butler, public relations director for the commission. 

Usually, the commission awards grant money for economic growth in the counties affected by the decline of the tobacco industry, like Mecklenburg. For this project, it took a different approach, providing a low-interest loan for the first time.

The total project cost is just under $4 million, and in exchange for the commission’s loan to the Chase City Industrial Development Authority, 25% of units will be reserved for workforce housing, or people making between 80% and 150% of the area’s median income. 

Gaskin initially approached the commission about its existing grant program, said Stephen Versen, deputy director of the tobacco commission. When the commission learned that the project had a funding gap, even after participating in state and federal historic grant programs, it started talking about the possibility of a loan, Versen said. 

“Over the life of the project, that’s going to have a much bigger impact on a developer’s bottom line than a grant would,” he said. “And from the commission’s perspective, that allowed us to make this project happen with less of a cost to us. It’s a new model.”

Gaskin and Forbes said the tobacco commission was essential in making this project possible. They called it “a pilot project” for the commission, and Butler said it’s something that could be replicated in other localities. 

“The tobacco commission coming in and not just doing a grant, but funding this at an interest rate that would not break the developer, that can be a road map going forward,” Forbes said. “Not just for us, but for other places in Southwest Virginia. I’m really excited to see where that goes, knowing that Chase City was the first stop on the train.”

The project is expected to spur additional development in Chase City. 

“It’s a small project. 17 units aren’t going to change the world,” Gaskin said. “But what it should do, like we’ve done in other rural Southwest and Southside communities, is show that market-rate, high-quality upscale housing can succeed and thrive. When that happens, because it’s a when not an if, other investments will be made, either by us or by other groups.” 

Outside of this project, the town IDA is purchasing buildings on Main Street to fix them up or sell them to developers, said the town’s mayor, Alden Fahringer. The goal is to bring life and vitality back to Main Street and fill all of the vacant storefronts, he said. 

“First and foremost, we have to have people who live here in Chase City, who do life here, who spend their dollars here and who want to stay here,” Fahringer said. “That’s a very pressing thing for us.”

The resurrection of the Mecca Theatre

Bev Wood’s parents were serious about their children’s education. The kids went to school, did their homework, did their chores and participated in sports. 

“Going to somebody’s house and hanging out was not part of our routine,” Wood said. “But we could go to the movies.”

Like most other establishments in the 1960s, the Mecca Theatre was segregated. 

As a young girl, Wood bought her ticket outside and then watched the movie from the balcony seats. It didn’t bother her at the time, she said. 

“If that’s all you know, then that’s all you know,” she said. “The whole place had rats, it’s not like there were only rats in the balcony. And we got to see our friends and our cousins.”

Wood loved all movies and saw everything she possibly could, but she especially loved Elvis Presley movies. She’s 69 years old now, and she still loves Elvis. 

The theater is part of a strip of buildings on Main Street, with a partial brick facade and a marquee above the double door entrance. 

“My whole life, I’ve always had good feelings about the time spent at the Mecca,” Wood said. 

After studying chemistry in college and grad school, Wood moved to California for a job in the film industry. She eventually became vice president of technical services for Deluxe Laboratories, which works with film clients on technical and production services. 

“I had done some work with something called silver retention, where you change the processing of a film and you give it a particular look,” Wood said. “They couldn’t believe that I knew how to do it, and it looked amazing. After that, people started mentioning my name.”

Over her 36-year career, she worked on movies like “Se7en,” “Braveheart,” “Skyfall,” “O Brother Where Art Thou?” “Angela’s Ashes” and “Sleepy Hollow.” 

Every summer, she visited Chase City.

“When I came home, I would always look at the Mecca and go, ‘Damn, why is it still just sitting there empty?’” she said. 

By 2016, Woods was ready to leave the industry.

 “I’m going home to Virginia,” she told her company. 

“When I came back, I knew I was going to do something to get that place renovated,” she said. 

The former owner of the Mecca donated the building, which had closed in 1980, to local nonprofit Save Our Heritage, which Wood is part of. 

“Oh my God, it was in such disarray with leaks in the ceiling,” Wood said. “But it was still amazing. It was still standing and I could tell that it was in good shape.”

The first phase of construction is underway to restore the front entrance of the theater. After that, Wood wants to restore the marquee. 

The project will probably take about three more years and cost between $4 million and $5 million when all is said and done, she said. Wood is also using historic tax credits and has been awarded multiple grants to fund the project. 

Even though the project is in its early stages, Wood has already heard from residents who are excited to see the Mecca restored, she said. 

“Any day that I’m depressed, I just go walk up and down the street, and people will approach me and say, ‘Bev, I think it’s so great what you’re doing, I have these wonderful memories of the Mecca,’” she said. 

When it’s finished, it’ll contribute to the growing vibrancy of Chase City’s downtown, and Wood hopes to see other projects spring up around it, she said. 

“I’m completely overwhelmed by the number of people, the traffic that we have going through, and I know it’s because of Microsoft and all that,” Wood said. “But if we just had a few more stores that people could come by, some more places to eat … it would be fantastic for the community to have people coming in and spending their money.”

Having these amenities, including the Mecca, downtown, near new housing like the Chase City Lofts, will make the area attractive for existing residents, new residents and visitors, said Forbes. 

And that’s part of the reason that Gaskin and the tobacco commission are investing in the town. 

“If this school building were five miles out of town, just on a rural road, I would have zero interest in it,” Gaskin said. “The whole point of the project is the connectivity, the walkability. In a way, the town is the amenity. The Mecca redevelopment, the restaurants, the fact that you can step outside and walk your dog and scoot around town without driving your car is incredibly appealing.”

The post Chase City revitalization efforts will see historic school and theater transformed appeared first on Cardinal News.

Something strange is going on in Lynchburg politics, which I realize doesn’t narrow things down very much.

In this case, I’m referring to the curious silence from the attorney general’s office about Lynchburg Republicans’ plans to nominate their city council candidates through a party-run “firehouse primary” rather than a state-run primary.

Here’s why this is unusual — and has statewide implications.

In 2021, the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed a law that came very close to requiring parties to nominate their candidates only through a state-run primary. This law has informally acquired the nickname “Helmer’s Law” after its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County. Republicans have always chafed at that law, considering it interferes in their party processes, with Lynchburg Republicans being more chafed than others. Part of this objection is rooted in the fear that, because Virginia doesn’t have voter registration by party, there’s nothing to stop Democrats from voting in a Republican primary to skew the outcome. There’s also the unspoken fact that a smaller electorate in a party-run process gives more power to conservative hardliners who often control the party machinery.

Two years ago, Lynchburg Republicans tried to find the theoretical legal daylight in the law that would let them hold a firehouse primary that complies with Helmer’s Law. Then-House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, asked for an attorney general’s opinion on whether the Lynchburg Republicans could do this. About 3 weeks later — 24 days after the Lynchburg Republicans first voted for a firehouse primary — then-Attorney General Jason Miyares issued a formal opinion that basically said, “nah, this won’t work.”

Lynchburg Republicans grudgingly held a state-run primary for their one contested nomination.

This year, Lynchburg Republicans have again decided to test the law by holding a party-run process that they say will fit the law. Once again, a state legislator has asked for an attorney general’s opinion on whether this is legal — this time Helmer himself.

Helmer sent his request on March 19. Today marks the 47^th day since then, with no response from Attorney General Jay Jones. That’s almost twice as long as Miyares took two years ago.

Why the difference? And what might that mean? Let’s look at the politics.

In 2024, Miyares — a Republican — took some political risk in telling Lynchburg Republicans they couldn’t legally do what they wanted to do. Jones, as a Democrat, would face no such risk. It also seems difficult to imagine that Jones is wrestling with what the law says here. As a state legislator, he voted for Helmer’s Law, so presumably supports it. No one realistically expects Jones to say that Miyares was wrong and that Lynchburg Republicans really have found a loophole in Helmer’s Law. So what’s taking him so long to issue an opinion?

Maybe Jones’ office has simply been busy; its election law section has certainly had things to deal with, in the form of the legal challenges to the redistricting amendment. Lynchburg Republicans likely aren’t that high a priority. However, is it possible that Jones is taking his cue from the Virginia Supreme Court — which, citing a 1912 precedent, said it couldn’t rule on the redistricting amendment until after voters had approved it?

The attorney general can’t tell Lynchburg Republicans not to hold a firehouse primary. They have a constitutional right to assembly, be it a firehouse primary or a square dance or a prayer vigil or a drum circle or whatever else they want to do. The question is whether that firehouse primary checks off the legal box to qualify the winners for inclusion on the ballot.

If Jones wanted to cite that 1912 Supreme Court precedent (which ironically came from a case out of Lynchburg), he could wait until after the firehouse primary on May 30 to issue his opinion. What would happen then?

The keyword in “attorney general’s opinion” is “opinion.” An attorney general’s opinion is not like a court opinion; it’s not a legal order, it’s simply the opinion of the state’s chief legal officer. If a local government seeks an attorney general’s opinion on some legal matter, and gets one, the local government is best advised to follow whatever the AG says. That doesn’t mean the local government won’t get sued by somebody, but it does give the locality some assurance that it’s probably following the law.

Let’s say Jones issues an opinion that the Lynchburg Republican firehouse doesn’t meet the legal criteria for a nomination. Lynchburg Republicans don’t have to listen to him. If Jones issues such an opinion before the firehouse primary, Lynchburg Republicans could forge ahead. The AG doesn’t have a security force to shut the event down.

At that point, we’re deep into the realm of speculation, where the only certainty is billable hours for lawyers.

Here are some possible scenarios.

Would the local electoral board decide it couldn’t certify the results based on an AG’s opinion? Doesn’t appear so. Here’s what David Levy, a Democratic representative on the Lynchburg Electoral Board, says: “The local party and state party have selected the firehouse primary as their method of naming their three candidates for City Council in Lynchburg. The local Registrar and the local Electoral Board have no discretion in the placing of those party-named candidates on the ballot for November,” he tells me in an email. “While Attorney General Jones could issue an opinion as to the legality of the Lynchburg firehouse primary, there would have to be a court order enjoining the firehouse or a decision by the State Board not to accept the list of candidates certified by the Republican party chair. It appears to me that no one locally is willing to file for an injunction.”

Based on that, a mere AG’s opinion wouldn’t be enough — a court order would be required to block either the local or state electoral board from accepting the firehouse nominees as the party’s official set of nominees.

Let’s speculate further.

Jones might be in a bind here. When Miyares issued his opinion in 2024, the state Republican Party told Lynchburg Republicans they needed to hold a state-run primary — and there was still time to do so. If Jones says the firehouse primary doesn’t meet the legal threshold for nominations, it’s unclear what happens, since the deadline for requesting a state-run primary has passed.

In theory, a court could declare that, in light of events, Lynchburg Republicans get an extension, but that requires a) a court case and b) more activism than some judges might be willing to engage in. Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans are entitled to have their candidates listed on the ballot (this is based on a state law that gives an automatic ballot line to the nominees of any party whose statewide nominees have recently won at least 10% of the vote).

If the firehouse primary is not deemed a lawful way for Lynchburg Republicans to nominate candidates, but there’s no state-run primary option, then the task could fall to the Lynchburg Republican City Committee — which is chaired by one of the candidates and aligned with one of the two main factions competing for the nomination. For those who have missed the drama over the past two years, Lynchburg Republicans are divided into two factions that seem to despise each other. On the one side is the faction that includes incumbent Marty Misjuns with Veronica Bratton and Trae Watkins as their candidates; that is the faction aligned with the city committee (which Bratton chairs). The other faction includes incumbents Stephanie Reed and Larry Taylor, along with Chris Boswell.

Suppose the Reed-Taylor-Boswell ticket wins, but the firehouse is ruled void and the duty of picking nominees falls on the city committee. Would the committee be morally obligated (or directed by the state party) to affirm whoever won the now-voided firehouse primary? Or would it decide that the Misjuns-Bratton-Watkins ticket is the one they want on the ballot, no matter what the firehouse primary decided? (Of course, the primary could deliver mixed results — if you think your head hurts by now, imagine how much it will throb if that were to happen!)

The bottom line is, because of the automatic ballot access law, Lynchburg Republicans will have candidates on the ballot this fall. The question is whether they will be ones chosen by the firehouse primary or the city committee or … well, who knows? The irony is that the Reed-Taylor-Boswell ticket might not want the firehouse declared void because there’s a chance those candidates might win the party-run primary; their chances of getting picked by the city committee seem absolutely nil.

I said earlier there’s no political risk to Jones in declaring the Lynchburg firehouse primary noncompliant with state law. That’s true in the sense that Virginia Democrats probably don’t care one way or another how Lynchburg Republicans pick their candidates. However, if Jones allows the firehouse primary to stand, then a legal precedent is created that other Republican committees across the state could follow in future elections. He may not want that on his record. One of the main criticisms of the method Lynchburg Republicans have come up with is that it allows for no absentee voting, except for certain protected classes of people (military personnel, those with communicable diseases and so forth). If you’re a Lynchburg Republican who has to work that day or be out of town on some pressing business, you’re out of luck. In a state-run primary, there are 45 days of “no excuses” early voting.

Here’s the dilemma for Jones: If he acts, he’s got to be prepared to go to court to enforce his opinion. If he doesn’t act, he creates a precedent that critics will say disenfranchises some voters — a bad look for a Democratic attorney general.

Meanwhile, those planning to vote in the Lynchburg Republican firehouse primary are entitled to know whether their votes will count. This could be assured in at least two ways: Jones could act quickly — and before the event. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee could also affirm that if circumstances force the nominating decision on the committee, it will simply ratify the results of the firehouse primary, no matter which side wins.

Isn’t politics fun?

Want more political news and analysis? I serve up an extra heaping every Friday afternoon in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up here:

The post The curious silence of Jay Jones and the Lynchburg Republican firehouse primary appeared first on Cardinal News.

Something strange is going on in Lynchburg politics, which I realize doesn’t narrow things down very much.

In this case, I’m referring to the curious silence from the attorney general’s office about Lynchburg Republicans’ plans to nominate their city council candidates through a party-run “firehouse primary” rather than a state-run primary.

Here’s why this is unusual — and has statewide implications.

In 2021, the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed a law that came very close to requiring parties to nominate their candidates only through a state-run primary. This law has informally acquired the nickname “Helmer’s Law” after its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County. Republicans have always chafed at that law, considering it interferes in their party processes, with Lynchburg Republicans being more chafed than others. Part of this objection is rooted in the fear that, because Virginia doesn’t have voter registration by party, there’s nothing to stop Democrats from voting in a Republican primary to skew the outcome. There’s also the unspoken fact that a smaller electorate in a party-run process gives more power to conservative hardliners who often control the party machinery.

Two years ago, Lynchburg Republicans tried to find the theoretical legal daylight in the law that would let them hold a firehouse primary that complies with Helmer’s Law. Then-House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, asked for an attorney general’s opinion on whether the Lynchburg Republicans could do this. About 3 weeks later — 24 days after the Lynchburg Republicans first voted for a firehouse primary — then-Attorney General Jason Miyares issued a formal opinion that basically said, “nah, this won’t work.”

Lynchburg Republicans grudgingly held a state-run primary for their one contested nomination.

This year, Lynchburg Republicans have again decided to test the law by holding a party-run process that they say will fit the law. Once again, a state legislator has asked for an attorney general’s opinion on whether this is legal — this time Helmer himself.

Helmer sent his request on March 19. Today marks the 47^th day since then, with no response from Attorney General Jay Jones. That’s almost twice as long as Miyares took two years ago.

Why the difference? And what might that mean? Let’s look at the politics.

In 2024, Miyares — a Republican — took some political risk in telling Lynchburg Republicans they couldn’t legally do what they wanted to do. Jones, as a Democrat, would face no such risk. It also seems difficult to imagine that Jones is wrestling with what the law says here. As a state legislator, he voted for Helmer’s Law, so presumably supports it. No one realistically expects Jones to say that Miyares was wrong and that Lynchburg Republicans really have found a loophole in Helmer’s Law. So what’s taking him so long to issue an opinion?

Maybe Jones’ office has simply been busy; its election law section has certainly had things to deal with, in the form of the legal challenges to the redistricting amendment. Lynchburg Republicans likely aren’t that high a priority. However, is it possible that Jones is taking his cue from the Virginia Supreme Court — which, citing a 1912 precedent, said it couldn’t rule on the redistricting amendment until after voters had approved it?

The attorney general can’t tell Lynchburg Republicans not to hold a firehouse primary. They have a constitutional right to assembly, be it a firehouse primary or a square dance or a prayer vigil or a drum circle or whatever else they want to do. The question is whether that firehouse primary checks off the legal box to qualify the winners for inclusion on the ballot.

If Jones wanted to cite that 1912 Supreme Court precedent (which ironically came from a case out of Lynchburg), he could wait until after the firehouse primary on May 30 to issue his opinion. What would happen then?

The keyword in “attorney general’s opinion” is “opinion.” An attorney general’s opinion is not like a court opinion; it’s not a legal order, it’s simply the opinion of the state’s chief legal officer. If a local government seeks an attorney general’s opinion on some legal matter, and gets one, the local government is best advised to follow whatever the AG says. That doesn’t mean the local government won’t get sued by somebody, but it does give the locality some assurance that it’s probably following the law.

Let’s say Jones issues an opinion that the Lynchburg Republican firehouse doesn’t meet the legal criteria for a nomination. Lynchburg Republicans don’t have to listen to him. If Jones issues such an opinion before the firehouse primary, Lynchburg Republicans could forge ahead. The AG doesn’t have a security force to shut the event down.

At that point, we’re deep into the realm of speculation, where the only certainty is billable hours for lawyers.

Here are some possible scenarios.

Would the local electoral board decide it couldn’t certify the results based on an AG’s opinion? Doesn’t appear so. Here’s what David Levy, a Democratic representative on the Lynchburg Electoral Board, says: “The local party and state party have selected the firehouse primary as their method of naming their three candidates for City Council in Lynchburg. The local Registrar and the local Electoral Board have no discretion in the placing of those party-named candidates on the ballot for November,” he tells me in an email. “While Attorney General Jones could issue an opinion as to the legality of the Lynchburg firehouse primary, there would have to be a court order enjoining the firehouse or a decision by the State Board not to accept the list of candidates certified by the Republican party chair. It appears to me that no one locally is willing to file for an injunction.”

Based on that, a mere AG’s opinion wouldn’t be enough — a court order would be required to block either the local or state electoral board from accepting the firehouse nominees as the party’s official set of nominees.

Let’s speculate further.

Jones might be in a bind here. When Miyares issued his opinion in 2024, the state Republican Party told Lynchburg Republicans they needed to hold a state-run primary — and there was still time to do so. If Jones says the firehouse primary doesn’t meet the legal threshold for nominations, it’s unclear what happens, since the deadline for requesting a state-run primary has passed.

In theory, a court could declare that, in light of events, Lynchburg Republicans get an extension, but that requires a) a court case and b) more activism than some judges might be willing to engage in. Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans are entitled to have their candidates listed on the ballot (this is based on a state law that gives an automatic ballot line to the nominees of any party whose statewide nominees have recently won at least 10% of the vote).

If the firehouse primary is not deemed a lawful way for Lynchburg Republicans to nominate candidates, but there’s no state-run primary option, then the task could fall to the Lynchburg Republican City Committee — which is chaired by one of the candidates and aligned with one of the two main factions competing for the nomination. For those who have missed the drama over the past two years, Lynchburg Republicans are divided into two factions that seem to despise each other. On the one side is the faction that includes incumbent Marty Misjuns with Veronica Bratton and Trae Watkins as their candidates; that is the faction aligned with the city committee (which Bratton chairs). The other faction includes incumbents Stephanie Reed and Larry Taylor, along with Chris Boswell.

Suppose the Reed-Taylor-Boswell ticket wins, but the firehouse is ruled void and the duty of picking nominees falls on the city committee. Would the committee be morally obligated (or directed by the state party) to affirm whoever won the now-voided firehouse primary? Or would it decide that the Misjuns-Bratton-Watkins ticket is the one they want on the ballot, no matter what the firehouse primary decided? (Of course, the primary could deliver mixed results — if you think your head hurts by now, imagine how much it will throb if that were to happen!)

The bottom line is, because of the automatic ballot access law, Lynchburg Republicans will have candidates on the ballot this fall. The question is whether they will be ones chosen by the firehouse primary or the city committee or … well, who knows? The irony is that the Reed-Taylor-Boswell ticket might not want the firehouse declared void because there’s a chance those candidates might win the party-run primary; their chances of getting picked by the city committee seem absolutely nil.

I said earlier there’s no political risk to Jones in declaring the Lynchburg firehouse primary noncompliant with state law. That’s true in the sense that Virginia Democrats probably don’t care one way or another how Lynchburg Republicans pick their candidates. However, if Jones allows the firehouse primary to stand, then a legal precedent is created that other Republican committees across the state could follow in future elections. He may not want that on his record. One of the main criticisms of the method Lynchburg Republicans have come up with is that it allows for no absentee voting, except for certain protected classes of people (military personnel, those with communicable diseases and so forth). If you’re a Lynchburg Republican who has to work that day or be out of town on some pressing business, you’re out of luck. In a state-run primary, there are 45 days of “no excuses” early voting.

Here’s the dilemma for Jones: If he acts, he’s got to be prepared to go to court to enforce his opinion. If he doesn’t act, he creates a precedent that critics will say disenfranchises some voters — a bad look for a Democratic attorney general.

Meanwhile, those planning to vote in the Lynchburg Republican firehouse primary are entitled to know whether their votes will count. This could be assured in at least two ways: Jones could act quickly — and before the event. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee could also affirm that if circumstances force the nominating decision on the committee, it will simply ratify the results of the firehouse primary, no matter which side wins.

Isn’t politics fun?

Want more political news and analysis? I serve up an extra heaping every Friday afternoon in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up here:

The post The curious silence of Jay Jones and the Lynchburg Republican firehouse primary appeared first on Cardinal News.

Something strange is going on in Lynchburg politics, which I realize doesn’t narrow things down very much.

In this case, I’m referring to the curious silence from the attorney general’s office about Lynchburg Republicans’ plans to nominate their city council candidates through a party-run “firehouse primary” rather than a state-run primary.

Here’s why this is unusual — and has statewide implications.

In 2021, the Democratic-controlled General Assembly passed a law that came very close to requiring parties to nominate their candidates only through a state-run primary. This law has informally acquired the nickname “Helmer’s Law” after its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County. Republicans have always chafed at that law, considering it interferes in their party processes, with Lynchburg Republicans being more chafed than others. Part of this objection is rooted in the fear that, because Virginia doesn’t have voter registration by party, there’s nothing to stop Democrats from voting in a Republican primary to skew the outcome. There’s also the unspoken fact that a smaller electorate in a party-run process gives more power to conservative hardliners who often control the party machinery.

Two years ago, Lynchburg Republicans tried to find the theoretical legal daylight in the law that would let them hold a firehouse primary that complies with Helmer’s Law. Then-House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, asked for an attorney general’s opinion on whether the Lynchburg Republicans could do this. About 3 weeks later — 24 days after the Lynchburg Republicans first voted for a firehouse primary — then-Attorney General Jason Miyares issued a formal opinion that basically said, “nah, this won’t work.”

Lynchburg Republicans grudgingly held a state-run primary for their one contested nomination.

This year, Lynchburg Republicans have again decided to test the law by holding a party-run process that they say will fit the law. Once again, a state legislator has asked for an attorney general’s opinion on whether this is legal — this time Helmer himself.

Helmer sent his request on March 19. Today marks the 47^th day since then, with no response from Attorney General Jay Jones. That’s almost twice as long as Miyares took two years ago.

Why the difference? And what might that mean? Let’s look at the politics.

In 2024, Miyares — a Republican — took some political risk in telling Lynchburg Republicans they couldn’t legally do what they wanted to do. Jones, as a Democrat, would face no such risk. It also seems difficult to imagine that Jones is wrestling with what the law says here. As a state legislator, he voted for Helmer’s Law, so presumably supports it. No one realistically expects Jones to say that Miyares was wrong and that Lynchburg Republicans really have found a loophole in Helmer’s Law. So what’s taking him so long to issue an opinion?

Maybe Jones’ office has simply been busy; its election law section has certainly had things to deal with, in the form of the legal challenges to the redistricting amendment. Lynchburg Republicans likely aren’t that high a priority. However, is it possible that Jones is taking his cue from the Virginia Supreme Court — which, citing a 1912 precedent, said it couldn’t rule on the redistricting amendment until after voters had approved it?

The attorney general can’t tell Lynchburg Republicans not to hold a firehouse primary. They have a constitutional right to assembly, be it a firehouse primary or a square dance or a prayer vigil or a drum circle or whatever else they want to do. The question is whether that firehouse primary checks off the legal box to qualify the winners for inclusion on the ballot.

If Jones wanted to cite that 1912 Supreme Court precedent (which ironically came from a case out of Lynchburg), he could wait until after the firehouse primary on May 30 to issue his opinion. What would happen then?

The keyword in “attorney general’s opinion” is “opinion.” An attorney general’s opinion is not like a court opinion; it’s not a legal order, it’s simply the opinion of the state’s chief legal officer. If a local government seeks an attorney general’s opinion on some legal matter, and gets one, the local government is best advised to follow whatever the AG says. That doesn’t mean the local government won’t get sued by somebody, but it does give the locality some assurance that it’s probably following the law.

Let’s say Jones issues an opinion that the Lynchburg Republican firehouse doesn’t meet the legal criteria for a nomination. Lynchburg Republicans don’t have to listen to him. If Jones issues such an opinion before the firehouse primary, Lynchburg Republicans could forge ahead. The AG doesn’t have a security force to shut the event down.

At that point, we’re deep into the realm of speculation, where the only certainty is billable hours for lawyers.

Here are some possible scenarios.

Would the local electoral board decide it couldn’t certify the results based on an AG’s opinion? Doesn’t appear so. Here’s what David Levy, a Democratic representative on the Lynchburg Electoral Board, says: “The local party and state party have selected the firehouse primary as their method of naming their three candidates for City Council in Lynchburg. The local Registrar and the local Electoral Board have no discretion in the placing of those party-named candidates on the ballot for November,” he tells me in an email. “While Attorney General Jones could issue an opinion as to the legality of the Lynchburg firehouse primary, there would have to be a court order enjoining the firehouse or a decision by the State Board not to accept the list of candidates certified by the Republican party chair. It appears to me that no one locally is willing to file for an injunction.”

Based on that, a mere AG’s opinion wouldn’t be enough — a court order would be required to block either the local or state electoral board from accepting the firehouse nominees as the party’s official set of nominees.

Let’s speculate further.

Jones might be in a bind here. When Miyares issued his opinion in 2024, the state Republican Party told Lynchburg Republicans they needed to hold a state-run primary — and there was still time to do so. If Jones says the firehouse primary doesn’t meet the legal threshold for nominations, it’s unclear what happens, since the deadline for requesting a state-run primary has passed.

In theory, a court could declare that, in light of events, Lynchburg Republicans get an extension, but that requires a) a court case and b) more activism than some judges might be willing to engage in. Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans are entitled to have their candidates listed on the ballot (this is based on a state law that gives an automatic ballot line to the nominees of any party whose statewide nominees have recently won at least 10% of the vote).

If the firehouse primary is not deemed a lawful way for Lynchburg Republicans to nominate candidates, but there’s no state-run primary option, then the task could fall to the Lynchburg Republican City Committee — which is chaired by one of the candidates and aligned with one of the two main factions competing for the nomination. For those who have missed the drama over the past two years, Lynchburg Republicans are divided into two factions that seem to despise each other. On the one side is the faction that includes incumbent Marty Misjuns with Veronica Bratton and Trae Watkins as their candidates; that is the faction aligned with the city committee (which Bratton chairs). The other faction includes incumbents Stephanie Reed and Larry Taylor, along with Chris Boswell.

Suppose the Reed-Taylor-Boswell ticket wins, but the firehouse is ruled void and the duty of picking nominees falls on the city committee. Would the committee be morally obligated (or directed by the state party) to affirm whoever won the now-voided firehouse primary? Or would it decide that the Misjuns-Bratton-Watkins ticket is the one they want on the ballot, no matter what the firehouse primary decided? (Of course, the primary could deliver mixed results — if you think your head hurts by now, imagine how much it will throb if that were to happen!)

The bottom line is, because of the automatic ballot access law, Lynchburg Republicans will have candidates on the ballot this fall. The question is whether they will be ones chosen by the firehouse primary or the city committee or … well, who knows? The irony is that the Reed-Taylor-Boswell ticket might not want the firehouse declared void because there’s a chance those candidates might win the party-run primary; their chances of getting picked by the city committee seem absolutely nil.

I said earlier there’s no political risk to Jones in declaring the Lynchburg firehouse primary noncompliant with state law. That’s true in the sense that Virginia Democrats probably don’t care one way or another how Lynchburg Republicans pick their candidates. However, if Jones allows the firehouse primary to stand, then a legal precedent is created that other Republican committees across the state could follow in future elections. He may not want that on his record. One of the main criticisms of the method Lynchburg Republicans have come up with is that it allows for no absentee voting, except for certain protected classes of people (military personnel, those with communicable diseases and so forth). If you’re a Lynchburg Republican who has to work that day or be out of town on some pressing business, you’re out of luck. In a state-run primary, there are 45 days of “no excuses” early voting.

Here’s the dilemma for Jones: If he acts, he’s got to be prepared to go to court to enforce his opinion. If he doesn’t act, he creates a precedent that critics will say disenfranchises some voters — a bad look for a Democratic attorney general.

Meanwhile, those planning to vote in the Lynchburg Republican firehouse primary are entitled to know whether their votes will count. This could be assured in at least two ways: Jones could act quickly — and before the event. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee could also affirm that if circumstances force the nominating decision on the committee, it will simply ratify the results of the firehouse primary, no matter which side wins.

Isn’t politics fun?

Want more political news and analysis? I serve up an extra heaping every Friday afternoon in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up here:

The post The curious silence of Jay Jones and the Lynchburg Republican firehouse primary appeared first on Cardinal News.

After warning of a possible shutdown for months, an indoor agriculture company operating in Pittsylvania County has canceled the prospect of a mass layoff and now says it will be a “stronger, more stable business.”

Between December and late March, the company, AeroFarms, sent multiple notices to state and local officials under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act, which requires large employers to provide advance notice of major layoffs or plant closures.

The notices originally indicated that AeroFarms would permanently close its Pittsylvania County facility but changed course to say that the company had secured short-term funding to stay open as it sought a buyer for the operation. At least 120 employees’ jobs were at stake as the saga unfolded.

In late March, AeroFarms said that it anticipated the sale of the company would be finalized in April but warned that it would move forward with the shutdown if the deal fell through. In an April 29 letter, Carlos Nunez, AeroFarms’ vice president of human resources, said that the company was rescinding its WARN notice — in other words, canceling its previous notification of a possible mass layoff.

“Thank you for your support as we have navigated during this time of transition,” Nunez wrote in the letter to officials. “We are excited to continue our work making AeroFarms a stronger, more stable business and remain focused on supporting our employees, customers, and community.”

In an email Monday to Cardinal News, Nunez declined to provide details about the latest development but said that AeroFarms will share more at a later date.

“What we can say with confidence is that our farm, our products, and our commitment to our customers, consumers, and community remain as strong as ever,” Nunez said.

AeroFarms produces microgreens such as broccoli and kale at a 140,000-square-foot vertical farming facility in the Cane Creek Centre industrial park. The park is located in Pittsylvania County near the North Carolina border and is jointly owned by the county and the city of Danville.

Danville City Manager Ken Larking said in a statement that he is happy that AeroFarms appears to have found a pathway to continue operating.

“It was certainly good news to hear that they no longer plan to lay off employees,” Larking said. “Hopefully they will maintain a lengthy and strong presence in our community, providing jobs to residents and contributing in other ways to help our region’s prosperity.”

AeroFarms was based in New Jersey when it opened the Pittsylvania County location in 2022. The company underwent Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023, closing its New Jersey site and focusing on Southside Virginia. In August 2025, AeroFarms announced that it had refinanced debt to support its Pittsylvania County location. 

The initial announcement in December of a possible closure came as AeroFarms said its largest investor had changed its priorities. 

Although AeroFarms has now rescinded its WARN notice, it might employ fewer people than it did in December.

At that time, AeroFarms told officials that shutting down the Pittsylvania site would result in the loss of 173 jobs. In March, it said that a shutdown would result in the loss of 133 jobs.

Nunez declined to provide a current employment figure on Monday. The company’s website lists various jobs available for prospective applicants, but it remains unclear how many open positions the company has.

The post AeroFarms avoids shutdown, says it will be a ‘stronger, more stable business’ appeared first on Cardinal News.

Hello Cardinal News readers. Welcome back to Cardinal Commerce Notes, our regular feature catching you up on various recent business news items.

If you missed last week’s edition, check it out here to learn more about local Walmart stores set to be remodeled, a grant program for farmers impacted by Hurricane Helene and more.

I’m always on the lookout for news tips. Please email me at matt@cardinalnews.org or connect with me on LinkedIn and message me there.

I-81 work in Roanoke County, Salem scheduled

Construction is scheduled to begin next spring on the first phase of a project to improve nine miles of Interstate 81 in Roanoke County and Salem over 8 1/2 years.

On April 22, Virginia’s Commonwealth Transportation Board awarded a $237.75 million contract to St. Albans, West Virginia-based Triton Construction Inc. to widen a 3.2-mile segment between I-81’s mile marker 133.8 and exit 137.

More than 50,000 vehicles use that stretch every day, the Virginia Department of Transportation said in a news release. 

In the second phase, construction to improve mile markers 131 through 133.8 is anticipated to begin in 2028.

In the third phase, construction from exit 128 to mile marker 131 is anticipated to begin in late 2027 or early 2028, VDOT said.

VDOT said the goal is to “increase capacity and improve safety by widening 9 miles of Interstate 81 from two lanes to three lanes in both directions between exit 128 in Montgomery County and exit 137 in Roanoke County/Salem.”

“The project also includes replacing bridges, improving ramps, installing concrete barrier walls and constructing sound walls in some locations,” VDOT said.

The entire project is scheduled to be finished by fall 2035.

“Widening this section is a major step forward for the Roanoke-Blacksburg region,” Ken King, district engineer for VDOT’s Salem District, said in the news release. “This investment will make travel safer and help keep people and goods moving reliably for years to come.”

State police buy former Allstate building in Roanoke County

The Virginia State Police have bought an office building in Roanoke County from the insurance company Allstate with plans to turn it into a new division headquarters. 

The property at 1745 Loch Haven Drive, near Interstate 81 and Virginia 419, sold for $15 million in February, according to county property records.

Virginia State Police Sgt. Rick Garletts said the building is big enough to accommodate current and future needs and will save the commonwealth money compared to building a new headquarters.

It will allow police to consolidate operations that are currently spread among several locations.

The property will require changes before police can move in, a process that could take a year, Garletts said in an email.

The current headquarters for VSP’s Division Six is at 3775 W. Main St. in Roanoke County. Garletts said the plan is to demolish that building, but funding for that project has yet to be secured and the building contains hazardous materials that will need to be dealt with.

Catawba restaurant, Bedford brewery reopen

In Catawba, The Homeplace Restaurant recently reopened after closing indefinitely in 2020 due to COVID-19 and then shutting down in 2021.

Located at 4968 Catawba Valley Drive, the restaurant offers family-style dining and celebrated its grand opening on April 19. 

In Bedford, Beale’s Brewery celebrated its grand reopening on Saturday. 

Beale’s, at 510 Grove St., closed in May 2025 after being in business for 8 years.

Both establishments are under new ownership. More information can be found on the Facebook pages for The Homeplace Restaurant and Beale’s Brewery.

The Lester Group names board chair

Jay Dickens has been named chairman of the board of The Lester Group, a Martinsville-based building products firm.

Dickens succeeds James O’Brien, who retired after more than a decade with the company, the company said in an April 29 news release.

Dickens joined The Lester Group as president in 2018 and was named CEO in 2020. He serves on the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and is chair of the Martinsville-Henry County chamber’s Partnership for Economic Growth.

The Lester Group, with approximately 200 employees, runs six building supply stores across Virginia, two Fortress Door manufacturing plants in Virginia and Georgia, and a Fortress Truss plant in Virginia. It also manages timberland and residential and commercial properties in three states.

That’s a wrap for this week. Do you know of a new business expanding or relocating in your town? Excited about a restaurant opening up soon? Maybe you’ve got an update on a story we’ve reported before. Please send me your tips and suggestions: matt@cardinalnews.org or connect with me on LinkedIn.

The post Cardinal Commerce Notes: 9 years of I-81 work, police buy Roanoke County building, restaurant and brewery reopen, Lester Group names chair appeared first on Cardinal News.

Virginia lawmakers made the right decision in rejecting Gov. Spanberger’s substitute to the cannabis retail bill. This was more than a policy disagreement; it was a necessary stand against rolling back hard-won progress on justice reform and against deepening the very inequities our commonwealth has worked so hard to undo.

The way marijuana policy choices have played out in the real lives of Virginia residents is this: While we legalized marijuana for adults, we have quietly shifted enforcement onto our children.

The numbers tell the story. Adult marijuana arrests have plummeted from 21,803 in 2019 to just 916 in 2024. That is what reform is supposed to do. But the system didn’t disappear; it was simply redirected. In 2019, only 17% of marijuana-related youth complaints came from schools. Today, that number has tripled to 54%. Schools have become the front door to the legal system for thousands of young Virginians.

We are now criminalizing children for behavior that is no longer illegal for adults.

Worse still, the data shows that criminalization is not working. Young people are pulled into the legal system for marijuana use more frequently than those who have no legal system involvement. And younger children are now being pulled into the legal system. Thirteen and 14-year-old children are now the ones against whom intake complaints are filed most frequently. Against this backdrop, the governor’s substitute bill would have taken us in the wrong direction.

It would have escalated youth marijuana possession from a Class 2 misdemeanor to a Class 1, the highest-level misdemeanor in Virginia. The governor’s substitute would have imposed mandatory minimums: a $500 fine and 50 hours of community service. That is not reform. It is a return to punitive policies that we already know fail, and the consequences would have been immediate and severe.

First, the harsh penalties outlined in the governor’s substitute would have stripped courts of discretion. Right now, nearly 76% of youth cases are eligible for diversion, giving young people a chance to avoid court involvement altogether while still providing accountability and rehabilitation. Mandatory minimums force more youth deeper into the legal system by increasing probation, court oversight and long-term consequences.

Second, it would have pushed more students out of school. Since decriminalization for adults, our new normal is that more than half of marijuana complaints come from schools. The further layering of court dates, community service and probation requirements onto the lives of students would only increase absenteeism, disengagement and dropout risk.

Third, the governor’s substitute would have imposed unjust financial burdens on families. A mandatory $500 fine may be an inconvenience for some, but for many families, it is destabilizing. And when fines go unpaid, the penalties compound, pulling young people even deeper into the legal system.

Virginia’s General Assembly recognized these harms and refused to enshrine them into law. That decision reflects a broader truth: we cannot punish our way out of youth substance use.

The legislature’s cannabis retail framework, developed through extensive stakeholder input, offers a path forward that does not sacrifice children in the process. The governor now faces a clear choice: sign the original bill and allow Virginia to move forward or veto it and prolong a system that is already failing our youth.

In this moment, we must be clear: rejecting the governor’s substitute was not the finish line; it was the floor.

We still have urgent work to do. After legalizing adult use, the shift in enforcement onto youth is real, harmful and measurable. If Virginia is serious about justice reform, the next steps must address this overcorrection head-on by investing in public health approaches, keeping young people in schools and expanding community-based responses that actually work.

Our young people deserve better than a system that uses criminalization to fill policy gaps. Virginia’s youth deserve solutions grounded in evidence, age appropriateness and opportunity.

In Virginia, we took a step in the right direction. Now, let’s finish the job!

Chelsea Higgs Wise is executive director of Marijuana Justice. Valerie Slater is a criminal defense attorney leading the RISE for Youth Organization, where she advocates for the rights of youth involved in the many Virginia systems.

The post Cannabis legalization advocates: Virginia lawmakers choose support and services over punishment for our youth appeared first on Cardinal News.

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of periodic commentaries by retired college presidents on the subject of civility. They are based on the book “Rules of Civility for a Modern Society,” by Jim Davis, the former president of Shenandoah University.

Jim Davis Civility Rule #73: Listen Before We Speak

The wise philosopher has stated that we have two ears and one mouth because our maker intended that we listen more than we talk.  It is always a wise action to listen before we speak.

Do you remember playing the game Telephone as a child? Children sit in a circle and whisper a phrase or sentence to the person seated next to them. That person, in turn, would whisper what he or she heard to the next person in the circle, and on around the circle the message went. When the last person seated in the circle received the message, he or she would share aloud what was heard, which was rarely the original thought. I remember this game fondly. By the time the message went around the circle, it usually bore no resemblance to the original message. As an adult, I have learned the lesson of this game persists; we often do not hear others’ thoughts and sentiments as they were intended, even in the simplest ways in our day-to-day lives.

For example, my husband and I wake up to NPR each morning and listen for the weather and news between enjoying the classical music selections. During this past winter, one morning I heard the day’s forecast calling for 4-8 inches of snow, and started to go into serious storm preparation mode, assuming the forecast was intended for the Roanoke Valley. If I had listened to the whole forecast, I would have learned that was predicted for everyone south of 460, including a large swath of Virginia and the Carolinas. Roanoke was on the northern edge of that area, making that forecast less likely for us. Another day that week, I heard what I thought was a forecast and again was ready to go into action; however, it was not the forecast but a report of the prior day’s weather. And then there was the day I slept through the forecast and blamed the radio station for skipping it. My fault, not theirs. Even listening to something as straightforward as a weather forecast requires me to attend and stop my inner chatter. So, what happens when we exchange more complex ideas, especially those with political or religious overtones, or our innermost thoughts and feelings?

In an era when everyone can speak, amplified by social media, and life moves at a very rapid clip, we often don’t feel heard. Nor do we slow down enough to listen attentively to others. Yet civil society only works when people trust that their voices really matter and that their perspectives are considered. Well-functioning families, schools, businesses and our democracy all require the civil exchange of ideas, thoughts and feelings. That exchange starts with listening, really hearing what the other person is trying to communicate. Such deep listening requires us to be fully present, to give our undivided attention to another, and to stop thinking about what we are going to say next.

Listening is particularly hard in a time when we are overloaded with information and misinformation, and opinions are deeply and rigidly entrenched. Stopping to listen deeply, drop our defensive posture, understand another’s position and only then to exchange ideas is not something we do well or see others doing as much as might be helpful. Sometimes it feels like we are now adults playing that Telephone game. 

Yet, listening strengthens civil society — whether in the family, workplace or public space —because it builds trust, reduces conflict and improves decision making. When people feel heard, they are more willing to compromise and collaborate and to participate in problem solving. If they feel their perspective has been respectfully heard and been considered by others, they are more willing to accept outcomes even when they don’t fully agree. But when individuals or even groups of people believe they are not being heard, conflict is likely to escalate. Anger and frustration build and people will take to the streets until they are heard. Listening enables us to take down the temperature, build trust and find common ground. 

Practice listening, being fully present to hear another without jumping to judgment, as one way each of us can strengthen our civil society and improve the quality of our common lives. Listening is a powerful tool that we can each use to foster an enduring civil society in which each person feels their voice has been heard and matters. Remember, two ears and one mouth, listen more than you speak.

Nancy Gray is the former president of Hollins University.

The post Former Hollins president: Why we should listen before we speak appeared first on Cardinal News.

Here are some of the top headlines from other news outlets around Virginia. Some content may be behind a metered paywall:

Politics:

Spanberger weighs legislation to allow class action lawsuits in Virginia courts. — Virginia Mercury.

Thousands of Virginians will regain the right to vote next month. — Virginia Mercury.

Economy:

Dominion solar credit rate to decline. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

Report: Virginia sports betting topped $672 million during March. — Bristol Herald Courier (paywall).

Weather:

For more weather news, follow weather journalist Kevin Myatt on Twitter / X at @kevinmyattwx and sign up for his free weather email newsletter. His weekly column appears in Cardinal News each Wednesday afternoon.

The post Headlines from across the state: Spanberger weighs legislation to allow class action lawsuits in Virginia courts; more … appeared first on Cardinal News.

Virginia lawmakers pushed through a few artificial intelligence-related bills by the end of their 2026 regular session. Multiple others didn’t make it, apparent victims of an executive order that President Donald Trump signed late last year.

In a Dec. 11 executive order, Trump threatened to withhold Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment money from states with “onerous AI laws.” That could add up to more than $800 million in Virginia for tasks that include providing cellular service to so-called “dead spots.”

Stalled measures included addressing chatbot interactions with minors and the use of AI to evaluate insurance claims and treat patients’ mental health.

“We’ve heard the alarm, if you will, in regards to that,” said Del. Cliff Hayes, D-Chesapeake, during a House of Delegates’ Communications, Technology and Innovation Committee that he chaired in February.

In a world where Trump wants federal control of AI to supersede state measures, members of Virginia’s congressional delegation are working to start that process. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., are pushing bills from their respective chambers that will cover some of the holes in Virginia’s code.

Griffith, a senior member of Energy and Commerce’s Communications and Technology subcommittee, co-sponsored the SECURE Data Act, introduced April 22. Griffith said the act would standardize data privacy protections, granting U.S. consumers rights to access, correct and delete their personal data.

It would also require disclosure of AI’s use “for consequential decision making” and requires parental consent to process personal data for ages 15 and younger, he said in the statement.

“Today, health insurers are increasingly using AI to process and automate prior authorization decisions,” he said. “AI can be helpful in streamlining this process, but in cases of a denial of a medical procedure or treatment, there should be immediate medical review by a qualified medical professional.”

On Thursday, Warner announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced legislation he wrote to protect children from AI chatbots. The bipartisan Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act passed out of the committee unanimously, according to a news release. 

It would ban AI companies from providing digital companions to minors and mandate that those companions disclose their nonhuman status and lack of professional credentials. It would also create criminal categories for companies that knowingly use AI products to solicit minors or provide them with sexual content.

“AI chatbots put the mental and physical health of young people at risk,” Warner said in a news release. “I’m encouraged to see this bipartisan legislation advance through committee. It is time to put clear guardrails in place to protect children from manipulative or dangerous chatbot interactions and hold tech companies accountable.”

These were among the issues that General Assembly members attempted to address in the recently concluded session.

A threat to funding

Trump’s executive order directed the Commerce Department to issue a policy notice rendering states with “onerous AI laws … ineligible for non-deployment funds, to the maximum extent allowed” by federal law. Non-deployment funds are the money left over from BEAD grants to the states after their internet connections are made.

Communications, Technology and Innovation postponed action until next year on HB 635, which would have heavily restricted so-called companion chatbots’ interactions with people that have led to self-harm and even suicide. The same committee stalled a Senate bill, SB 796, from Sen. Tara Durant, R-Fredericksburg, which was similar but specifically targeted minors’ use of the technology.

Del. Michelle Maldonado, D-Manassas, introduced the House bill and blamed the Trump administration for its failure, noting the “chilling effect of the AI executive order on state actions.”

“We have seen the administration go after them,” Maldonado said during committee discussion of her measure. “It’s inappropriate. It’s unfair.”

The committee carried over the measures with recommendations that the General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Technology and Science study them. It suggested the same for SB 586, by Sen. Saddam Salim, D-Falls Church, which would have required health insurance companies to show how they use AI to manage claims and prohibit health carriers from relying on it exclusively for decisions.

Hayes, the committee chair, laid out three requirements for such legislation: A bill couldn’t conflict with the state’s existing consumer data protection law. If it cost taxpayers, the budget bill had to provide for it. Finally, it could not jeopardize the BEAD money. 

Salim’s bill was among those that should be postponed because they might affect the federal funds, Hayes said in a Feb. 23 hearing.

According to Trump’s executive order, the attorney general’s office was to establish an “AI litigation task force” and the Commerce Department was scheduled to conduct a study of state laws to identify and dispute state laws that “unconstitutionally” regulate interstate commerce, that conflict with existing federal regulations, that require AI models to alter their “truthful outputs” or that would lead to First Amendment violations.

“We have to make sure that we … will not threaten the commonwealth’s over $800 million with regards to the BEAD funding that we have that’s coming from the federal government,” Hayes said.

Salim, in a recent phone interview, said that he believes legislators are moving too slowly from an abundance of caution and are using the executive order as a “smoke screen” as groups, including the Joint Committee on Technology and Science, study them.

“We usually try to see what other states do, and then replicate what’s good and take out what’s bad,” Salim said. 

He added: “I thought if we were going to be pushing for change and pushing things forward, we would have moved these bills forward in order to push the federal administration to say they’re already cutting funding for us regardless of what we do and what we don’t do. … I don’t believe it would have impacted those funds.

“I think if it did, we could have had legal counsel … the AG’s office could have sued.”

Federal lawmakers’ responses

Four months after Trump called for states to follow a national policy framework for AI, the administration released its legislative recommendations for such a framework. It is meant to supersede “a patchwork of conflicting state laws” that would “undermine American innovation.” No framework bill in either house of Congress has yet been introduced, but Griffith said a draft is in development from the House of Representatives side.

“There have been discussions behind the scenes at the Energy & Commerce Committee and Rep. [Jay] Obernolte [R-California] is drafting a comprehensive federal AI standards bill that I look forward to reviewing,” Griffith said in an April 24 email from his spokesman. 

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., has publicly circulated a draft bill, as well.

Meanwhile, Warner and Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., introduced a bill that would direct the U.S. Department of Labor to collect AI usage data to help illuminate how AI is affecting employment.

“It’s critical that everyone has access to accurate and timely information that can prepare them for a changing labor market,” Warner said in a news release about the Workforce Transparency Act.

As for state lawmaking, Warner has said he is skeptical of Trump’s framework, which he said “lacks significant substance.” In a quote that his office provided on April 24, he said that it is a “gross overreach of federal power” to threaten withholding BEAD funds to states exercising their constitutional rights to “legislate freely.”

Warner was among those in Congress who drafted the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which created BEAD.

“As one of the lead drafters of the IIJA’s broadband provisions, I can say with certainty that the president’s actions are counter to Congress’ goal of closing the broadband gap with BEAD,” he said in the April 24 statement. “I remain unsurprised at this administration’s lack of respect for and understanding of the law.”

He added that he hopes Republicans will join him in opposing the administration’s threat to the states.

Resolving to study, setting a safety standard

The General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution, HJ 32, to require the nonpartisan Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission to study AI policies in place at Virginia’s colleges and universities and to develop a model policy for its use. JLARC would also make recommendations for “tools, curricula and other resources” to be commonly available.

Other unanimous votes centered on an AI safety advisory board under the Virginia Information Technologies Agency’s auspices and a bill expanding the Division of Consumer Counsel’s duties to include programs to address AI fraud and abuse.

Failed legislation included a consumer data protection bill, SB 85, which passed the Senate but died in the House. Before crossover, the House killed bills related to law enforcement’s use of AI in investigations and forensic laboratory accreditation.

Salim, the delegate from Falls Church, said he thinks his bills will eventually be passed, and he hopes to see a quicker turnaround time in general.

“We’re going at a walking pace,” he said, “whereas the industry is going 120 miles an hour.”

The post AI bills faced a logjam in the General Assembly due to a Trump executive order, but Congress is working to fill the gap appeared first on Cardinal News.

To win election to the Martinsville City Council in a closely contested election four years ago, L.C. Jones needed votes from all six of the city’s voting precincts to eke out a narrow, 91-vote victory.

To remove Jones from office — suspended from office for two months — and put him on trial to be removed permanently, critics needed only one of those precincts.

That precinct, which supplied more than three-quarters of the signatures needed to trigger the removal process, is politically and demographically unlike the rest of Martinsville.

In a city that’s almost evenly divided along racial lines, it’s the only majority-white precinct.

In a city that almost always votes Democratic, it’s the only precinct that consistently votes Republican.

In a city that’s growing younger, it’s the precinct with the highest median age — and one of only two where that median age is rising, not falling.

In other words, Martinsville’s Precinct 5 is quite unlike the rest of the city around it, yet voters there have managed to set in motion something rare in Virginia politics: a trial on whether the city’s mayor should be removed from office.

Let’s put this another way: A petition mostly signed by voters in Martinsville’s only majority-white precinct managed to temporarily oust the city’s Black mayor — and could still lead to his permanent removal.

I want to be clear: There is no evidence whatsoever that the removal petition is inspired by any kind of racial animus. I also offer no insight into whether Jones did or didn’t do the things he’s accused of — the petition begins by alleging “acceptance of a bribe” then goes on to say Jones “neglected” to report various conflicts of interest and an attempt “to impede lawful efforts to address credible reports” of violations of state and federal law. These are serious charges which are now under investigation by a special prosecutor. If that special prosecutor finds sufficient evidence for an indictment, we have a court system to handle such things.

My curiosity is solely about the separate process that’s been initiated to remove Jones from office before any criminal charges have been filed.

I devoted a previous column to this process. The short version: Only four localities in Virginia have provisions for recall elections. In others, the removal process requires a petition with a certain number of signatures (varies by size of locality) that winds up in court. Almost all these get dismissed because the legal bar is high. This year, though, Virginia has two removal cases in process, one against the mayor of Martinsville, the other against the vice mayor of Purcellville, a town in Loudoun County.

The case against Ben Nett in Purcellville went to trial last week. A jury found him guilty of conflict of interest but not more serious charges, and allowed him to continue in office. This was the first removal trial to go to a conclusion in Virginia since 1953, when a jury in Princess Anne County (now Virginia Beach) declined to remove its sheriff. You have to go back to 1911 to find an elected official in Virginia removed from office; that was Roanoke Mayor Joel Cutchin, who was accused of allowing brothels to flourish.

As I pointed out in that previous column, Virginia’s removal law is written so broadly that it has allowed for the cases in Purcellville and Martinsville to proceed in two very different ways. In Northern Virginia, a white vice mayor under indictment on bid-rigging charges was allowed to serve for nine months before his removal case went to trial. In Southside, a Black mayor who has not been charged with any crime was suspended for two months before his removal trial could be held. A different judge recently reinstated Jones but the fact remains, these cases unfolded in two very different ways. Does that show the law is too broadly written or does it show the law is sufficiently flexible?

Today, I will look at a different aspect of the law: what it takes to set the removal process in motion. State law lays out two main reasons. One is conviction of certain crimes, which is clear enough. The other is “neglect of a clear, ministerial duty of the office, misuse of the office, or incompetence in the performance of the duties of the office.” Those standards are harder to define, but we likely do need some judicial way to remove an official who neglects or misuses the office or is just flat-out incompetent.

The petition that set the Jones removal case in Martinsville in motion alleges some neglect. However, it also alleges at least one actual crime — “acceptance of a bribe” — and likely another, impeding efforts to address allegations of lawbreaking, which might constitute obstruction of justice. I’ll let the lawyers deal with that, but accepting a bribe is very clearly defined as a Class 4 felony, for which the penalty is two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.

The odd thing here, procedurally, is that the mayor of Martinsville is set to face a removal trial for “acceptance of a bribe” with no criminal indictment whatsoever, merely the say-so of the petition signers. Yes, a judge read all this and felt this was sufficient to suspend the mayor, but this is still an allegation of a serious crime that has taken place outside the regular criminal justice system. Is this a good idea? We live in contentious political times. Is it wise to have a system where a group of people can simply sign a petition and effectively charge an office-holder with a crime? Shouldn’t allegations of a crime have to go through the standard criminal justice mechanisms — a police investigation, a grand jury indictment, an arrest warrant? The petition’s allegation that Jones “neglected” to report conflicts of interest seems to fall squarely under the removal statute’s language about neglect, misuse and incompetence, but if people can simply sign a petition and allege that an office-holder committed a felony, that seems ripe for misuse even if turns out to be completely justified in this case.

Then there’s the matter of who signed the petition. This is more of a political observation than a legal one, but we are talking about an elected official here, so politics is tied up in this. Jones’ legal team has circulated a map that says 76.3% of the petition-signers came from a single precinct: Precinct 5, described above. Not willing to take this claim at face value, Cardinal commissioned freelance journalist Hugh Lessig to map all the names and addresses on the petition — and we came to the same conclusion. You can see our map here:

In this case, voters in one part of town have been able to set in motion a removal trial for a council member elected citywide. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe it’s not. On the good side: The law allows a group of aggrieved voters to seek recourse. The fact that these petition-signers may be in the political minority in Martinsville is irrelevant. While our democratic system is built on the concept of “majority rules,” we do build in protections for political minorities. Perhaps this is one of them. On the not-so-good side: The politics here start to give the appearance of a racial dimension to the case even if there is none.

Martinsville is 48.1% white, 46.1% Black. The vast majority of the petition-signers come from a precinct that nearly matches Census Tract 5, which is 73.4% white — and the only census tract in the city with a white majority. Perhaps this is a situation where the law allows a group of concerned citizens to raise their concerns in a judicial forum; they shouldn’t be penalized for who they are or where they live. Or, politically, this could be a case of the tail wagging the dog — a small minority exerting an outsized power.

The larger question may be this: Virginia removal law, once little used, is now being turned to more often. Is it working? Or do these cases shine light on ways it should be changed?

Want more political news and analysis? We have it every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up here:

The post More than 3/4s of the signatures that led to mayor’s suspension came from just one part of Martinsville. It’s a neighborhood unlike the rest of the city. appeared first on Cardinal News.

To win election to the Martinsville City Council in a closely contested election four years ago, L.C. Jones needed votes from all six of the city’s voting precincts to eke out a narrow, 91-vote victory.

To remove Jones from office — suspended from office for two months — and put him on trial to be removed permanently, critics needed only one of those precincts.

That precinct, which supplied more than three-quarters of the signatures needed to trigger the removal process, is politically and demographically unlike the rest of Martinsville.

In a city that’s almost evenly divided along racial lines, it’s the only majority-white precinct.

In a city that almost always votes Democratic, it’s the only precinct that consistently votes Republican.

In a city that’s growing younger, it’s the precinct with the highest median age — and one of only two where that median age is rising, not falling.

In other words, Martinsville’s Precinct 5 is quite unlike the rest of the city around it, yet voters there have managed to set in motion something rare in Virginia politics: a trial on whether the city’s mayor should be removed from office.

Let’s put this another way: A petition mostly signed by voters in Martinsville’s only majority-white precinct managed to temporarily oust the city’s Black mayor — and could still lead to his permanent removal.

I want to be clear: There is no evidence whatsoever that the removal petition is inspired by any kind of racial animus. I also offer no insight into whether Jones did or didn’t do the things he’s accused of — the petition begins by alleging “acceptance of a bribe” then goes on to say Jones “neglected” to report various conflicts of interest and an attempt “to impede lawful efforts to address credible reports” of violations of state and federal law. These are serious charges which are now under investigation by a special prosecutor. If that special prosecutor finds sufficient evidence for an indictment, we have a court system to handle such things.

My curiosity is solely about the separate process that’s been initiated to remove Jones from office before any criminal charges have been filed.

I devoted a previous column to this process. The short version: Only four localities in Virginia have provisions for recall elections. In others, the removal process requires a petition with a certain number of signatures (varies by size of locality) that winds up in court. Almost all these get dismissed because the legal bar is high. This year, though, Virginia has two removal cases in process, one against the mayor of Martinsville, the other against the vice mayor of Purcellville, a town in Loudoun County.

The case against Ben Nett in Purcellville went to trial last week. A jury found him guilty of conflict of interest but not more serious charges, and allowed him to continue in office. This was the first removal trial to go to a conclusion in Virginia since 1953, when a jury in Princess Anne County (now Virginia Beach) declined to remove its sheriff. You have to go back to 1911 to find an elected official in Virginia removed from office; that was Roanoke Mayor Joel Cutchin, who was accused of allowing brothels to flourish.

As I pointed out in that previous column, Virginia’s removal law is written so broadly that it has allowed for the cases in Purcellville and Martinsville to proceed in two very different ways. In Northern Virginia, a white vice mayor under indictment on bid-rigging charges was allowed to serve for nine months before his removal case went to trial. In Southside, a Black mayor who has not been charged with any crime was suspended for two months before his removal trial could be held. A different judge recently reinstated Jones but the fact remains, these cases unfolded in two very different ways. Does that show the law is too broadly written or does it show the law is sufficiently flexible?

Today, I will look at a different aspect of the law: what it takes to set the removal process in motion. State law lays out two main reasons. One is conviction of certain crimes, which is clear enough. The other is “neglect of a clear, ministerial duty of the office, misuse of the office, or incompetence in the performance of the duties of the office.” Those standards are harder to define, but we likely do need some judicial way to remove an official who neglects or misuses the office or is just flat-out incompetent.

The petition that set the Jones removal case in Martinsville in motion alleges some neglect. However, it also alleges at least one actual crime — “acceptance of a bribe” — and likely another, impeding efforts to address allegations of lawbreaking, which might constitute obstruction of justice. I’ll let the lawyers deal with that, but accepting a bribe is very clearly defined as a Class 4 felony, for which the penalty is two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.

The odd thing here, procedurally, is that the mayor of Martinsville is set to face a removal trial for “acceptance of a bribe” with no criminal indictment whatsoever, merely the say-so of the petition signers. Yes, a judge read all this and felt this was sufficient to suspend the mayor, but this is still an allegation of a serious crime that has taken place outside the regular criminal justice system. Is this a good idea? We live in contentious political times. Is it wise to have a system where a group of people can simply sign a petition and effectively charge an office-holder with a crime? Shouldn’t allegations of a crime have to go through the standard criminal justice mechanisms — a police investigation, a grand jury indictment, an arrest warrant? The petition’s allegation that Jones “neglected” to report conflicts of interest seems to fall squarely under the removal statute’s language about neglect, misuse and incompetence, but if people can simply sign a petition and allege that an office-holder committed a felony, that seems ripe for misuse even if turns out to be completely justified in this case.

Then there’s the matter of who signed the petition. This is more of a political observation than a legal one, but we are talking about an elected official here, so politics is tied up in this. Jones’ legal team has circulated a map that says 76.3% of the petition-signers came from a single precinct: Precinct 5, described above. Not willing to take this claim at face value, Cardinal commissioned freelance journalist Hugh Lessig to map all the names and addresses on the petition — and we came to the same conclusion. You can see our map here:

In this case, voters in one part of town have been able to set in motion a removal trial for a council member elected citywide. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe it’s not. On the good side: The law allows a group of aggrieved voters to seek recourse. The fact that these petition-signers may be in the political minority in Martinsville is irrelevant. While our democratic system is built on the concept of “majority rules,” we do build in protections for political minorities. Perhaps this is one of them. On the not-so-good side: The politics here start to give the appearance of a racial dimension to the case even if there is none.

Martinsville is 48.1% white, 46.1% Black. The vast majority of the petition-signers come from a precinct that nearly matches Census Tract 5, which is 73.4% white — and the only census tract in the city with a white majority. Perhaps this is a situation where the law allows a group of concerned citizens to raise their concerns in a judicial forum; they shouldn’t be penalized for who they are or where they live. Or, politically, this could be a case of the tail wagging the dog — a small minority exerting an outsized power.

The larger question may be this: Virginia removal law, once little used, is now being turned to more often. Is it working? Or do these cases shine light on ways it should be changed?

Want more political news and analysis? We have it every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up here:

The post More than 3/4s of the signatures that led to mayor’s suspension came from just one part of Martinsville. It’s a neighborhood unlike the rest of the city. appeared first on Cardinal News.

A yearlong push to have Russell County’s financial records audited amid questions of possible irregularities is back on the agenda for the county board of supervisors’ Monday meeting.

In May 2025, Supervisors Nathan Kiser and Tara Dye began calling for a forensic audit, which would examine financial records for possible evidence of fraud or misconduct.

Among the matters they want investigated are the county public service authority’s billing and fee collection practices and the dissolution of the Dante Volunteer Fire Department.

But County Administrator Lonzo Lester and several other supervisors assert that there has been no wrongdoing and that some people in the community are stirring up rumors without any evidence.

The topic on the agenda will be a report on whether the Virginia Office of the Inspector General would conduct an audit at no cost to the county. The alternative favored by Kiser and Dye is to have a Maryland accounting firm conduct a forensic audit at a cost of more than $200,000.

Kiser first called for a forensic audit in May 2025 as supervisors discussed setting a real estate tax rate for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

The rate had been 63 cents per $100 of assessed value prior to a property reassessment. In April 2025, supervisors were told that following the reassessment, real estate values overall were 40% higher than those established in 2018, and that the tax rate would need to drop to 47.4 cents to keep property owners’ tax bills roughly the same. At that time, county administrators said the rate would need to be 60.8 cents to pay for all funding requests in the county budget.

At the May 2025 meeting, William Harrison of the county fire chiefs’ association said it was rumored that the county intended to cut funding for fire departments. Kiser said that someone in county government had made a list of proposed funding cuts that the board had not discussed. He moved to order a forensic audit, saying it would restore citizens’ trust in government, but the motion failed.

According to Lester, there was a list simply showing supervisors their options for spending cuts, not recommendations for cuts. He said that when federal- and state-mandated local government funding requirements are removed from the equation, supervisors control only 5%-7% of county spending.

Lester called rumors of financial impropriety simply “fake news on social media” and said he would gladly “show anyone the books.”

A motion from Supervisor Steve Breeding to set the real estate tax rate at 57.9 cents initially failed. But the board approved a motion from Kiser to set the same tax rate if a forensic audit was approved.

In July 2025, supervisors named Lester, Breeding and Kiser to an audit firm search committee. That September, the board agreed to send out a request for proposals. As of December, the audit committee interviewed firms. In February, the committee recommended hiring Maryland-based UHY Advisors Mid-Atlantic Inc.

UHY’s proposal, which would cost $217,600, would include reviewing county payments, internal financial controls, documentation of the depletion of county fund balances and compliance with generally accepted accounting principles. Further, the proposed agreement’s scope would include a review of agreements between the county and the public service authority pertaining to trash disposal fee collections since 2006, along with an examination of the 2024 suspension and 2025 closing of the Dante Fire Department.

Some citizens have repeatedly raised questions and concerns about both the PSA’s billing practices and the circumstances under which the fire department was shut down. One action during the May 2025 meeting was to authorize the county administration to sell the former fire department property, with Kiser voting no.

During the March 30 supervisors meeting, county attorney Tyler Starnes explained that another option would be to ask the state inspector general’s office to do an investigation. The office can look into alleged fraud, abuse and waste if an official allegation of wrongdoing has been made, he said.

Supervisor Lou Ann Wallace said some people on social media falsely claim that people in county government are “all embezzling or something.” Lester noted that litigation following the Dante Fire Department’s shutdown had been resolved and the matter was “cleared up.”

He was referring to a November 2025 circuit court settlement of litigation challenging the shutdown. The settlement included an agreement between plaintiffs and defendants to have the litigation “non-suited,” which means that the person who filed the suit agreed to withdraw it.

At that time, county officials said in a statement that the Dante department’s incorporation had been terminated by the State Corporation Commission in 2015, but the department had continued operating without corporate status until the county ordered it to cease operations in 2024.

As for the PSA issues, Lester said that the Virginia State Police investigated allegations of financial improprieties and the result was that “every dollar is accounted for.”

Lester cautioned supervisors that an inspector general’s forensic audit would be “a forensic audit on steroids” and investigators would question “everyone,” including people making allegations on social media.

The board agreed to have county officials contact the inspector general’s office and inquire about how to initiate an investigation. Kiser and Dye voted against it.

 Starnes will report on the results of the inquiry when the board meets on Monday.

Supervisors will convene at 6 p.m. in the board chambers at the county governmental center, 139 Highland Drive, Lebanon.

You can find meeting documents here.

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