rawdog

Gov. Abigail Spanberger and two key legislators have come to an agreement to legalize recreational cannabis sales. 

That agreement includes a later start to recreational sales and a slower roll out of retail licenses than what was in legislation that the General Assembly passed, as well as the removal of tougher penalties for the transport of unlawfully large quantities of cannabis that the governor had included in her amendments. 

The compromise includes a July 2027 start date for recreational sales, and retail licenses will be capped at 350 across the state with their issuance to be rolled out gradually over time. 

Spanberger had vetoed the bill by state Sen. Lashrecse Aird, D-Henrico County, and Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax County, that passed during the 2026 legislative session to create a framework for recreational cannabis sales after the General Assembly discarded amendments to the bill made by the governor. A vetoed bill can be resurrected if it is included in the commonwealth’s budget, which is what the lawmakers plan to do. 

The governor has line-item veto authority over the budget but Tuesday’s joint press conference signaled Spanberger’s approval of the effort. 

“We have always shared the same priorities and goals for this marketplace, including measures to keep our kids safe once the marketplace is open. It’s important to all of us that retailers don’t advertise to young people, that they comply with the new laws in place about selling to minors,” Spanberger said. 

The House of Delegates and state Senate still appear at odds regarding the full biennial spending bill, however, with tax exemptions for data centers as the main point of contention. The House unveiled an updated proposal on Friday and the Senate presented their updated proposal on Tuesday during the Senate Finance Committee meeting. The House and Senate conferees were slated to meet Tuesday afternoon to work out the differences between the two proposals. 

As it pertained to cannabis, however, prior differences between the legislative and executive branch appear to have been smoothed over through negotiations that took place after the 2026 session concluded.

“To compromise and find agreement, leaders have to be open, they have to be willing to know their priorities but understand that to reach agreement you have to be flexible,” Aird said of the cannabis framework negotiations. “Too many have been affected by real harms for us to get here and this agreement reflects responsible regulation that protects young people, gives Virginians a safe legal option and avoids criminalizing adult use.”

Krizek added that communities who have been disproportionately affected by past cannabis enforcement should not be “locked out” of the economic opportunity created by reform. 

“The goal really is to create a cannabis market that is responsible and one that is regulated, competitive but most important, open to small businesses that deserve a real chance to succeed,” he said. 

What else is included in the retail cannabis framework: 

• A state tax rate of 6% at launch, which will rise to 8% after July 1, 2029;
• Localities are able to include an additional local retail tax of up to 3%; 
• Retail license cap of 350, not all of which will be issued at once but instead rolled out over time; 
• The authority to issue up to 100 microbusiness licenses by May 2027; 
• 75% of license fee deposits in the first year will be directed into the Cannabis Equity Business Loan Fund;
• Allocates the revenue of cannabis sales towards early childcare and education, K-12 education, behavioral health programming for substance use disorder prevention and treatment programs, public health programs, and the Cannabis Equity Reinvestment Fund.
• Increases the possession limit from one ounce to two ounces; 
• A $250 public consumption civil penalty that will start in July 2027; 
• Strict testing and labeling requirements;
• A measure to address the proliferation of intoxicating hemp products sold in retail settings; 
• Restores regulatory language designed to protect impact licensees and small businesses from predatory investment structures, and other limits on the transfer of licenses; 
• Establishes the Cannabis Impact Business Support Team to help businesses in communities disproportionately impacted by past cannabis enforcement.

The Joint Commission to Oversee the Transition of the Commonwealth into a Cannabis Retail Market will continue to make recommendations for further consideration by the legislature, Aird added. 

“There are several additional actions that the joint commission will continue to review and assess,” she said. 

The post Spanberger, legislators announce agreement on legal cannabis sales appeared first on Cardinal News.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:

When Thomas Jefferson wanted to inspire people, he looked to his literary models. None was closer to his heart than Shakespeare.

The Battle of Agincourt was fought in northern France on St. Crispin’s Day (Oct. 25), 1415, between the French and the outnumbered forces of English King Henry V. In Shakespeare’s telling, one of Henry’s lieutenants waffles on the eve of battle. Henry responds with lines that have resounded through the English-speaking world:

…we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother…
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

The fire and rhythm of those lines influenced Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the conclusion to the Declaration of the Independence:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

That’s the view of Bill Barker, a historical actor and interpreter who portrays the third president at Monticello.

The Bard’s influence is also evident in the long central section of the Declaration, the list of grievances against King George III, Barker said in an interview. 

In an age when many were illiterate, the Declaration, like Shakespeare’s work, was written to be heard, not just read. “It’s lifting the soul to noble sentiments, just as Henry V does,” Barker said. “And you feel that when you hear it read.”

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello produced a video in which Barker, in character as the president, speaks of his early fondness for the poet.

“I grew up in the wilderness,” says Barker (as Jefferson). “I still consider myself to be a savage of the forest. Reading Shakespeare and plays and the poems of Milton was something that occupied our time delightfully. In fact my good friend from youth, Dabney Carr, and I would come up here to the mountaintop and sit under an old oak tree on the southwest side” and read to each other. 

Our knowledge of Jefferson’s reading habits comes from his journals, letters and a catalog of his personal library compiled by Millicent Sowerby in the 1950s.

Jefferson didn’t just read the plays; he sought opportunities to see them. The first one he saw, Barker said, was “The Merchant of Venice,” produced by David Douglass’s American Company. 

Williamsburg boasted the first theater in the Colonies, built in 1716. Professional theater in Virginia dates to 1752 with the arrival of a troupe of English actors. 

During a two-week period when he was courting the widow Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson attended the theater in Williamsburg almost every night. Seven shillings bought a seat in a box. “Whomever you were courting, that was the ticket you would purchase,” Barker said. The less affluent bought seats in the gallery or standing room among the “groundlings” in the pit. 

Theater etiquette was indecorous by modern standards. Patrons, especially those in the gallery or pit, were vocal if displeased. “The pit, they could hurl aspersions, whatever they chose to say to the actors, while the performance was continuing,” Barker said. Nevertheless, Jefferson loved the theater.

One of the first times Jefferson socialized with George Washington was at the theater in Williamsburg, around 1768. Theater season coincided with court and legislative sessions. Many who debated politics during the day gathered in the theater in the evening.

In the pre-social media era, the ability to orate from a stage was a critical skill in the politician’s toolbox. 

“I doubt anyone who is engaged in politics could underestimate the effect that theater has upon their life, particularly Shakespeare and his magnificent speeches,” Barker said. “That is one of the things that so pleases me about Shakespeare, is the influence it has upon speechmaking and moving the heart and moving the conscience.”

Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say, “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” Jefferson knew, when he wrote the Declaration, “he could be writing his death warrant,” Barker said. The other signers were also putting their lives in jeopardy. As they affixed their signatures, “[Ben] Franklin makes that extraordinary comment, ‘Gentlemen, we must now continue to hang together, because rest assured, if we do not, we are going to hang separately.’ There’s your Band of Brothers.”

Franklin’s remark has been doubted by scholars, but no one doubts the courage behind it.

In 1786, while serving as minister to France, Jefferson spent six weeks in England. He saw Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London. With John Adams, also a Shakespeare fan, he visited the Bard’s home, Stratford-upon-Avon, where the worshipful Jefferson stepped out of the carriage and kissed the ground. In the house reputed to be Shakespeare’s birthplace, they were shown a chair in which the playwright had supposedly sat before dying. The future presidents sliced off a piece for a souvenir, common custom at the time.

They visited Shakespeare’s tomb inside Holy Trinity Church and pondered the curse engraved upon it (here with modernized spelling):

GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEAR,
TO DIG THE DUST ENCLOSED HERE.
BLESSED BE THE MAN THAT SPARES THESE STONES,
AND CURSED BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES.

All the world’s a stage. When Jefferson made his own exit, he did so with a dramatist’s sense of timing. On his deathbed at Monticello, he woke up on the evening of July 3, 1826, and asked, “Is it the Fourth?” 

The final curtain dropped the next day, exactly 50 years since the adoption of Declaration. Shakespeare could not have written it better.

See Thomas Jefferson (as portrayed by Bill Barker) discuss his love of Shakespeare in this video produced by Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello:

The post Who inspired Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence? Shakespeare. appeared first on Cardinal News.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:

The last name of Charles Lynch became a verb. Lynching is a terrifying execution, often by hanging, at the hands of a mob. The sentences he imposed on Loyalists in the tense summer of 1780 were indeed severe — but does he deserve everlasting infamy? A new biography has some answers.

Contrary to some sources, Charles Lynch wasn’t born in what’s now Lynchburg, but on his father’s plantation in Goochland (later Albemarle) County. The site later became Charlottesville’s Pen Park, according to Wyatt Golden, author of  “A Zealous and Active Patriot,” which will be published July 11.

The career of Judge Lynch’s father, Charles Lynch the Elder, illustrates the incredible fortunes that could be made in Colonial Virginia by white males with hard work, a willingness to take risks, and luck. The elder Lynch arrived in Virginia around 1725 as stowaway from Ireland. The penniless teen had no options except indentured servitude, and had the good fortune to find himself in the hands of a kindly Quaker master. Lynch left his indenture not only with the skills to navigate 18th-century Virginia, but with the master’s 15-year-old daughter, Sarah. By the late 1740s the former indentured servant was a member of the House of Burgesses. He moved from Albemarle to what’s now Lynchburg, and his holdings in 1752 included 4,000 acres and 22 enslaved people.

Charles Sr. and Sarah had four sons, including Charles Jr., the judge (born 1736) and John (founder of Lynchburg). In 1755, Charles Jr. married Anne Terrell, a Quaker, and moved to a property he inherited on the Staunton (Roanoke) River in Bedford County (later Campbell County). The site of Lynch’s plantation, Green Level, is in what’s now Altavista.

No portraits survive of Charles Lynch. We know nothing of his appearance except that the Lynch men were tall. Like his father, he was resourceful, ambitious, energetic and willing to take risks.

The man whose surname became a byword for violence, especially against Black people, was a Quaker. Some Quakers still owned slaves in the mid-1700s, and Charles owned and used enslaved people to build and run his estate. He inherited five enslaved people, Lety, Will, Samson, Philis and Sarah, from his father. By 1776, Quakers were prohibited from owning slaves. Charles’s siblings Sarah and John, devout Quakers, became advocates for manumission.

Charles was a prominent Quaker, but dropped out by 1764 — probably in support of his brother, Christopher, who was charged with transgressions and forced out of the faith, according to Golden. 

Following in his father’s footsteps, Charles was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1769. In Williamsburg he widened his acquaintance with the men who would take Virginia out of the British Empire. 

With war looming, gunpowder became critical. Almost all of the Colonies’ supply was imported from Britain. As tensions heated up, the British cut off supplies and instructed governors like Lord Dunmore to seize local stores. In 1775 the Colonies had only one powder mill, in Pennsylvania. 

Into the breach stepped Charles Lynch. With a neighbor, Benjamin Clement, he went into the un-Quakerish business of manufacturing gunpowder.

The ingredients for gunpowder are saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur and charcoal. At the Third Virginia Convention, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, Robert Carter Nicholas, Archibald Cary, Edmund Pendleton and Lynch authored an ordinance for making “saltpetre, gunpowder, lead, and refining sulfur, and providing arms for the use of the colony.”

Lynch’s inclusion among some of the foremost Virginians of the day indicates their recognition of his expertise and energy. The Lynch/Clement powder mill was in Hurt, across the Staunton River from Green Level.

Virginia’s primitive military-industrial complex included the mill, an arsenal at New London, and the lead mines (see our story) in Montgomery (now Wythe) County. By 1778, Lynch was in charge of the lead mines. The ex-Quaker was a linchpin of the military supply chain. Patriot soldiers fired bullets made from Lynch’s lead, propelled by Lynch’s gunpowder.

Lynch was also a justice of the peace and a militia colonel, responsible for recruiting Bedford County’s militia. He traveled back and forth to the mines, but probably spent most of his time in Bedford County, Golden said.

In 1780 a Patriot spy named John Wyatt uncovered a Loyalist conspiracy to seize the mines and the arsenal. Patriots feared a full-fledged insurrection. Loyalist sentiment simmered in the back country, while Gen. Cornwallis threatened Virginia from the south. (For more on Wyatt and how he uncovered what Col. William Preston told Gov. Thomas Jefferson was “a horrid conspiracy,” see our previous story.)

In 1776, Continental Congress recommended that each state enact a law against treason. The General Assembly defined treason as making war against the commonwealth, or giving aid and comfort to the commonwealth’s enemies. Convicted traitors were to be executed without benefit of clergy, forfeiting their land and possessions. Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, adopted in 1776, grants the accused in capital or criminal prosecutions the right to confront accusers and witnesses, and the right to receive a speedy trial by an impartial jury. 

In the first week of August 1780, Charles Lynch tried some of the accused Loyalist plotters at Green Level, rather than sending them to Richmond. He may have feared escape attempts or rescue by other Loyalists. He was also in a hurry to secure the lead mines.

Records, if any were made, no longer exist, but Golden believes Lynch chose to act in his role as a militia colonel, rather than as a justice of the peace, and in a court-martial, rather than in a criminal trial. The convicted Loyalists, tied to a tree, were lashed 39 times or until they cried “Liberty forever!” Broken under the whip, they were sent to the ranks of the Continental Army.

There is no evidence that Lynch ever executed anyone, by hanging or otherwise, Golden said. Nor were Black people singled out. Nor was Lynch the only back-country Patriot to deal harshly with Loyalists.

Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. With liberty secured, judges became more careful in observing legalities. On June 15, 1782, the Virginia General Court sentenced John Caton, Joshua Hopkins and James Lamb to death for treason. That same year, the General Assembly granted retroactive legal cover to Lynch, William Preston, Robert Adams and James Callaway, describing their summary trials of Loyalists as not “strictly warranted by law, although justifiable from the imminence of the danger.”   

Lynch himself used the term “Lynch’s Law.” Perhaps the alliteration made it more memorable than “Preston’s Law.” Perhaps the “ch” sound chokes off the syllable like a rope-drop. In any case, by the mid-19th century, the term had assumed its terrible modern meaning.

No longer an official member of the Society of Friends, Lynch may have still considered himself a Quaker at heart. When he died in 1796, the judge was buried without a headstone, in keeping with the Quaker values of simplicity and equality. Quakers have no set dogma on judgment in the afterlife. But in attaching his name to lynching, posterity has rendered a kind of verdict on Charles Lynch, whether justified or not.

For information on purchasing “An Active and Zealous Patriot,” see the Avoca Museum website, avocamuseum.org.

Sources:

“An Active and Zealous Patriot,” by Wyatt Golden, 2026. 

The Real Judge Lynch by Thomas Walker Page, 1901

Avoca Museum

1782 letter mentioning “Lynch’s Law”

“An Act Declaring What Shall Be Treason,” 1776

Virginia General Court sentences three men to death for treason, 1782

General Assembly’s indemnification of Lynch:

William Hening, “The Statutes at Large,” vol. 11, p. 134.

The post Col. Lynch had Loyalists tied to a tree and whipped until they cried ‘Liberty Forever!’ That’s where the term ‘Lynch law’ comes from. appeared first on Cardinal News.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. As part of this, I’m writing monthly columns about the politics of the era, written the same way I’d write them today. The events described here took place in April 1776. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter here:

We stand today on the brink of history.

Whether we also stand today on the brink of high treason is yet to be known.

In April, Carter Henry Harrison stepped onto the front porch of the Effingham Tavern in Cumberland County and read out a resolution that called for the Colonies to “abjure any allegiance to His Brittanick Majesty and bid him a goodnight forever.”

The property owners of Cumberland County gathered outside the tavern cheered their approval, and with that, instructed Harrison — their delegate to the Virginia Convention — “positively to declare for an independency.”

With that, the freeholders of Cumberland County became the first in Virginia (and perhaps the first anywhere in the Colonies) to declare their desire to cut our ties with Great Britain and fashion a new country. Not quite two months later, the Colonies from Georgia to New Hampshire (but not those further north) teeter on the edge of doing just that.

Like a tide that at first seems to come in slowly and then suddenly rises up to crash on the shore, this groundswell for independence — or “independency” as some prefer — has been building for a long time, yet still has taken some by surprise.

Just last November, the Albemarle County lawyer and politician Thomas Jefferson wrote to his cousin:

“Believe me, dear Sir: there is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do.” Today, Jefferson sits on a committee in Philadelphia that has been instructed to draft a proposed Declaration of Independence. It is only fair to point out that in his November letter, after Jefferson vouched his affection for Great Britain, he went on to declare that “by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose; and in this, I think I speak the sentiments of America.”

However, the events of the past few months have run more quickly than anyone could have imagined. In April, the freeholders of first Cumberland and Charlotte counties declared themselves in favor of independence. North Carolina soon followed with its own resolution that authorized its delegates to the Congress in Philadelphia to vote in favor of independence should that measure come before the body. Since then, perhaps more than 90 such resolutions have been passed in one form or another by one body or another. Some have been in town or county meetings. In South Carolina, the chief justice of that Colony’s highest court simply included them in jury instructions: “the law of the land authorizes me to declare … that George the Third, King of Great Britain … has no authority over us, and we owe no obedience to him.”

On May 4, the Colony of Rhode Island went the furthest and simply declared itself an independent state. Rhode Island is small but fierce. It is also home to two active ports, Newport and Providence, that have allowed it to amass an unusual amount of wealth. Rhode Island can easily imagine itself standing alone in the world, much like the Italian city-state of Venice, also a busy port. In mid-May, the Virginia Convention instructed its delegates to Congress “to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain.” The middle Colonies have been the most cautious about this talk of independence, but in early May, a special election in Pennsylvania installed a legislature with more independence-minded legislators. The tides have certainly swelled toward a formal break with Britain.

Now we come to this: The Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee, acting on his Colony’s instruction, has put a formal resolution in favor of independence before Congress: “Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

There are words for this, but we don’t know yet which ones to use. If this independence enterprise fails, the word that surely applies is treason. Men in England have been hanged for less. If, though, it should succeed, Lee’s resolution will mark the start of a new era the likes of which we have not seen: A new nation upon the earth.

Know this: Lee’s resolution will come to a vote. There will soon come a time for choosing. We just don’t know when.

The mere introduction of this resolution has thrown Congress into turmoil. Delegates from five Colonies had not yet received instructions from their capitals, and those men are unlikely to vote for such a radical measure. Some have talked of leaving the Congress should it take that fateful step. Others of less hesitant blood contend that Lee’s resolution does nothing more than describe the world as it is: We are already independent of the king. Most of our royal governors have departed, forcibly or otherwise. The king has declared us rebels beyond his protection. Independence need not be declared because independence has already happened.

Words matter, though, and as a matter of law, there should be some words to describe our current condition. Congress has postponed a vote in hopes that a majority can be mustered in favor of a break — but just in case that majority asserts itself, Congress has already appointed a committee to draft a declaration explaining this action to the world. Not surprisingly, the vocal Massachusetts radical John Adams is on this committee; so is Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin, known for his witticisms. One might think that Lee would have been named to this panel — after all, it’s his resolution that the committee hopes to explain — but he is headed back to Virginia, so Jefferson has been named in his stead, along with Robert Livingstone of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.

Committees have rarely produced great works of prose, and so we have no great hope for this particular body. However, word reaches us that this committee has delegated the initial draft to Jefferson, which gives us some hope that its words might be memorable. Jefferson is a noted wordsmith; he is reputed to be the author of the widely circulated pamphlet “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” which makes the case that the Colonies owe no allegiance to Parliament, only to the crown. It would only take a few word changes for Jefferson to cross out references to the crown, as well.

Just as I was about to send these words to the typesetter, news sweeps in from the north like a gale: Connecticut has instructed its delegates to support independence. The following day, similar news came from New Hampshire and Delaware. The political deadlock in Pennsylvania has been broken; it, too, now sides with independence. And in New Jersey, the legislature has declared its governor “an enemy to the liberties of this country” and ordered him arrested. A vote there in favor of independence now seems likely.

As for that now-imprisoned New Jersey governor: His name is William Franklin. He is the son of, yes, Benjamin Franklin. The two apparently no longer talk. Such are the complications before us. By the time I am able to report to you again, we can expect news from Philadelphia, which now seems likely to be in favor of independence — or, as London will see it, a capital crime.

The post Dispatch from 1776: Prompted by a Virginian, Congress is about to vote on independence appeared first on Cardinal News.

In Part 2 of our Cardinal 250 trivia series, host Dutchie Jessee and founding editor Dwayne Yancey uncover more surprising stories from Virginia’s path to independence. Discover the county that first voted for independence, the free Black hero of the Battle of Great Bridge, the enslaved sailors who helped launch Virginia’s navy, and the legendary soldier known as the “Hercules of Independence.” (Find part one here.)

You’ll also hear the remarkable ride of Jack Jouett, why Thomas Jefferson wanted Norfolk destroyed, and the unusual dinner that followed the British surrender at Yorktown.

Test your knowledge and explore the people, places and events that helped shape America —but are often left out of the history books.

The video version is here.

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The two baby giraffes that have been missing from the Natural Bridge Zoo since early 2025 have been recovered safely, according to the office of Attorney General Jay Jones.

His office did not release information on where and how the giraffes were found, citing an “ongoing criminal investigation,” but said they are now in “a professional facility specializing in giraffe care” and “are safe and are receiving proper medical and behavioral support.”

The disappearance of the giraffes has been the subject of a criminal inquiry by the AG’s office for more than a year.

The case began in December 2023 when the attorney general’s office led a raid on the roadside zoo in Rockbridge County and confiscated animals as part of an animal abuse investigation. Four that weren’t seized were the giraffes; the state placed legal claims on them but kept them at the zoo because it had no way to move them. 

In March 2024, a Rockbridge County jury ruled after a weeklong trial that the state could keep 71 of the animals while 29 should be returned to the zoo because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support abuse charges involving them. Among the 71 animals that the state was given custody of were the four giraffes still at the zoo, one male and three females. Two of the females were pregnant, which complicated a possible transfer.

By late summer 2024, the details of how and when to move those giraffes prompted more court action and disputes that led to contempt charges against several members of the Mogensen family that owns the zoo. The Mogensens contended that the giraffe offspring belonged to them, not the state; a Rockbridge County judge ruled otherwise.

One adult giraffe was moved in fall 2024 to a park in Georgia but the others remained over the winter of 2024-25 because it was deemed too cold to move them. During a state inspection in April 2025, the two females were found to be no longer pregnant but no offspring could be found. (The two females were later moved to Georgia; the other male died during transport.)

When zoo manager Gretchen Mogensen would not reveal the whereabouts of the giraffe offspring, Circuit Judge Christopher Russell ordered her jailed for 100 days for contempt. Shortly before her release in February 2026, she and several others were indicted on a variety of misdemeanor animal cruelty charges and two felony counts of forging a public record. A procedural hearing on some of those charges is scheduled for Wednesday in Rockbridge County Circuit Court.

The whereabouts of the missing baby giraffes has drawn national attention. Actress Alicia Silverstone teamed with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to offer a $50,000 reward for information leading to their recovery. Jones’ office did not indicate whether that reward helped lead to the giraffes’ recovery.

In a news release, the attorney general’s office thanked the public “for the tremendous support shown throughout this investigation” but also sought more tips: “If anyone has further information about the illegal movement of the giraffes, please call our office at 804-786-2071.”

The baby giraffes are now about 15 months old. The Giraffe Conservation Foundation says at that age giraffes are about 10-12 feet tall.

The post Two baby giraffes missing from Natural Bridge Zoo have been recovered safely, AG’s office says appeared first on Cardinal News.

The two baby giraffes that have been missing from the Natural Bridge Zoo since early 2025 have been recovered safely, according to the office of Attorney General Jay Jones.

His office did not release information on where and how the giraffes were found, citing an “ongoing criminal investigation,” but said they are now in “a professional facility specializing in giraffe care” and “are safe and are receiving proper medical and behavioral support.”

The disappearance of the giraffes has been the subject of a criminal inquiry by the AG’s office for more than a year.

The case began in December 2023 when the attorney general’s office led a raid on the roadside zoo in Rockbridge County and confiscated animals as part of an animal abuse investigation. Four that weren’t seized were the giraffes; the state placed legal claims on them but kept them at the zoo because it had no way to move them. 

In March 2024, a Rockbridge County jury ruled after a weeklong trial that the state could keep 71 of the animals while 29 should be returned to the zoo because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to support abuse charges involving them. Among the 71 animals that the state was given custody of were the four giraffes still at the zoo, one male and three females. Two of the females were pregnant, which complicated a possible transfer.

By late summer 2024, the details of how and when to move those giraffes prompted more court action and disputes that led to contempt charges against several members of the Mogensen family that owns the zoo. The Mogensens contended that the giraffe offspring belonged to them, not the state; a Rockbridge County judge ruled otherwise.

One adult giraffe was moved in fall 2024 to a park in Georgia but the others remained over the winter of 2024-25 because it was deemed too cold to move them. During a state inspection in April 2025, the two females were found to be no longer pregnant but no offspring could be found. (The two females were later moved to Georgia; the other male died during transport.)

When zoo manager Gretchen Mogensen would not reveal the whereabouts of the giraffe offspring, Circuit Judge Christopher Russell ordered her jailed for 100 days for contempt. Shortly before her release in February 2026, she and several others were indicted on a variety of misdemeanor animal cruelty charges and two felony counts of forging a public record. A procedural hearing on some of those charges is scheduled for Wednesday in Rockbridge County Circuit Court.

The whereabouts of the missing baby giraffes has drawn national attention. Actress Alicia Silverstone teamed with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to offer a $50,000 reward for information leading to their recovery. Jones’ office did not indicate whether that reward helped lead to the giraffes’ recovery.

In a news release, the attorney general’s office thanked the public “for the tremendous support shown throughout this investigation” but also sought more tips: “If anyone has further information about the illegal movement of the giraffes, please call our office at 804-786-2071.”

The baby giraffes are now about 15 months old. The Giraffe Conservation Foundation says at that age giraffes are about 10-12 feet tall.

The post 2 baby giraffes missing from Natural Bridge Zoo have been recovered safely, AG’s office says appeared first on Cardinal News.

Buchanan General Hospital paid for the children of two of its top executives to become doctors through a program that was designed to provide loans for medical training, such as medical school or nursing school. However, the payments are listed as grants, not loans, on the nonprofit hospital’s tax filings, and the hospital has declined to answer questions about the discrepancy or say whether others received similar benefits.

The total amount of financial aid received by the two is also unclear because of how the transactions are recorded in the tax documents.

Hospital officials, members of its board and the two recipients did not answer questions about the program, so it is unclear how many other beneficiaries the hospital’s tuition program has or what conditions were placed on the funds given to Dr. Tyler Ruchti, son of CEO Robert Ruchti, and Dr. Lindsey Boyd, daughter of CFO Kimetha Boyd. 

The hospital’s tuition assistance program is designed to recruit clinicians to work in the rural, 111-bed facility. Under the program, Buchanan General pays for a student’s medical training in exchange for a commitment to return and work at the Grundy hospital for several years, according to Sam Bartley, public relations specialist for the hospital. If the new doctor fulfills those obligations, the loan is forgiven. If not, it must be repaid with interest. 

The hospital’s Internal Revenue Service Form 990 filings, however, show the payments to Ruchti and Boyd listed under Schedule L: grants to interested persons, a designation that does not require repayment. 

Boyd is in the final year of her residency; Ruchti is currently working at a hospital in Ohio.

Bartley declined to provide details about the agreements with Ruchti and Boyd. 

However, Dr. Seth Lowe, who participated in the program from 2015 to 2024, shared his contract. He was required to return to Grundy within 30 days of completing nine years of training to become a cardiac anesthesiologist. When he did not accept the hospital’s job offer, he had to repay the hospital $336,000 in 30 days, the contract said.

The hospital’s loan program has been in place for 30 years, according to Bartley. He declined to say how many people have used the program. He did say that the hospital typically requires loan recipients to repay the assistance within 30 days if they decline a job offer from the hospital. 

Members of the hospital board of directors did not respond to requests from Cardinal News. The hospital has not disclosed the eligibility requirements or selection criteria for its tuition assistance program. 

There is no cap on the amount of funding that can be awarded each year or the number of participants, Bartley said. Every applicant is assessed by the hospital’s board, which then approves or denies the application.

Bartley declined to answer multiple questions about the program and how it is administered, stating that the nonprofit hospital is a private corporation. 

Cardinal News asked why the allocation was labeled as “cash” on the IRS filings for several years beyond the students’ graduation dates. Cardinal News also requested copies of the hospital’s conflict-of-interest policy, information on how the policy is implemented and enforced, the total number of individuals who have participated in the tuition program and a breakdown of how many of them accepted employment at the hospital after completing their education.

Cardinal News also asked Bartley to facilitate interviews with people who had used the tuition assistance program and later accepted positions at Buchanan General Hospital. Bartley did not respond to those requests.

“We find ourselves still asking how this line of questioning benefits the healthcare needs in our underserved communities. It appears you are looking to put Buchanan General Hospital in an unfavorable light,” Bartley said by email.

Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business who reviewed the tax filings at the request of Cardinal News, confirmed that the funds to the executives’ children were reported as grants. 

Errors in nonprofit tax filings are not uncommon, he said; it’s possible that a mistake was made in Buchanan General’s tax filings spanning from 2016 to 2024, even though the documents were prepared by a public accounting firm headquartered in North Carolina.

Rising sums were listed as grants for nine years

The Internal Revenue Service requires organizations to disclose potential conflicts of interest, including payments to family members of leadership — such as Ruchti and Boyd. Lowe’s name is not listed on the hospital’s tax documents, nor are the names of any other recipients of the tuition assistance program. 

Ruchti’s name appeared in tax documents from 2016 through 2025, the most recent available filing. 

During Ruchti’s first year of medical school in 2016, Buchanan General’s tax records show a payment, listed as a grant, of $2,276 for tuition assistance.

The 2017 filing lists a grant of $55,317, and the 2018 filing lists a $112,376 grant. The payments continued to increase through his final year of medical school in 2020, when tax forms show $240,838 was directed toward tuition assistance.

The payments continued through 2024, as Ruchti completed an internship and a residency.

It’s unclear how much in total assistance Ruchti received. The grants are listed in the annual tax documents as though each year was a separate payout to him; approached that way, the nine years’ worth of grants added together total more than $1.7 million. 

But the total could also be cumulative, Mittendorf said. “They’re reporting these as if they’re individual amounts each year,” he said. “But the way it is stated, it’s almost like an accumulation, not year to year.”

According to Bartley, the sum in the 990 documents represents both tuition and interest. Tax forms describe the type of assistance as “cash” and the purpose of assistance described as “tuition.”

The 990s do not provide a breakdown of how much money represented tuition and how much represented interest, and Bartley declined to provide those details. 

The tuition assistance should be listed on the tax forms under “loans to interested persons,” Mittendorf said. “And it should say the amount of the loan, the purpose of the loan and the original amount borrowed and how much is left that they still owe.” 

None of these details are included in the tax forms through 2024.

Bartley said the cash assistance is paid directly to the educational institution. He declined to provide information about Boyd’s and Ruchti’s education, saying that the information was irrelevant. 

Ruchti graduated from Lincoln Memorial University Debusk College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2020 and is currently employed by Mercy Health in Ohio, according to Mercy’s website. During his first year of medical school, tuition came to about $44,322. By the time he graduated, tuition had increased to about $51,140, according to the school’s catalog. 

Medical training continues years beyond medical school graduation through internships, residencies and fellowships. Buchanan General holds the loan during this time. While repayment is deferred, interest continues to accumulate, according to Bartley.

Ruchti started an internal medicine internship in Florida, followed by an emergency medicine residency at East Carolina University, which he completed in 2024. Throughout those years, the growing balance in the tax forms continued to be listed as a grant and described as cash for tuition.

In 2024, the amount listed — now described as medical school tuition and interest — was approximately $316,850, still categorized as a grant. 

“They claim they gave a grant of $316,000 of cash that year to that individual,” Mittendorf said. “I don’t think that’s what they mean to claim, but that is what the financial statement is saying. … They are reporting it as a grant whose value accumulates, but grants are individual amounts.”

Ruchti is currently listed as clinical faculty for the emergency medicine residency program at Mercy Health in Ohio and was issued a medical license by the Ohio Board of Medicine in March 2024. According to the American Board of Physician Specialties, Ruchti has not completed his board certification yet, which is required under Virginia administrative code for emergency medicine physicians. 

Ruchti did not respond to phone calls seeking comment. 

Mercy Health declined to confirm Ruchti’s status at the Ohio hospital. He is listed as clinical faculty in the hospital’s emergency medicine residency program. It is unclear whether he is completing a fellowship, which would likely extend his loan period.

Similar questions surround the funds attached to Boyd’s name. She first received funds for medical school from Buchanan General Hospital in 2019 when $44,760 appeared in the tax documents as tuition assistance listed as grants to interested persons. 

Boyd graduated in 2022 from Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, according to her profile with Wake Forest University School of Medicine, where she’s currently a resident. That year, tuition for a fourth-year medical student totaled $49,800; the same year’s tax form showed that $213,715 was directed toward Boyd’s education and was described as cash for tuition. 

The 2024 filing shows a grant of $252,539. 

As with Ruchti’s awards, it’s unclear whether the amounts are individual or cumulative.

Boyd is in her fourth year of residency at Wake Forest. She holds a resident training license, which is up for renewal in November. 

Boyd is expected to complete her residency this year, according to Wake Forest.

She did not respond to email requests for comment.

“What we can take from this is the reporting is inconsistent,” Mittendorf said. “They [the tax filings] show that no one owes them money who is a family member of one of these interested individuals. At the same time, Schedule L seems to indicate there’s some sort of transaction there.” 

Lowe said he was offered a noncompetitive salary 

After nine years of medical training, Lowe was required to return to Grundy to fulfill his contract. He began coordinating with Buchanan General Hospital, but when the salary offer came through, Lowe hesitated. It was much lower than what he had expected. 

Buchanan General offered him an annual salary of $325,000, Lowe said. 

Cardiac anesthesiologists earned an average of $452,000 to $600,000 in 2024, according to a study published in the National Library of Medicine. Lowe declined to provide his starting salary at his current workplace in North Carolina.

“Their offer was such a huge slap in the face,” he said. He added that he could take a job as a traveler — a healthcare professional who takes short-term contracts to help medical facilities fill staffing gaps — and make three times that amount while working in the same region. 

The hospital wouldn’t budge, he said. His options were to work at Buchanan General for four years at what he described as a noncompetitive rate or pay back a loan that had been accruing 8% interest every year for nine years. 

Under his 2015 agreement, Buchanan General would lend him $188,000 to cover four years of medical school, along with $4,600 a year for textbooks.

The moment the contract is broken, the hospital requires that the loan be paid back within 30 days. Every additional month would add 1.5% interest to the loan.

Lowe said he was expected to return to Grundy immediately after completing a fellowship. 

In 2024, when he decided he could not work at Buchanan General, Lowe owed the hospital $336,000 for his medical school tuition. 

As a newly credentialed anesthesiologist, Lowe didn’t have the money. He wanted out of the contract, but said he felt trapped. That’s when his mother stepped in. 

Lowe grew up in Grundy, where his mother was a teacher and his father worked in the coal mines before he died when Lowe was a teenager. 

Lowe’s mom drew on the money his father had left them in order to pay the hospital back.

Now, Lowe is working for a hospital in North Carolina and offering financial support for his mother in Grundy.

Hospital is silent on its conflict of interest policy

Mittendorf, the Ohio State professor, also applies his accounting expertise to improve nonprofit research and programming. He said understanding Buchanan General Hospital’s conflict of interest policy is critical to clarifying what is represented in the tax filing and regaining trust in the community. 

“Are you offering these things to everyone or are you offering only to select individuals? And how do you determine that?” Mittendorf said. “We want to know, as the public or as an outside individual, that these transactions are all engaged to support the organization and a charitable mission. Not to support particular individuals. You’d want a conflict of interest policy built around that.”

Bartley did not respond to requests to see the hospital’s conflict of interest policy.

The money used for Rutchti and Boyd’s education isn’t reflected on the hospital’s balance sheet either, Mittendorf said. 

“If it were just a loan that got put as a grant, we should still see it on the balance sheet, and they’re not showing one,” Mittendorf said.

The hospital’s assets do equal its liabilities, indicating the transaction was recorded in some form, but it is unclear what was recorded or where. The amounts may be small relative to the hospital’s overall budget and could have been grouped into a broader category. The hospital has had a negative net income since 2023. In 2024, the hospital’s total revenue was $30.4 million, but expenses reached $32.3 million.

Mittendorf said that because these payments involve a potential conflict of interest, they should be clearly disclosed.

“Those are the sorts of payments they want to be very cautious and careful about tracking,” Mittendorf said. 

The hospital’s nonprofit status means it is exempt from paying federal and some state and local taxes, can issue tax-exempt bonds and can receive tax-deductible contributions. It also must meet the Internal Revenue Service Community Benefit Standard and publicly and extensively report the range of benefits and services it provides to its community.

The post A rural hospital paid for the children of 2 top executives to become doctors. It won’t say how many other people have gotten similar help. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Buchanan General Hospital paid for the children of two of its top executives to become doctors through a program that was designed to provide loans for medical training, such as medical school or nursing school. However, the payments are listed as grants, not loans, on the nonprofit hospital’s tax filings, and the hospital has declined to answer questions about the discrepancy or say whether others received similar benefits.

The total amount of financial aid received by the two is also unclear because of how the transactions are recorded in the tax documents.

Hospital officials, members of its board and the two recipients did not answer questions about the program, so it is unclear how many other beneficiaries the hospital’s tuition program has or what conditions were placed on the funds given to Dr. Tyler Ruchti, son of CEO Robert Ruchti, and Dr. Lindsey Boyd, daughter of CFO Kimetha Boyd. 

The hospital’s tuition assistance program is designed to recruit clinicians to work in the rural, 111-bed facility. Under the program, Buchanan General pays for a student’s medical training in exchange for a commitment to return and work at the Grundy hospital for several years, according to Sam Bartley, public relations specialist for the hospital. If the new doctor fulfills those obligations, the loan is forgiven. If not, it must be repaid with interest. 

The hospital’s Internal Revenue Service Form 990 filings, however, show the payments to Ruchti and Boyd listed under Schedule L: grants to interested persons, a designation that does not require repayment. 

Boyd is in the final year of her residency; Ruchti is currently working at a hospital in Ohio.

Bartley declined to provide details about the agreements with Ruchti and Boyd. 

However, Dr. Seth Lowe, who participated in the program from 2015 to 2024, shared his contract. He was required to return to Grundy within 30 days of completing nine years of training to become a cardiac anesthesiologist. When he did not accept the hospital’s job offer, he had to repay the hospital $336,000 in 30 days, the contract said.

The hospital’s loan program has been in place for 30 years, according to Bartley. He declined to say how many people have used the program. He did say that the hospital typically requires loan recipients to repay the assistance within 30 days if they decline a job offer from the hospital. 

Members of the hospital board of directors did not respond to requests from Cardinal News. The hospital has not disclosed the eligibility requirements or selection criteria for its tuition assistance program. 

There is no cap on the amount of funding that can be awarded each year or the number of participants, Bartley said. Every applicant is assessed by the hospital’s board, which then approves or denies the application.

Bartley declined to answer multiple questions about the program and how it is administered, stating that the nonprofit hospital is a private corporation. 

Cardinal News asked why the allocation was labeled as “cash” on the IRS filings for several years beyond the students’ graduation dates. Cardinal News also requested copies of the hospital’s conflict-of-interest policy, information on how the policy is implemented and enforced, the total number of individuals who have participated in the tuition program and a breakdown of how many of them accepted employment at the hospital after completing their education.

Cardinal News also asked Bartley to facilitate interviews with people who had used the tuition assistance program and later accepted positions at Buchanan General Hospital. Bartley did not respond to those requests.

“We find ourselves still asking how this line of questioning benefits the healthcare needs in our underserved communities. It appears you are looking to put Buchanan General Hospital in an unfavorable light,” Bartley said by email.

Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business who reviewed the tax filings at the request of Cardinal News, confirmed that the funds to the executives’ children were reported as grants. 

Errors in nonprofit tax filings are not uncommon, he said; it’s possible that a mistake was made in Buchanan General’s tax filings spanning from 2016 to 2024, even though the documents were prepared by a public accounting firm headquartered in North Carolina.

Rising sums were listed as grants for nine years

The Internal Revenue Service requires organizations to disclose potential conflicts of interest, including payments to family members of leadership — such as Ruchti and Boyd. Lowe’s name is not listed on the hospital’s tax documents, nor are the names of any other recipients of the tuition assistance program. 

Ruchti’s name appeared in tax documents from 2016 through 2025, the most recent available filing. 

During Ruchti’s first year of medical school in 2016, Buchanan General’s tax records show a payment, listed as a grant, of $2,276 for tuition assistance.

The 2017 filing lists a grant of $55,317, and the 2018 filing lists a $112,376 grant. The payments continued to increase through his final year of medical school in 2020, when tax forms show $240,838 was directed toward tuition assistance.

The payments continued through 2024, as Ruchti completed an internship and a residency.

It’s unclear how much in total assistance Ruchti received. The grants are listed in the annual tax documents as though each year was a separate payout to him; approached that way, the nine years’ worth of grants added together total more than $1.7 million. 

But the total could also be cumulative, Mittendorf said. “They’re reporting these as if they’re individual amounts each year,” he said. “But the way it is stated, it’s almost like an accumulation, not year to year.”

According to Bartley, the sum in the 990 documents represents both tuition and interest. Tax forms describe the type of assistance as “cash” and the purpose of assistance described as “tuition.”

The 990s do not provide a breakdown of how much money represented tuition and how much represented interest, and Bartley declined to provide those details. 

The tuition assistance should be listed on the tax forms under “loans to interested persons,” Mittendorf said. “And it should say the amount of the loan, the purpose of the loan and the original amount borrowed and how much is left that they still owe.” 

None of these details are included in the tax forms through 2024.

Bartley said the cash assistance is paid directly to the educational institution. He declined to provide information about Boyd’s and Ruchti’s education, saying that the information was irrelevant. 

Ruchti graduated from Lincoln Memorial University Debusk College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2020 and is currently employed by Mercy Health in Ohio, according to Mercy’s website. During his first year of medical school, tuition came to about $44,322. By the time he graduated, tuition had increased to about $51,140, according to the school’s catalog. 

Medical training continues years beyond medical school graduation through internships, residencies and fellowships. Buchanan General holds the loan during this time. While repayment is deferred, interest continues to accumulate, according to Bartley.

Ruchti started an internal medicine internship in Florida, followed by an emergency medicine residency at East Carolina University, which he completed in 2024. Throughout those years, the growing balance in the tax forms continued to be listed as a grant and described as cash for tuition.

In 2024, the amount listed — now described as medical school tuition and interest — was approximately $316,850, still categorized as a grant. 

“They claim they gave a grant of $316,000 of cash that year to that individual,” Mittendorf said. “I don’t think that’s what they mean to claim, but that is what the financial statement is saying. … They are reporting it as a grant whose value accumulates, but grants are individual amounts.”

Ruchti is currently listed as clinical faculty for the emergency medicine residency program at Mercy Health in Ohio and was issued a medical license by the Ohio Board of Medicine in March 2024. According to the American Board of Physician Specialties, Ruchti has not completed his board certification yet, which is required under Virginia administrative code for emergency medicine physicians. 

Ruchti did not respond to phone calls seeking comment. 

Mercy Health declined to confirm Ruchti’s status at the Ohio hospital. He is listed as clinical faculty in the hospital’s emergency medicine residency program. It is unclear whether he is completing a fellowship, which would likely extend his loan period.

Similar questions surround the funds attached to Boyd’s name. She first received funds for medical school from Buchanan General Hospital in 2019 when $44,760 appeared in the tax documents as tuition assistance listed as grants to interested persons. 

Boyd graduated in 2022 from Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, according to her profile with Wake Forest University School of Medicine, where she’s currently a resident. That year, tuition for a fourth-year medical student totaled $49,800; the same year’s tax form showed that $213,715 was directed toward Boyd’s education and was described as cash for tuition. 

The 2024 filing shows a grant of $252,539. 

As with Ruchti’s awards, it’s unclear whether the amounts are individual or cumulative.

Boyd is in her fourth year of residency at Wake Forest. She holds a resident training license, which is up for renewal in November. 

Boyd is expected to complete her residency this year, according to Wake Forest.

She did not respond to email requests for comment.

“What we can take from this is the reporting is inconsistent,” Mittendorf said. “They [the tax filings] show that no one owes them money who is a family member of one of these interested individuals. At the same time, Schedule L seems to indicate there’s some sort of transaction there.” 

Lowe said he was offered a noncompetitive salary 

After nine years of medical training, Lowe was required to return to Grundy to fulfill his contract. He began coordinating with Buchanan General Hospital, but when the salary offer came through, Lowe hesitated. It was much lower than what he had expected. 

Buchanan General offered him an annual salary of $325,000, Lowe said. 

Cardiac anesthesiologists earned an average of $452,000 to $600,000 in 2024, according to a study published in the National Library of Medicine. Lowe declined to provide his starting salary at his current workplace in North Carolina.

“Their offer was such a huge slap in the face,” he said. He added that he could take a job as a traveler — a healthcare professional who takes short-term contracts to help medical facilities fill staffing gaps — and make three times that amount while working in the same region. 

The hospital wouldn’t budge, he said. His options were to work at Buchanan General for four years at what he described as a noncompetitive rate or pay back a loan that had been accruing 8% interest every year for nine years. 

Under his 2015 agreement, Buchanan General would lend him $188,000 to cover four years of medical school, along with $4,600 a year for textbooks.

The moment the contract is broken, the hospital requires that the loan be paid back within 30 days. Every additional month would add 1.5% interest to the loan.

Lowe said he was expected to return to Grundy immediately after completing a fellowship. 

In 2024, when he decided he could not work at Buchanan General, Lowe owed the hospital $336,000 for his medical school tuition. 

As a newly credentialed anesthesiologist, Lowe didn’t have the money. He wanted out of the contract, but said he felt trapped. That’s when his mother stepped in. 

Lowe grew up in Grundy, where his mother was a teacher and his father worked in the coal mines before he died when Lowe was a teenager. 

Lowe’s mom drew on the money his father had left them in order to pay the hospital back.

Now, Lowe is working for a hospital in North Carolina and offering financial support for his mother in Grundy.

Hospital is silent on its conflict of interest policy

Mittendorf, the Ohio State professor, also applies his accounting expertise to improve nonprofit research and programming. He said understanding Buchanan General Hospital’s conflict of interest policy is critical to clarifying what is represented in the tax filing and regaining trust in the community. 

“Are you offering these things to everyone or are you offering only to select individuals? And how do you determine that?” Mittendorf said. “We want to know, as the public or as an outside individual, that these transactions are all engaged to support the organization and a charitable mission. Not to support particular individuals. You’d want a conflict of interest policy built around that.”

Bartley did not respond to requests to see the hospital’s conflict of interest policy.

The money used for Rutchti and Boyd’s education isn’t reflected on the hospital’s balance sheet either, Mittendorf said. 

“If it were just a loan that got put as a grant, we should still see it on the balance sheet, and they’re not showing one,” Mittendorf said.

The hospital’s assets do equal its liabilities, indicating the transaction was recorded in some form, but it is unclear what was recorded or where. The amounts may be small relative to the hospital’s overall budget and could have been grouped into a broader category. The hospital has had a negative net income since 2023. In 2024, the hospital’s total revenue was $30.4 million, but expenses reached $32.3 million.

Mittendorf said that because these payments involve a potential conflict of interest, they should be clearly disclosed.

“Those are the sorts of payments they want to be very cautious and careful about tracking,” Mittendorf said. 

The hospital’s nonprofit status means it is exempt from paying federal and some state and local taxes, can issue tax-exempt bonds and can receive tax-deductible contributions. It also must meet the Internal Revenue Service Community Benefit Standard and publicly and extensively report the range of benefits and services it provides to its community.

The post A rural hospital paid for the children of 2 top executives to become doctors. It won’t say how many other people have gotten similar help. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Whenever the Botetourt County supervisors meet, demonstrators gather outside the county offices to protest the Google data center that will soon start construction in the county’s business park.

Depending on the time of day, those anti-data center demonstrators pass by workers going to or from another business in the Greenfield Center complex. Those are the workers for Munters, a company that makes climate control systems — and whose exponential job growth in Botetourt has been fueled by the same data center industry that their neighbors are protesting.

That juxtaposition frames some of the complexities surrounding not only the Google debate in Botetourt, but also the larger data center debate across Virginia, and an even more far-reaching debate about the role of the artificial intelligence systems that many data centers power.

Data centers certainly come with well-known drawbacks: They are thirsty for energy and water.

On the other hand, they generate tax revenue and jobs, which is why some rural localities are eager for them.

One rap against data centers is that they don’t create many jobs, which is sometimes true, and sometimes not, depending on the type of data center in question. In Botetourt, Google is committed to create at least 150 jobs; the proposed Stack development in Pittsylvania County calls for at least 2,500 jobs.

That’s not what we’ll talk about today, though. Instead, what we’ll look at is what those jobs at Munters represent, which usually doesn’t get much attention — part of the supply chain for data centers.

In a recent interview with Cardinal News, Gov. Abigail Spanberger referenced her interest in growing that supply chain. Her comments came in the context of the dispute over the state’s tax incentives for data centers — incentives that Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end eight years early and which Spanberger believes should stay in place until their scheduled expiration in 2035 on the grounds that the state has already made commitments that shouldn’t be broken.

Spanberger said the issue is bigger than just these giant warehouses full of computer servers.

“It is not just data centers,” she said. “It is advanced manufacturing. I have met with some companies that want to come to Virginia” to be part of the supply chain. “They are looking to invest in Virginia and create manufacturing jobs in Virginia.” The implication: Those economic opportunities might be at risk if Virginia ends its tax abatement early.

That raises the question of just how big is that supply chain now? How many jobs are we talking about? And how does Virginia rank?

Those have proven to be difficult questions to answer, primarily because the companies that constitute the data center supply chain often are making components for other industries as well. For instance, Munters — the Botetourt plant referenced earlier — is a Swedish company that was founded in 1955, long before data centers existed. The firm started off making refrigeration systems and dehumidifiers; supplying data centers is simply an expansion of its market, although in Virginia, an important one. Munters employed 200 people when it moved from Buena Vista to Botetourt County in 2022 and is now close to 670, county officials say — with the demand for climate systems for data centers driving that growth.

That’s a very clear case. Others are less so. There are lots of figures on the number of people working in data centers, but quantifying the number employed in the supply chain that leads up to them is much more difficult.

I turned to Jason El Koubi, president of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the state’s economic development agency. “Our knowledge of the broader data center supply chain in Virginia is limited and likely understated,” he said by text message. “Many companies which support the data center industry provide contracting, construction, or manufacturing services to other industries and do not explicitly indicate data centers as primary customers even if that is the case.”

Despite that limitation, he said, “we can identify more than 100 companies whose business is overtly focused on serving the industry, but that’s almost certainly an undercount since many manufacturers, contractors, and infrastructure providers also serve other markets. The 100+ figure is really just the tip of the iceberg.”

What we can say with more certainty is that there is a lot of money being poured into data centers and related infrastructure, which means there is a lot of money going into manufacturing the components of those facilities. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. issued a report last year that said “by 2030, data centers are projected to require $6.7 trillion worldwide to keep pace with the demand for compute power.”

We also know that relatively little of that infrastructure is currently built in Virginia, which means if you’re, say, the governor, you can see lots of room for growth.

Broadly speaking, the main components of a data center are the information technology (computer servers, for instance), the power infrastructure, the cooling systems and the physical aspects of the building (surveillance, fire suppression). A 2024 study by the General Assembly’s investigative arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, said that 68% of the data center investment went into information technology and little of that was spent in Virginia “because there are no major computer server manufacturers in Virginia.” However, that report also said: “Some other equipment used in data centers is sourced in Virginia. For example, Virginia has suppliers of electrical and cooling equipment, raised-access floors and hot/cold aisle containment systems, and fiber infrastructure. These suppliers have recently located or expanded operations in Virginia because of the state’s large data center market.”

JLARC didn’t attempt to estimate a job count, though.  

El Koubi says more than 80% of the known supply chain jobs are in Northern Virginia, about 10% in the Richmond area, the rest scattered across the state. That distribution, though, is starting to change.

Virginia has seen a surge of power-related manufacturing jobs and those are going to rural areas. Roanoke-based Virginia Transformer Corp. bills itself as the largest U.S.-based manufacturers of electrical power transformers in North America; it also recently acquired a 17-acre parcel in Botetourt County’s Eastpark Commerce Center for an apparent expansion (the company hasn’t talked about the acquisition). Hitachi Energy currently employs 670 people in Halifax County and earlier this year announced an expansion that would add 825 more jobs; the company says this will make South Boston the biggest manufacturing site for large power transformers in the country.

It’s hard to say how many of these jobs are related to data centers, but clearly many are. A news release from Hitachi last year, which announced a $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, specifically tied its expansion to AI-driven data centers, with the South Boston plant part of that.

In late May, Spanberger announced that the North Carolina-based engineering company Jabil is opening an operation in Prince George County — 352 jobs to “produce critical power distribution systems and solutions for Siemens, a worldwide leader in industrial manufacturing and engineering.” What wasn’t said: Both Jabil and Siemens are involved with data centers. A spokesperson for Jabil confirms that the Prince George facility will be producing “critical applications including data centers.”

Some of you may have already connected some of these dots: While we have come to associate data centers with Northern Virginia (although they’re not spreading outwards), much of the manufacturing for the supply chain is turning up in rural Virginia — places like Botetourt County, Halifax County, Prince George County. This complicates the politics on data centers, because it means that communities that may not have any data centers (although Botetourt soon will) now have a financial stake, jobs-wise, in the data center industry. 

Virginia lost jobs last year and is forecast by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia to lose jobs this year, as well. If you’re the governor of Virginia and want to turn those numbers around, you’d naturally look to see what the growth sectors are — and which of those fit best with Virginia. Given that, it’s only natural that Spanberger would see the data center supply chain as one that could help Virginia’s jobs situation — and be concerned that if legislators end the tax incentive early, that not only slows data center development (which many would be happy with), it would also slow down the manufacturing jobs behind data centers.

This is where seemingly simple political positions have complex implications on the ground — some of this job growth in rural areas is tied to data centers. Lucas has set a “listening tour” on data centers, but she doesn’t have appearances in, say, Halifax County, where she might hear something very different about data centers from Hitachi workers than she will in Virginia Beach and Richmond.

There are also some fascinating class implications as well. Beth Macy, the Democratic candidate for the 6^th Congressional District, wants a moratorium on data center development and “guardrails” on artificial intelligence, citing studies on how AI could eliminate a lot of white-collar jobs. On the other hand, data centers devoted to AI are creating a lot of blue-collar jobs for those who make power-related equipment. That leaves me curious: What do the anti-Google protesters in Botetourt have to say to their neighbors who work at Munters and who owe their livelihood to data centers?

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post Data center supply chains are moving into rural areas that need jobs. This complicates the debate over taxation. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Whenever the Botetourt County supervisors meet, demonstrators gather outside the county offices to protest the Google data center that will soon start construction in the county’s business park.

Depending on the time of day, those anti-data center demonstrators pass by workers going to or from another business in the Greenfield Center complex. Those are the workers for Munters, a company that makes climate control systems — and whose exponential job growth in Botetourt has been fueled by the same data center industry that their neighbors are protesting.

That juxtaposition frames some of the complexities surrounding not only the Google debate in Botetourt, but also the larger data center debate across Virginia, and an even more far-reaching debate about the role of the artificial intelligence systems that many data centers power.

Data centers certainly come with well-known drawbacks: They are thirsty for energy and water.

On the other hand, they generate tax revenue and jobs, which is why some rural localities are eager for them.

One rap against data centers is that they don’t create many jobs, which is sometimes true, and sometimes not, depending on the type of data center in question. In Botetourt, Google is committed to create at least 150 jobs; the proposed Stack development in Pittsylvania County calls for at least 2,500 jobs.

That’s not what we’ll talk about today, though. Instead, what we’ll look at is what those jobs at Munters represent, which usually doesn’t get much attention — part of the supply chain for data centers.

In a recent interview with Cardinal News, Gov. Abigail Spanberger referenced her interest in growing that supply chain. Her comments came in the context of the dispute over the state’s tax incentives for data centers — incentives that Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end eight years early and which Spanberger believes should stay in place until their scheduled expiration in 2035 on the grounds that the state has already made commitments that shouldn’t be broken.

Spanberger said the issue is bigger than just these giant warehouses full of computer servers.

“It is not just data centers,” she said. “It is advanced manufacturing. I have met with some companies that want to come to Virginia” to be part of the supply chain. “They are looking to invest in Virginia and create manufacturing jobs in Virginia.” The implication: Those economic opportunities might be at risk if Virginia ends its tax abatement early.

That raises the question of just how big is that supply chain now? How many jobs are we talking about? And how does Virginia rank?

Those have proven to be difficult questions to answer, primarily because the companies that constitute the data center supply chain often are making components for other industries as well. For instance, Munters — the Botetourt plant referenced earlier — is a Swedish company that was founded in 1955, long before data centers existed. The firm started off making refrigeration systems and dehumidifiers; supplying data centers is simply an expansion of its market, although in Virginia, an important one. Munters employed 200 people when it moved from Buena Vista to Botetourt County in 2022 and is now close to 670, county officials say — with the demand for climate systems for data centers driving that growth.

That’s a very clear case. Others are less so. There are lots of figures on the number of people working in data centers, but quantifying the number employed in the supply chain that leads up to them is much more difficult.

I turned to Jason El Koubi, president of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the state’s economic development agency. “Our knowledge of the broader data center supply chain in Virginia is limited and likely understated,” he said by text message. “Many companies which support the data center industry provide contracting, construction, or manufacturing services to other industries and do not explicitly indicate data centers as primary customers even if that is the case.”

Despite that limitation, he said, “we can identify more than 100 companies whose business is overtly focused on serving the industry, but that’s almost certainly an undercount since many manufacturers, contractors, and infrastructure providers also serve other markets. The 100+ figure is really just the tip of the iceberg.”

What we can say with more certainty is that there is a lot of money being poured into data centers and related infrastructure, which means there is a lot of money going into manufacturing the components of those facilities. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. issued a report last year that said “by 2030, data centers are projected to require $6.7 trillion worldwide to keep pace with the demand for compute power.”

We also know that relatively little of that infrastructure is currently built in Virginia, which means if you’re, say, the governor, you can see lots of room for growth.

Broadly speaking, the main components of a data center are the information technology (computer servers, for instance), the power infrastructure, the cooling systems and the physical aspects of the building (surveillance, fire suppression). A 2024 study by the General Assembly’s investigative arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, said that 68% of the data center investment went into information technology and little of that was spent in Virginia “because there are no major computer server manufacturers in Virginia.” However, that report also said: “Some other equipment used in data centers is sourced in Virginia. For example, Virginia has suppliers of electrical and cooling equipment, raised-access floors and hot/cold aisle containment systems, and fiber infrastructure. These suppliers have recently located or expanded operations in Virginia because of the state’s large data center market.”

JLARC didn’t attempt to estimate a job count, though.  

El Koubi says more than 80% of the known supply chain jobs are in Northern Virginia, about 10% in the Richmond area, the rest scattered across the state. That distribution, though, is starting to change.

Virginia has seen a surge of power-related manufacturing jobs and those are going to rural areas. Roanoke-based Virginia Transformer Corp. bills itself as the largest U.S.-based manufacturers of electrical power transformers in North America; it also recently acquired a 17-acre parcel in Botetourt County’s Eastpark Commerce Center for an apparent expansion (the company hasn’t talked about the acquisition). Hitachi Energy currently employs 670 people in Halifax County and earlier this year announced an expansion that would add 825 more jobs; the company says this will make South Boston the biggest manufacturing site for large power transformers in the country.

It’s hard to say how many of these jobs are related to data centers, but clearly many are. A news release from Hitachi last year, which announced a $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, specifically tied its expansion to AI-driven data centers, with the South Boston plant part of that.

In late May, Spanberger announced that the North Carolina-based engineering company Jabil is opening an operation in Prince George County — 352 jobs to “produce critical power distribution systems and solutions for Siemens, a worldwide leader in industrial manufacturing and engineering.” What wasn’t said: Both Jabil and Siemens are involved with data centers. A spokesperson for Jabil confirms that the Prince George facility will be producing “critical applications including data centers.”

Some of you may have already connected some of these dots: While we have come to associate data centers with Northern Virginia (although they’re not spreading outwards), much of the manufacturing for the supply chain is turning up in rural Virginia — places like Botetourt County, Halifax County, Prince George County. This complicates the politics on data centers, because it means that communities that may not have any data centers (although Botetourt soon will) now have a financial stake, jobs-wise, in the data center industry. 

Virginia lost jobs last year and is forecast by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia to lose jobs this year, as well. If you’re the governor of Virginia and want to turn those numbers around, you’d naturally look to see what the growth sectors are — and which of those fit best with Virginia. Given that, it’s only natural that Spanberger would see the data center supply chain as one that could help Virginia’s jobs situation — and be concerned that if legislators end the tax incentive early, that not only slows data center development (which many would be happy with), it would also slow down the manufacturing jobs behind data centers.

This is where seemingly simple political positions have complex implications on the ground — some of this job growth in rural areas is tied to data centers. Lucas has set a “listening tour” on data centers, but she doesn’t have appearances in, say, Halifax County, where she might hear something very different about data centers from Hitachi workers than she will in Virginia Beach and Richmond.

There are also some fascinating class implications as well. Beth Macy, the Democratic candidate for the 6^th Congressional District, wants a moratorium on data center development and “guardrails” on artificial intelligence, citing studies on how AI could eliminate a lot of white-collar jobs. On the other hand, data centers devoted to AI are creating a lot of blue-collar jobs for those who make power-related equipment. That leaves me curious: What do the anti-Google protesters in Botetourt have to say to their neighbors who work at Munters and who owe their livelihood to data centers?

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post Data center supply chains are moving into rural areas that need jobs. This complicates the debate over taxation. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Whenever the Botetourt County supervisors meet, demonstrators gather outside the county offices to protest the Google data center that will soon start construction in the county’s business park.

Depending on the time of day, those anti-data center demonstrators pass by workers going to or from another business in the Greenfield Center complex. Those are the workers for Munters, a company that makes climate control systems — and whose exponential job growth in Botetourt has been fueled by the same data center industry that their neighbors are protesting.

That juxtaposition frames some of the complexities surrounding not only the Google debate in Botetourt, but also the larger data center debate across Virginia, and an even more far-reaching debate about the role of the artificial intelligence systems that many data centers power.

Data centers certainly come with well-known drawbacks: They are thirsty for energy and water.

On the other hand, they generate tax revenue and jobs, which is why some rural localities are eager for them.

One rap against data centers is that they don’t create many jobs, which is sometimes true, and sometimes not, depending on the type of data center in question. In Botetourt, Google is committed to create at least 150 jobs; the proposed Stack development in Pittsylvania County calls for at least 2,500 jobs.

That’s not what we’ll talk about today, though. Instead, what we’ll look at is what those jobs at Munters represent, which usually doesn’t get much attention — part of the supply chain for data centers.

In a recent interview with Cardinal News, Gov. Abigail Spanberger referenced her interest in growing that supply chain. Her comments came in the context of the dispute over the state’s tax incentives for data centers — incentives that Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end eight years early and which Spanberger believes should stay in place until their scheduled expiration in 2035 on the grounds that the state has already made commitments that shouldn’t be broken.

Spanberger said the issue is bigger than just these giant warehouses full of computer servers.

“It is not just data centers,” she said. “It is advanced manufacturing. I have met with some companies that want to come to Virginia” to be part of the supply chain. “They are looking to invest in Virginia and create manufacturing jobs in Virginia.” The implication: Those economic opportunities might be at risk if Virginia ends its tax abatement early.

That raises the question of just how big is that supply chain now? How many jobs are we talking about? And how does Virginia rank?

Those have proven to be difficult questions to answer, primarily because the companies that constitute the data center supply chain often are making components for other industries as well. For instance, Munters — the Botetourt plant referenced earlier — is a Swedish company that was founded in 1955, long before data centers existed. The firm started off making refrigeration systems and dehumidifiers; supplying data centers is simply an expansion of its market, although in Virginia, an important one. Munters employed 200 people when it moved from Buena Vista to Botetourt County in 2022 and is now close to 670, county officials say — with the demand for climate systems for data centers driving that growth.

That’s a very clear case. Others are less so. There are lots of figures on the number of people working in data centers, but quantifying the number employed in the supply chain that leads up to them is much more difficult.

I turned to Jason El Koubi, president of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the state’s economic development agency. “Our knowledge of the broader data center supply chain in Virginia is limited and likely understated,” he said by text message. “Many companies which support the data center industry provide contracting, construction, or manufacturing services to other industries and do not explicitly indicate data centers as primary customers even if that is the case.”

Despite that limitation, he said, “we can identify more than 100 companies whose business is overtly focused on serving the industry, but that’s almost certainly an undercount since many manufacturers, contractors, and infrastructure providers also serve other markets. The 100+ figure is really just the tip of the iceberg.”

What we can say with more certainty is that there is a lot of money being poured into data centers and related infrastructure, which means there is a lot of money going into manufacturing the components of those facilities. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. issued a report last year that said “by 2030, data centers are projected to require $6.7 trillion worldwide to keep pace with the demand for compute power.”

We also know that relatively little of that infrastructure is currently built in Virginia, which means if you’re, say, the governor, you can see lots of room for growth.

Broadly speaking, the main components of a data center are the information technology (computer servers, for instance), the power infrastructure, the cooling systems and the physical aspects of the building (surveillance, fire suppression). A 2024 study by the General Assembly’s investigative arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, said that 68% of the data center investment went into information technology and little of that was spent in Virginia “because there are no major computer server manufacturers in Virginia.” However, that report also said: “Some other equipment used in data centers is sourced in Virginia. For example, Virginia has suppliers of electrical and cooling equipment, raised-access floors and hot/cold aisle containment systems, and fiber infrastructure. These suppliers have recently located or expanded operations in Virginia because of the state’s large data center market.”

JLARC didn’t attempt to estimate a job count, though.  

El Koubi says more than 80% of the known supply chain jobs are in Northern Virginia, about 10% in the Richmond area, the rest scattered across the state. That distribution, though, is starting to change.

Virginia has seen a surge of power-related manufacturing jobs and those are going to rural areas. Roanoke-based Virginia Transformer Corp. bills itself as the largest U.S.-based manufacturers of electrical power transformers in North America; it also recently acquired a 17-acre parcel in Botetourt County’s Eastpark Commerce Center for an apparent expansion (the company hasn’t talked about the acquisition). Hitachi Energy currently employs 670 people in Halifax County and earlier this year announced an expansion that would add 825 more jobs; the company says this will make South Boston the biggest manufacturing site for large power transformers in the country.

It’s hard to say how many of these jobs are related to data centers, but clearly many are. A news release from Hitachi last year, which announced a $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, specifically tied its expansion to AI-driven data centers, with the South Boston plant part of that.

In late May, Spanberger announced that the North Carolina-based engineering company Jabil is opening an operation in Prince George County — 352 jobs to “produce critical power distribution systems and solutions for Siemens, a worldwide leader in industrial manufacturing and engineering.” What wasn’t said: Both Jabil and Siemens are involved with data centers. A spokesperson for Jabil confirms that the Prince George facility will be producing “critical applications including data centers.”

Some of you may have already connected some of these dots: While we have come to associate data centers with Northern Virginia (although they’re not spreading outwards), much of the manufacturing for the supply chain is turning up in rural Virginia — places like Botetourt County, Halifax County, Prince George County. This complicates the politics on data centers, because it means that communities that may not have any data centers (although Botetourt soon will) now have a financial stake, jobs-wise, in the data center industry. 

Virginia lost jobs last year and is forecast by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia to lose jobs this year, as well. If you’re the governor of Virginia and want to turn those numbers around, you’d naturally look to see what the growth sectors are — and which of those fit best with Virginia. Given that, it’s only natural that Spanberger would see the data center supply chain as one that could help Virginia’s jobs situation — and be concerned that if legislators end the tax incentive early, that not only slows data center development (which many would be happy with), it would also slow down the manufacturing jobs behind data centers.

This is where seemingly simple political positions have complex implications on the ground — some of this job growth in rural areas is tied to data centers. Lucas has set a “listening tour” on data centers, but she doesn’t have appearances in, say, Halifax County, where she might hear something very different about data centers from Hitachi workers than she will in Virginia Beach and Richmond.

There are also some fascinating class implications as well. Beth Macy, the Democratic candidate for the 6^th Congressional District, wants a moratorium on data center development and “guardrails” on artificial intelligence, citing studies on how AI could eliminate a lot of white-collar jobs. On the other hand, data centers devoted to AI are creating a lot of blue-collar jobs for those who make power-related equipment. That leaves me curious: What do the anti-Google protesters in Botetourt have to say to their neighbors who work at Munters and who owe their livelihood to data centers?

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post Data center supply chains are moving into rural areas that need jobs. This complicates the debate over taxation. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Whenever the Botetourt County supervisors meet, demonstrators gather outside the county offices to protest the Google data center that will soon start construction in the county’s business park.

Depending on the time of day, those anti-data center demonstrators pass by workers going to or from another business in the Greenfield Center complex. Those are the workers for Munters, a company that makes climate control systems — and whose exponential job growth in Botetourt has been fueled by the same data center industry that their neighbors are protesting.

That juxtaposition frames some of the complexities surrounding not only the Google debate in Botetourt, but also the larger data center debate across Virginia, and an even more far-reaching debate about the role of the artificial intelligence systems that many data centers power.

Data centers certainly come with well-known drawbacks: They are thirsty for energy and water.

On the other hand, they generate tax revenue and jobs, which is why some rural localities are eager for them.

One rap against data centers is that they don’t create many jobs, which is sometimes true, and sometimes not, depending on the type of data center in question. In Botetourt, Google is committed to create at least 150 jobs; the proposed Stack development in Pittsylvania County calls for at least 2,500 jobs.

That’s not what we’ll talk about today, though. Instead, what we’ll look at is what those jobs at Munters represent, which usually doesn’t get much attention — part of the supply chain for data centers.

In a recent interview with Cardinal News, Gov. Abigail Spanberger referenced her interest in growing that supply chain. Her comments came in the context of the dispute over the state’s tax incentives for data centers — incentives that Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end eight years early and which Spanberger believes should stay in place until their scheduled expiration in 2035 on the grounds that the state has already made commitments that shouldn’t be broken.

Spanberger said the issue is bigger than just these giant warehouses full of computer servers.

“It is not just data centers,” she said. “It is advanced manufacturing. I have met with some companies that want to come to Virginia” to be part of the supply chain. “They are looking to invest in Virginia and create manufacturing jobs in Virginia.” The implication: Those economic opportunities might be at risk if Virginia ends its tax abatement early.

That raises the question of just how big is that supply chain now? How many jobs are we talking about? And how does Virginia rank?

Those have proven to be difficult questions to answer, primarily because the companies that constitute the data center supply chain often are making components for other industries as well. For instance, Munters — the Botetourt plant referenced earlier — is a Swedish company that was founded in 1955, long before data centers existed. The firm started off making refrigeration systems and dehumidifiers; supplying data centers is simply an expansion of its market, although in Virginia, an important one. Munters employed 200 people when it moved from Buena Vista to Botetourt County in 2022 and is now close to 670, county officials say — with the demand for climate systems for data centers driving that growth.

That’s a very clear case. Others are less so. There are lots of figures on the number of people working in data centers, but quantifying the number employed in the supply chain that leads up to them is much more difficult.

I turned to Jason El Koubi, president of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the state’s economic development agency. “Our knowledge of the broader data center supply chain in Virginia is limited and likely understated,” he said by text message. “Many companies which support the data center industry provide contracting, construction, or manufacturing services to other industries and do not explicitly indicate data centers as primary customers even if that is the case.”

Despite that limitation, he said, “we can identify more than 100 companies whose business is overtly focused on serving the industry, but that’s almost certainly an undercount since many manufacturers, contractors, and infrastructure providers also serve other markets. The 100+ figure is really just the tip of the iceberg.”

What we can say with more certainty is that there is a lot of money being poured into data centers and related infrastructure, which means there is a lot of money going into manufacturing the components of those facilities. The consulting firm McKinsey & Co. issued a report last year that said “by 2030, data centers are projected to require $6.7 trillion worldwide to keep pace with the demand for compute power.”

We also know that relatively little of that infrastructure is currently built in Virginia, which means if you’re, say, the governor, you can see lots of room for growth.

Broadly speaking, the main components of a data center are the information technology (computer servers, for instance), the power infrastructure, the cooling systems and the physical aspects of the building (surveillance, fire suppression). A 2024 study by the General Assembly’s investigative arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, said that 68% of the data center investment went into information technology and little of that was spent in Virginia “because there are no major computer server manufacturers in Virginia.” However, that report also said: “Some other equipment used in data centers is sourced in Virginia. For example, Virginia has suppliers of electrical and cooling equipment, raised-access floors and hot/cold aisle containment systems, and fiber infrastructure. These suppliers have recently located or expanded operations in Virginia because of the state’s large data center market.”

JLARC didn’t attempt to estimate a job count, though.  

El Koubi says more than 80% of the known supply chain jobs are in Northern Virginia, about 10% in the Richmond area, the rest scattered across the state. That distribution, though, is starting to change.

Virginia has seen a surge of power-related manufacturing jobs and those are going to rural areas. Roanoke-based Virginia Transformer Corp. bills itself as the largest U.S.-based manufacturers of electrical power transformers in North America; it also recently acquired a 17-acre parcel in Botetourt County’s Eastpark Commerce Center for an apparent expansion (the company hasn’t talked about the acquisition). Hitachi Energy currently employs 670 people in Halifax County and earlier this year announced an expansion that would add 825 more jobs; the company says this will make South Boston the biggest manufacturing site for large power transformers in the country.

It’s hard to say how many of these jobs are related to data centers, but clearly many are. A news release from Hitachi last year, which announced a $1 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, specifically tied its expansion to AI-driven data centers, with the South Boston plant part of that.

In late May, Spanberger announced that the North Carolina-based engineering company Jabil is opening an operation in Prince George County — 352 jobs to “produce critical power distribution systems and solutions for Siemens, a worldwide leader in industrial manufacturing and engineering.” What wasn’t said: Both Jabil and Siemens are involved with data centers. A spokesperson for Jabil confirms that the Prince George facility will be producing “critical applications including data centers.”

Some of you may have already connected some of these dots: While we have come to associate data centers with Northern Virginia (although they’re not spreading outwards), much of the manufacturing for the supply chain is turning up in rural Virginia — places like Botetourt County, Halifax County, Prince George County. This complicates the politics on data centers, because it means that communities that may not have any data centers (although Botetourt soon will) now have a financial stake, jobs-wise, in the data center industry. 

Virginia lost jobs last year and is forecast by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia to lose jobs this year, as well. If you’re the governor of Virginia and want to turn those numbers around, you’d naturally look to see what the growth sectors are — and which of those fit best with Virginia. Given that, it’s only natural that Spanberger would see the data center supply chain as one that could help Virginia’s jobs situation — and be concerned that if legislators end the tax incentive early, that not only slows data center development (which many would be happy with), it would also slow down the manufacturing jobs behind data centers.

This is where seemingly simple political positions have complex implications on the ground — some of this job growth in rural areas is tied to data centers. Lucas has set a “listening tour” on data centers, but she doesn’t have appearances in, say, Halifax County, where she might hear something very different about data centers from Hitachi workers than she will in Virginia Beach and Richmond.

There are also some fascinating class implications as well. Beth Macy, the Democratic candidate for the 6^th Congressional District, wants a moratorium on data center development and “guardrails” on artificial intelligence, citing studies on how AI could eliminate a lot of white-collar jobs. On the other hand, data centers devoted to AI are creating a lot of blue-collar jobs for those who make power-related equipment. That leaves me curious: What do the anti-Google protesters in Botetourt have to say to their neighbors who work at Munters and who owe their livelihood to data centers?

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post Data center supply chains are moving into rural areas that need jobs. This complicates the debate over taxation. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Bedford County says it wants out of a federally funded project that internet service provider RiverStreet Networks has failed to complete.

County officials sent letters to the state’s broadband authority and to the ISP two days after RiverStreet requested that the state extend a corrective action plan deadline that was due June 8. 

RiverStreet teamed up in 2022 and 2023 with the Martinsville-based West Piedmont Planning District Commission to receive federal funding on contracts to deliver broadband to 50,805 potential locations in 12 counties. But it has reached only 11,773 of them.

The money must be spent, and work shown to have progressed, by year’s end in order for the partners to receive full reimbursement on $120 million across six grants.

RiverStreet has said that it ran out of investment dollars and is trying to get more money. 

Bedford County Administrator Robert Hiss, in a June 10 letter to Chandler Vaughan, acting director of the state’s broadband office, said the county voices “extreme objection” to any further extension for RiverStreet, and it is “strenuously requesting” to separate from the project. He copied the letter to General Assembly members who represent the county: Sen. Mark Peake, R-Lynchburg; Del. Tim Griffin, R-Bedford County; and Del. Eric Zehr, R-Campbell County.

“RSN had ample time to complete this project and/or show its ability to complete it,” Hiss wrote. “Our broadband leadership team has met with RSN executives on multiple occasions and has heard the same story repeatedly. They have financial challenges and without additional money, they cannot fulfil their obligation. This is not a recent phenomenon.”

In a separate letter dated the same day, Bedford County Attorney Patrick Skelley II wrote to RiverStreet Networks CEO and President Eric Cramer and the project’s grant administrator, West Piedmont Planning District Commission Executive Director Michael Armbrister, noting that the ISPs contractual deadline with the county has expired, with “no assurances that RSN will complete its work in Bedford County in the foreseeable future, if ever.”

Skelley’s letter requests a mediator to assign the work to another company and to determine what RiverStreet owes the county “for losses and costs associated with RSN’s breach of its duties.”

The Bedford County contract calls for RiverStreet to offer internet service at 2,253 locations, but it had 954 remaining, according to West Piedmont. The company’s project completion deadline was Oct. 8, 2025.

Messages sent to West Piedmont’s Armbrister and RiverStreet’s Cramer and Greg Coltrain were not answered on Monday. 

The broadband office, which is part of the Department of Housing and Community Development, has issued two corrective action plans to RiverStreet and West Piedmont since April. The first required comprehensive action plans for all the projects, including updated budget documents that identify sources of lending and equity, along with information on the funding status; resource management plans detailing construction crews and executed contracts; and construction plan production dates for each county.

West Piedmont and RiverStreet responded, but DHCD determined that it still lacked sufficient capital funding information. In a second corrective action plan letter dated May 8, the department requested documentation “that all outstanding capital sources are secured, including the identity of the lender, equity provider, etc.,” and it requested “to meet with representatives from the source of capital prior to finalization of funding being secured.”

On its deadline, June 8, RiverStreet and West Piedmont asked for another extension. By that time, Bedford County officials had seen enough. 

“In Bedford County, there are multiple ISPs who have the financial and logistical ability to finish this project in [a] timely manner,” Hiss wrote. “Unlike RSN, these ISPs also have a track record of managing their funds to complete a project. … We welcome conversations about how this can occur both financially and in practice. As our agreement with RSN and West Piedmont PDC states, ‘time is of the essence.’ We take that phrase seriously and want to work with an ISP who shares that same commitment.”

RiverStreet’s two biggest partnerships with West Piedmont are the West Broadband Project of Patrick, Henry and Franklin counties, and the East Broadband Project, covering Amelia, Bedford, Campbell, Charlotte, Nottoway and Pittsylvania counties. The money came in two rounds of funding, in 2022 and 2023, from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act.

They also combined for two other ARPA grants, a second one in Pittsylvania County and one in Dinwiddie County.

The West project was funded through a $33.5 million grant that the state administers via the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, largely funded by ARPA. Another $59.4 million comes from match funding that RiverStreet and local government partners provided, according to West Piedmont.

The East Broadband Project received an $87 million VATI grant, with $65.4 million in match funding from RiverStreet Networks and local governments.

It was a later federal grant that set RiverStreet back, Coltrain, RiverStreet’s vice president of business development, said at a Patrick County Board of Supervisors meeting on May 26. The company received $44 million in promised funding from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Act, popularly known as BEAD. That money covered new areas, some of which overlap with Patrick, Henry, Amelia and Dinwiddie counties.

In Patrick County, the company has not completed any of the 8,381 fiber locations it had contracted to complete there in 2022 and 2023.

In a recent letter to its VATI partner localities, the company wrote that “growth” from the new funding “required a full redesign and refinancing of our plans to meet several updated federal requirements.” RiverStreet added that “because these new build areas overlap with our existing infrastructure, legal and financing protocols require finalized contracts before we can break ground.”

That amounts to a lot of incomplete work, according to a document that West Piedmont provided to Cardinal News recently. 

RiverStreet has completed work to 40 of 16,633 serviceable locations in the three West Project counties, Franklin, Henry and Patrick, from the 2022 and 2023 contracts. In the East Broadband Project, 9,785 of 27,997 locations are serviceable.

Dinwiddie County has seen no work done for 5,009 locations. The second Pittsylvania project has provided potential service to 854 out of 2,105 locations.

Only East projects Charlotte County, with 315 remaining, and Bedford County had seen more than half the work done, the West Piedmont document shows.

RiverStreet is the only one of 19 ISPs working with federal grant funding in the commonwealth that is currently under a corrective action plan, according to housing department documents. Four of its projects were listed as high risk to be unfinished, according to the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative quarterly report released in April.

Hiss’ letter cited a 2024 report from the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, addressing broadband deployment in the state. He cited three recommendations from that report to DHCD, including to strengthen oversight and monitor provider performance and to provide greater flexibility to ensure completion.

“The County is not requesting a new project,” Hiss wrote. “The County is not requesting additional funding. The County is not requesting expanded grant obligations. Instead, the County seeks approval to complete the same project, using the same public investment, for the same residents, through a provider capable of delivering results.”

While it is possible that Housing and Community Development’s broadband office will remove the company from all six grant projects, its officials have yet to respond to either the extension request or Bedford County’s letter. Vaughan, the acting director, didn’t reply to a message on Monday.

The post Bedford County wants out of a broadband deployment project that is in danger of missing a federal deadline 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 a new website for healthcare jobs, a new Virginia Chamber of Commerce president and the role that fuel made by BWX Technologies played in a recent advanced reactor test.

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.

Botetourt grocery store plan advances

The Botetourt County Planning Commission has recommended approval of a 51,000-square-foot grocery store with a bakery, deli, butcher and drive-thru pharmacy at the Daleville Town Center.

The county’s board of supervisors will review the project on June 23. It requires two special exception permits.

A traffic analysis recommended several improvements, including a traffic signal at the intersection of Roanoke Road and Glebe Road, near where the store would be located, according to the county. 

The grocery store would be sized similarly to others in Botetourt, according to a report prepared for the county and included in documents submitted to the planning commission. The Food Lion in Daleville is 37,000 square feet, the Kroger in Daleville is about 49,000 square feet and the Food Lion in Blue Ridge is about 32,000 square feet.

The documents do not name the store. The developer, North Carolina-based Harris Development Partners, has a webpage of projects with images that all appear to show Publix stores. Publix is currently building its first store in the Roanoke region at 4449 Brambleton Ave. in Roanoke County.

The Daleville Town Center is a “traditional neighborhood development,” a style of planned development that mixes residential and commercial uses. The town center’s original planning documents call for a large store in the space where this development would go.

New renderings of NRV train station released

The Virginia Passenger Rail Authority has released new renderings of what it says the Christiansburg rail station, currently under construction, will one day look like.

Once built, the station is anticipated to return Amtrak passenger rail service to the New River Valley in late 2027.

Construction continues, and recent milestones include crews completing the structure of the foundation of the nearly 1,000-foot platform and canopy and building a retaining wall along what will become the parking lot, the rail authority said in a recent update.

Work also continues in Radford, where crews are building a layover facility — a storage and maintenance area to park trains overnight. A modular building to house an Amtrak office and maintenance facilities is expected to be installed this fall.

Microsoft to expand Mecklenburg County data center footprint

Microsoft plans to expand its data center complex in Mecklenburg County, according to a notice filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The project, called AVC22, will be on 490 acres south of U.S. 58, east of Panhandle Road and next to the tech company’s AVC17 data center.

An application for the project states that it will include “three one-story buildings that will store multiple storage servers, along with access roads, an on-site electrical substation, water storage facility, laydown areas and detention ponds.”

The project is needed to address increasing customer demand for cloud computing services, data storage, gaming and more, according to the application.

Officials first announced plans for Microsoft’s Mecklenburg County operations in 2010 with a $499 million investment. The company has expanded its footprint in the area multiple times, including with applications filed in May 2021, July 2022, October 2022 and April 2023. 

As of 2023, it had about 500 employees in what it calls its Southern Virginia Regional Network Group, and that year it paid $23 million in property taxes to Mecklenburg County, according to information provided by the company.

Valley Link meeting in Buckingham postponed

The developer of a controversial extra-high-voltage electric transmission line proposed to run 115 miles from Campbell County to Culpeper has postponed an open-house informational meeting in Buckingham County that was scheduled for Thursday.

The developer, Valley Link, said in a statement that the decision was prompted by a recent measles outbreak in the county that makes a large gathering risky.

Valley Link has planned a series of open-house meetings through June 25 after publishing revised route proposals for its transmission line project.

“Valley Link is still eager to discuss recent route refinements to the Joshua Falls to Yeat transmission project with Buckingham residents. We will share our plans for another public engagement opportunity soon,” the company said.

Electric upgrades underway at Wythe County’s Progress Park

Appalachian Power is upgrading an electric substation and a quarter-mile of transmission line at Wythe County’s Progress Park.

The work began June 1, is expected to end in February and is expected to occur from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.

Appalachian Power said the project will “help support existing and future customer needs and enhance reliability in the area.”

“It will also help maintain a strong, dependable electric system for the communities served,” the company said in a news release.

Last year, officials announced that a complex of data centers, which generally are large users of electricity, would be developed on 99 acres in Progress Park. Officials have said that the project is not expected to impact the electric rates that residents pay.

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: Botetourt grocery store plan advances appeared first on Cardinal News.

The Henry County School Board will be asked Tuesday to approve about $391,000 in sound, video and lighting upgrades at three schools and auditorium, curtain and rigging system upgrades at four schools.

The board is also set to vote on several federal grant applications worth nearly $3.85 million if approved. Members will convene at 9 a.m. in the third-floor board room at the Henry County administration building, 3300 Kings Mountain Road, Martinsville.

The school board will vote on whether to approve seeking sound, video and lighting upgrades at the Bassett and Magna Vista high school outdoor stadiums and in the Drewry Mason Elementary School auditorium. The facilities are used often for various events, and enhancements are needed to improve the experience, according to meeting documents.

The estimated costs are $80,000 each for upgrades at the two stadiums and $41,000 for the elementary school auditorium. The board will also vote on approving a contract with Stage Sound Inc., of Roanoke, for auditorium curtain and light/sound rigging system upgrades at Bassett and Magna Vista high schools, Fieldale-Collins Middle School and Laurel Park Middle School.

The existing curtains are deteriorated in several areas, and the rigging equipment has “reached the end of its useful life and is due for replacement,” according to meeting documents. The estimated cost is nearly $190,000.

Board members will also be asked to approve four applications for federal Department of Education grants, including:

• Title I, Part A. County schools are eligible for about $3.2 million, to be allocated by the state Department of Education, to support elementary instruction. All county elementary schools are expected to qualify. The funds would help pay for reading specialists, instructional coaches and paraprofessionals, behavior intervention technicians, instructional materials, parent involvement activities, materials and supplies to support homeless students, and more.
• Title II, Part A. About $408,500 will be sought for education reform efforts and would help pay for professional development opportunities for teachers, administrators and paraprofessionals; school-based mentor pay stipends and benefits; hard-to-fill job signing stipends and benefits; teacher reimbursement for costs to complete certification or re-certification; a recruitment billboard; professional development books; new teacher resources and supplies; and more.
• Title III, Part A. About $59,200 will be sought to support language instruction for English learners and immigrant students.
• Title IV, Part A. Nearly $179,000 will be sought for student support and academic enrichment. The money will help pay for elementary and secondary LEGO robotics club activities and competition participation, Virginia Society for Technology in Education and Virginia Association of Science Teachers conference attendance costs, and other activities.

The board will also receive a report on the success of the school division’s energy conservation program, which was launched in February 2010.

According to the report, during its first year, the program cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 2,800 metric tons — equal to taking 496 vehicles off the roads. Between February and May of this year, it has already cut emissions by 581 metric tons, equal to removing 121 vehicles.

Over the life of the program so far, it has cut greenhouse gases by more than 44,000 metric tons, equal to taking 8,820 vehicles off the road, the report states.

You can find meeting documents by going here and clicking on the meeting date.

The post Nearly $400,000 in building upgrades and $3.85 million in federal grants on the Henry County School Board’s agenda appeared first on Cardinal News.

As the only doctor left in Patrick County, my days are defined by the patients in my waiting room, not by government payment calculations. Since 1991, my practice has grown to care for over 38,000 patients — a critical lifeline made even more vital after our local hospital closed its doors in 2017.

But right now, a massive mathematical error by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is threatening our very ability to keep our doors open. Specifically, CMS is using a flawed calculation known as the Accountable Care Prospective Trend (ACPT) that completely fails to reflect real-world cost growth, penalizing independent practices like mine for care we have already delivered.

Nearly 500,000 community clinicians across the country are facing a collective $700 million pay cut. At a time when millions of Americans struggle to see a primary care doctor — and rural areas like ours are already starved for medical infrastructure — this isn’t just a budget adjustment. It is a direct threat to the health of our community.

Representative Griffith fights for our local clinics

Thankfully, our local leaders recognize this danger. Congressman Morgan Griffith, who represents our region, understands the unique pressures facing rural health providers. In a direct letter to CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, he and other lawmakers asked CMS to fix these inaccurate calculations and secure stable payment benchmarks for doctors. They understand that local doctors need predictable, honest budgets to keep patients healthy and keep clinic doors open.

Like many independent doctors, I chose a different path than corporate healthcare. I refuse to treat patients like numbers, rushing people through the exam room just to bill for as many visits as possible to keep the lights on. Instead, our practice partners with Medicare in the Medicare Shared Savings Program, designed to reward quality of care over quantity of patients.

In simple terms, we are rewarded for keeping our patients healthy and out of the emergency room. When we successfully manage chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease, preventing avoidable hospital trips, the financial savings are shared back with our practice.

The real cost to Patrick County

While this healthcare model has been pivotal for our practice, the ACPT’s mathematical error hits hard. Our small team is facing a deficit of more than $50,000 in critical funding for care already delivered to our community. These are vital resources that were meant to be reinvested directly into local patient health.

When independent practices earn these shared savings, that money doesn’t go into a corporate vacuum. We reinvest it right here at home. Right now, I am actively trying to recruit and hire the next generation of young doctors and nurses to Patrick County so we can expand our services and better support our community.

Losing $50,000 to a federal oversight severely limits our ability to recruit staff and build the local healthcare network our neighbors desperately need.

Modernizing Medicare for the future of medicine

CMS has already recognized that the ACPT is not working. In their newest medical models, they have established guardrails to protect healthcare providers from these exact types of mathematical errors. Without applying those same protections to us, or making an immediate adjustment to the ACPT to reflect true cost trends, the financial sustainability of rural, independent clinics is at serious risk.

We want to continue providing a high level of dedicated care, but we need the government’s financial formulas to align with the actual, skyrocketing costs of staffing, medical supplies and daily operations.

If we want this patient-first approach to be the enduring future of medicine, we must ensure the formulas supporting it are as resilient as the doctors practicing it. We urge CMS to fix the ACPT calculations and establish future guardrails that accurately reflect the real economic environment. Primary care is the backbone of our community. By correcting this technical gap, CMS can ensure that rural doctors like me can stay focused on what we do best: caring for our neighbors.

Richard Cole, MD, is a board-certified family physician and founder/owner of Patrick County Family Practice of Stuart, VA. He leads the team at Patrick County Family Practice, delivering care to residents of Patrick County and surrounding areas.

The post Patrick County doctor: Rural Virginia healthcare threatened by Washington’s math error 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 15:

In matters of money and who should pay for harm caused to an individual or group, one should always be willing to make right or well that which has been damaged or ruined.

Years ago, my middle son, Jeff, now working as a senior scientist with a firm in Washington state, spent his sophomore year in college studying abroad in Nepal and living with a Nepalese family of whom he was very fond. One evening, while he was sleeping, $300 was taken out of his wallet. Devastated by this loss, Jeff mentioned it to his Nepalese “mother,” Kusum. Appalled that such an incident could have occurred in her own home, despite Jeff’s protests, and being very strapped for money herself, Kusum gave my son $300 to replace the money that was missing. 

Five years later, I mentioned to Jeff that a Hollins student, Erin, had volunteered with Hands for Help Nepal, a Nepali-based organization, where she would be working at a medical clinic in Nepal the following summer. In response, Jeff asked me if this student would be willing to do a favor for him. Grateful for what Kusum had done to help him when he was a student, he asked Erin if she would be willing to try to find Kusum and deliver $500 to repay her for her kindness. Erin agreed to help Jeff and went out of her way to help him, traveling from the rural clinic where she was working to Katmandu to pick up the wired money. She was able to locate Kusum, who was living across the street from the Chinese Embassy, met Kusum and delivered Jeff’s gift. Kusum’s mother was in the hospital, suffering from cancer, and needed chemotherapy. Jeff’s gift, delivered by this kind student, could not have come at a better time for Kusum and her mother. 

First Kusum, then Jeff, and then Erin each went out of their ways to “make right” what had happened one evening years ago. Kusum corrected the wrong, Jeff sought to return her kindness, and Erin helped him pass it on.

Just imagine a world in which each of us does whatever we can to make up for wrongs we have witnessed, or even committed ourselves, and then to help each other to make it right for others. Unfortunately, most of us will do things we should not and hurt others intentionally or unintentionally. Maybe it was a petty theft at work or scraping a car trying to get out of a tight parking spot, or another time when you wronged someone but did nothing to help “right the situation.” Why not take the step to “right the situation,” to return what you took or leave a note on the car? 

Such harm or damage is not limited to physical property with monetary implications but also relates to what we say about others. Whether motivated by anger, jealousy or ignorance, most of us have sent an email or said things we should not have said that hurt, insulted or disrespected others. Why not apologize to the injured party, correct the record, or do whatever is needed to repair the harm that was done? Once we realize what we have said, taking responsibility for our words and actions and trying to make amends goes a long way in helping us live peacefully with each other.

The issue is not whether we will do hurtful things that harm others. We will. Whether accidentally, carelessly, and occasionally intentionally, we do and say things we should not and may hurt others. The question is how we respond after we have realized we did or said something that hurt someone else or we could help someone else make a difficult situation better. The story of Kusum, Jeff and Erin is a good reminder of how important it is to try to right the wrong and to help others to do so. Taking the steps to “right the wrongs” and to pass on such kindness helps make our community the kind of place most of us want it to be.

Nancy Gray is the former president of Hollins University.

The post Former Hollins president: How we respond after we realize we hurt someone else is a mark of civility 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 gun manufacturer to leave state, citing new laws. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

Virginia congressional Democrats push DOD to reinstate resilience position at Norfolk naval base. — WHRO.

Environment:

Tangier Island: rising waters, eroding shores, dwindling time. — Virginia Mercury.

Education:

How public education has transformed in Virginia since the nation’s founding. — Virginia Mercury.

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 gun manufacturer to leave state, citing new laws; more … appeared first on Cardinal News.

On the Chinese calendar, this is the Year of the Horse. In Virginia, it is the year of the voided election.

First, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the April 21 special election on redistricting on the grounds that it had been improperly placed on the ballot. On Saturday, the state Republican Party’s governing body threw out the results of the Lynchburg Republicans’ May 30 nominating event for the city council on the grounds that it had violated multiple party rules.

Two different elections (one state-run, the other party-run) and two different challenges (one constitutional, the other an intraparty matter), but the result is the same: Those votes don’t count. Broadly speaking, the theme that runs through both is that process matters.

This isn’t a dispute confined to the Hill City; what happened Saturday has statewide implications that reach into the office of Attorney General Jay Jones. For those who just want those, skip ahead to points six and seven.

For those trying to understand the rest of what happened with the Lynchburg Republicans, and what happens now, here’s a full seven-point guide, one for each of the hills in the “City of Seven Hills.”

1. This was about rules, not factions

In Lynchburg, what we see is a battle between two rival factions who are relatively evenly matched and whose disputes might be personal or ideological, depending on the framing. That’s not how the Republican State Central Committee saw things, though. What it saw was a violation of party rules and a local unit that was way out of bounds.

The party’s appeals committee detailed at least seven ways that the conduct of the May 30 “firehouse primary” violated party procedures. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee contended that there was no evidence that the final results would have been different if those rule violations hadn’t happened — there were no allegations, for instance, that ineligible people voted or that votes were miscounted. However, implicit in the appeal was the notion that the committee may have scared some eligible voters away because they supported candidates the committee didn’t want.

The majority report from the appeals committee said “irregular provisional balloting procedures, voting via email, disenfranchisement of military members, intimidation of voters, improper submission of election forms, and a myriad of questionable actions from the Party that is supposed to defend election integrity is puzzling at best, conniving at worst.”

That report went on to say that the “many” violations of party rules “represent egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia. This canvass, and the actions of certain actors in the LRCC, have tainted the reputation of the local Party beyond repair, and for that, there must be consequences.”

In the end, this did not come down to the state party choosing one Republican faction over another (although some in Lynchburg may see it that way); the state party came down on the side of the rules.

Lynchburg council member Marty Misjuns, one of the three firehouse primary winners who now no longer have nominations under this decision, countered that the party’s governing body “has been captured by consultants.”

2. The state Republican party vote on Lynchburg wasn’t close

There were many surprises in the state party’s ruling, but perhaps the biggest was the lopsided nature of the vote. The vote was initially recorded as 54-18, but should have been 55-17 because one member, who was also casting a proxy vote for an absent member, misunderstood her instructions and voted the “wrong” way. Regardless, this was, in political terms, a landslide that says something about how Lynchburg Republicans are viewed by their fellow party members statewide — at least at the leadership level.

In an interview after the vote with Lynchburg independent journalist Andre Whitehead, Veronica Bratton (who has been chair of the city committee and was one of the winners in the firehouse primary) blamed the appeals on council member Stephanie Reed, who lost the May 30 vote. “Our committee members have been stabbed in the back today by the Republican Party of Virginia because Stephanie Reed came in sixth place,” Bratton said. People in Lynchburg can judge the local dynamics for themselves, but I doubt that many of the State Central Committee members have heard of any of the local candidates. What State Central Committee members said at the meeting (and what some have told me since) is that they are simply sticklers for the rules and saw a local unit that was making them up as it went along.

3. It’s unusual for the state party to disband a local unit, but it happened here

The state party didn’t just nullify the committee’s firehouse primary results, it disbanded the whole Lynchburg Republican City Committee and ruled that the current members (with one exception) are barred from serving for the current term. State party chair Jeff Ryer will now appoint replacements. That’s clearly a major rebuke.

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for the state party to disband a local unit. The last time this happened was in Suffolk in 2013. As in Lynchburg, the issue in Suffolk had been clashes between two rival factions over nominating methods, although what pushed things over the edge was when the Suffolk Republicans passed a motion to censure then-Republican Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert for failing to allow certain gun legislation to come to a vote. Gilbert, who is set to become a judge in Shenandoah County in a few weeks, was hardly soft on Second Amendment issues, but knew that the bill in question would not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and saw no point in holding what would have been a symbolic vote that might have put some Republican delegates in a tough spot at reelection time. Suffolk Republicans didn’t appreciate those political calculations and censured him; the state party disbanded them.

Now Lynchburg Republicans will get reconstituted under direction from the state party. (The the from the appeals committee was 3-2 to do this.)

4. The state party barred Jeff Helgeson from party membership through 2027

The appeals committee report singled out three Lynchburg Republicans for special mention — one good, two bad.

It formally commended Steven “Doc” Troxel “for his efforts to attempt a fair process” and makes him the one exception to Lynchburg Republican City Committee members who must go.

It faulted Bratton: “We would be remiss if we did not mention the brutal optics of a Chairman of the Lynchburg Republican City Committee who, based on testimony, appointed the overseers of an election that she planned on participating in as a candidate before renouncing her Chairmanship.”

However, the most drastic thing the state Republican Party did Saturday was to formally censure Helgeson, a former city council member, and bar him from party membership through 2027. Ryer said he couldn’t remember the party taking such action against any individual since 2016.

Helgeson’s offenses aren’t listed in the appeals committee report but he appears to be referenced indirectly as the party’s electoral board member who “stated on a local radio show [that] the names of Firehouse Primary voters/participants will be published in the local News & Advance.” The appeals committee ruled that “these comments by an Electoral Board Member were meant to intimidate voters and discourage participation in the Party Canvass. With these comments, this Electoral Board member was not acting ‘in good faith, with reasonable care, skill, and diligence,’” as the party rules require. The appeals committee unanimously recommended he be suspended and, by an overwhelming vote, the state party’s governing body agreed.

What makes this so important is that Helgeson is central to understanding the Republican infighting in Lynchburg. Maybe the split between Lynchburg Republicans would have happened anyway (there are factions everywhere in every party), but what precipitated was the council vote for mayor in January 2023. Republicans had just won a 5-2 majority on the council. Three Republicans (Misjuns, Helgeson and Larry Taylor) voted to make Helgeson, their longest-serving member, the mayor. The other two (Reed and Chris Faraldi) thought the pugnacious Helgeson was unsuited to be mayor and joined with two Democrats for a 4-3 vote that made Reed the mayor and Faraldi the vice mayor. All the disputes that have followed can be traced back to that vote. Now here’s the state party voting to make Helgeson ineligible for party service until 2030. He’s gone from being one vote away from mayor to a 55-17 vote by his own party to suspend him.

5. The Republican State Central Committee just gave Lynchburg Democrats an opening to win a council majority

The party voided the nominations from the firehouse primary and said “all interested candidates” could run as independents without violating party rules. Almost immediately, the Team Lynchburg slate of Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell said it would. Misjuns talked about going to court to uphold his nomination. Bratton, on Sunday, said it’s the Republican Party of Virginia that would need to go to court to remove the names of the firehouse primary winners from the ballot.

I’m not a lawyer but the law appears to be on the side of the Republican Party of Virginia. The Code of Virginia says: “Should the nominee of any party die, withdraw, or have his nomination set aside for any reason, the party may nominate to fill the vacancy in accordance with its own rules.” That “set aside for any reason” likely covers situations like this where the state Republican Party says the nominations from firehouse primary are void, but maybe now we’ll get a judge to tell us for sure.

In the meantime, Bratton says the original slate that included her, Misjuns and Trae Watkins will be collecting signatures to run as independents if the courts don’t go her way.

There were 10 candidates in that firehouse primary, but to simplify things let’s suppose the two rival slates run as independents in the fall — Bratton, Misjuns and Watkins on one side, with Boswell, Reed and Taylor on the other. If that were a straight-up election, we’d finally get a good idea of how Lynchburg voters stand on the differences between them. That’s not what we’ll have, though. There are three Democrats running: Christina Delzingaro, Dave Henderson and Nat Marshall. The danger for both Republican slates is that they split the vote enough that the Democrats win. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won 49.4% of the vote in Lynchburg. In the 2024 presidential race, Democrat Kamala Harris took 45.0% of the vote in Lynchburg. Based on those numbers, it wouldn’t take much of a split to tip the balance to the three Democratic council candidates.

6. The Lynchburg Republican conflict has implications for the 5^th District congressional race

The 5^th District is a hard district for Democrats to win. Winsome Earle-Sears was the weakest Republican candidate for governor since 1965, yet she still won 53.7% of the vote in the 5^th District last year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Nonetheless, a Democratic win is not out of the question. Spanberger didn’t put much effort into Southside; the Democratic nominee in the 5^th — likely former Rep. Tom Perriello — will. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already declared the 5^th a targeted district. As of the spring campaign finance reports, Perriello had more than twice as much money as the Republican incumbent, John McGuire. Both candidates have primary challengers in the Aug. 4 primary, although McGuire’s opponent, Melanie Lucero, appears stronger than the ones Perriello will face. Let’s skip ahead and assume that McGuire and Perriello are the nominees (a safe bet). If Perriello is going to stand a chance, he’ll have to carry Lynchburg. It’s the second most-populous locality in the district and one of the few places with any significant pocket of Democratic voters. How much, if any, will this turmoil among Lynchburg Republicans hamper McGuire and help Perriello? We don’t know, but it’s something to keep an eye on. McGuire will need a full effort from Lynchburg Republicans but may not be able to get it. If Perriello wins narrowly, you can bet that the Lynchburg situation will get cited as one factor.

(If some of these observations seem familiar, it’s because I wrote about Lynchburg’s role in the 5^th District two weeks ago in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Yes, that’s a self-serving pitch to sign up for that newsletter. See below.)

7. Republicans may have just avoided legal action by the attorney general

If there’s a silver lining for the now-defunct Lynchburg Republican City Committee, it’s this: Its quest to find a legal way to hold a firehouse primary may have just gotten a reprieve.

Virginia now operates under a law — known as Helmer’s Law, for its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County — that all but requires parties to hold state-run primaries to pick their nominees for a general election. (It does exempt nominations for special elections, which is why there’s no controversy over the upcoming June 20 firehouse primary that Montgomery County Republicans are holding to nominate a sheriff’s candidate for a special election.) Lynchburg Republicans have tried to find the daylight in the “all but” provision of Helmer’s Law to hold a party-run nomination.

Last week, the attorney general’s office announced an “inquiry” into whether the Lynchburg Republican process complied with state law. Let’s just say that probably wasn’t a friendly inquiry. However, with the state Republicans now voiding the local results, that legal question is likely moot, which preserves the theoretical option of a firehouse primary for another day.

The irony is that none of the appeals that dissenting Lynchburg Republicans filed challenged the process itself, only the way it was run. Had Lynchburg Republicans run that firehouse primary in a different way — if they hadn’t gone on the radio to announce that voters would have their names listed in the local newspaper, for instance; if they hadn’t distributed literature that essentially disparaged certain candidates, if they hadn’t done many other things — the results might well have been the same and there would have been no appeals to get upheld. In that case, though, Jones might have been contemplating legal action. Now it’s Republicans who are.

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post 7 things to know about the Lynchburg Republican council nominations getting nullified (and how this matters statewide) appeared first on Cardinal News.

On the Chinese calendar, this is the Year of the Horse. In Virginia, it is the year of the voided election.

First, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the April 21 special election on redistricting on the grounds that it had been improperly placed on the ballot. On Saturday, the state Republican Party’s governing body threw out the results of the Lynchburg Republicans’ May 30 nominating event for the city council on the grounds that it had violated multiple party rules.

Two different elections (one state-run, the other party-run) and two different challenges (one constitutional, the other an intraparty matter), but the result is the same: Those votes don’t count. Broadly speaking, the theme that runs through both is that process matters.

This isn’t a dispute confined to the Hill City; what happened Saturday has statewide implications that reach into the office of Attorney General Jay Jones. For those who just want those, skip ahead to points six and seven.

For those trying to understand the rest of what happened with the Lynchburg Republicans, and what happens now, here’s a full seven-point guide, one for each of the hills in the “City of Seven Hills.”

1. This was about rules, not factions

In Lynchburg, what we see is a battle between two rival factions who are relatively evenly matched and whose disputes might be personal or ideological, depending on the framing. That’s not how the Republican State Central Committee saw things, though. What it saw was a violation of party rules and a local unit that was way out of bounds.

The party’s appeals committee detailed at least seven ways that the conduct of the May 30 “firehouse primary” violated party procedures. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee contended that there was no evidence that the final results would have been different if those rule violations hadn’t happened — there were no allegations, for instance, that ineligible people voted or that votes were miscounted. However, implicit in the appeal was the notion that the committee may have scared some eligible voters away because they supported candidates the committee didn’t want.

The majority report from the appeals committee said “irregular provisional balloting procedures, voting via email, disenfranchisement of military members, intimidation of voters, improper submission of election forms, and a myriad of questionable actions from the Party that is supposed to defend election integrity is puzzling at best, conniving at worst.”

That report went on to say that the “many” violations of party rules “represent egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia. This canvass, and the actions of certain actors in the LRCC, have tainted the reputation of the local Party beyond repair, and for that, there must be consequences.”

In the end, this did not come down to the state party choosing one Republican faction over another (although some in Lynchburg may see it that way); the state party came down on the side of the rules.

Lynchburg council member Marty Misjuns, one of the three firehouse primary winners who now no longer have nominations under this decision, countered that the party’s governing body “has been captured by consultants.”

2. The state Republican party vote on Lynchburg wasn’t close

There were many surprises in the state party’s ruling, but perhaps the biggest was the lopsided nature of the vote. The vote was initially recorded as 54-18, but should have been 55-17 because one member, who was also casting a proxy vote for an absent member, misunderstood her instructions and voted the “wrong” way. Regardless, this was, in political terms, a landslide that says something about how Lynchburg Republicans are viewed by their fellow party members statewide — at least at the leadership level.

In an interview after the vote with Lynchburg independent journalist Andre Whitehead, Veronica Bratton (who has been chair of the city committee and was one of the winners in the firehouse primary) blamed the appeals on council member Stephanie Reed, who lost the May 30 vote. “Our committee members have been stabbed in the back today by the Republican Party of Virginia because Stephanie Reed came in sixth place,” Bratton said. People in Lynchburg can judge the local dynamics for themselves, but I doubt that many of the State Central Committee members have heard of any of the local candidates. What State Central Committee members said at the meeting (and what some have told me since) is that they are simply sticklers for the rules and saw a local unit that was making them up as it went along.

3. It’s unusual for the state party to disband a local unit, but it happened here

The state party didn’t just nullify the committee’s firehouse primary results, it disbanded the whole Lynchburg Republican City Committee and ruled that the current members (with one exception) are barred from serving for the current term. State party chair Jeff Ryer will now appoint replacements. That’s clearly a major rebuke.

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for the state party to disband a local unit. The last time this happened was in Suffolk in 2023. As in Lynchburg, the issue in Suffolk had been clashes between two rival factions over nominating methods, although what pushed things over the edge was when the Suffolk Republicans passed a motion to censure then-Republican Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert for failing to allow certain gun legislation to come to a vote. Gilbert, who is set to become a judge in Shenandoah County in a few weeks, was hardly soft on Second Amendment issues, but knew that the bill in question would not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and saw no point in holding what would have been a symbolic vote that might have put some Republican delegates in a tough spot at reelection time. Suffolk Republicans didn’t appreciate those political calculations and censured him; the state party disbanded them.

Now Lynchburg Republicans will get reconstituted under direction from the state party. (The the from the appeals committee was 3-2 to do this.)

4. The state party barred Jeff Helgeson from party membership through 2027

The appeals committee report singled out three Lynchburg Republicans for special mention — one good, two bad.

It formally commended Steven “Doc” Troxel “for his efforts to attempt a fair process” and makes him the one exception to Lynchburg Republican City Committee members who must go.

It faulted Bratton: “We would be remiss if we did not mention the brutal optics of a Chairman of the Lynchburg Republican City Committee who, based on testimony, appointed the overseers of an election that she planned on participating in as a candidate before renouncing her Chairmanship.”

However, the most drastic thing the state Republican Party did Saturday was to formally censure Helgeson, a former city council member, and bar him from party membership through 2027. Ryer said he couldn’t remember the party taking such action against any individual since 2016.

Helgeson’s offenses aren’t listed in the appeals committee report but he appears to be referenced indirectly as the party’s electoral board member who “stated on a local radio show [that] the names of Firehouse Primary voters/participants will be published in the local News & Advance.” The appeals committee ruled that “these comments by an Electoral Board Member were meant to intimidate voters and discourage participation in the Party Canvass. With these comments, this Electoral Board member was not acting ‘in good faith, with reasonable care, skill, and diligence,’” as the party rules require. The appeals committee unanimously recommended he be suspended and, by an overwhelming vote, the state party’s governing body agreed.

What makes this so important is that Helgeson is central to understanding the Republican infighting in Lynchburg. Maybe the split between Lynchburg Republicans would have happened anyway (there are factions everywhere in every party), but what precipitated was the council vote for mayor in January 2023. Republicans had just won a 5-2 majority on the council. Three Republicans (Misjuns, Helgeson and Larry Taylor) voted to make Helgeson, their longest-serving member, the mayor. The other two (Reed and Chris Faraldi) thought the pugnacious Helgeson was unsuited to be mayor and joined with two Democrats for a 4-3 vote that made Reed the mayor and Faraldi the vice mayor. All the disputes that have followed can be traced back to that vote. Now here’s the state party voting to make Helgeson ineligible for party service until 2030. He’s gone from being one vote away from mayor to a 55-17 vote by his own party to suspend him.

5. The Republican State Central Committee just gave Lynchburg Democrats an opening to win a council majority

The party voided the nominations from the firehouse primary and said “all interested candidates” could run as independents without violating party rules. Almost immediately, the Team Lynchburg slate of Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell said it would. Misjuns talked about going to court to uphold his nomination. Bratton, on Sunday, said it’s the Republican Party of Virginia that would need to go to court to remove the names of the firehouse primary winners from the ballot.

I’m not a lawyer but the law appears to be on the side of the Republican Party of Virginia. The Code of Virginia says: “Should the nominee of any party die, withdraw, or have his nomination set aside for any reason, the party may nominate to fill the vacancy in accordance with its own rules.” That “set aside for any reason” likely covers situations like this where the state Republican Party says the nominations from firehouse primary are void, but maybe now we’ll get a judge to tell us for sure.

In the meantime, Bratton says the original slate that included her, Misjuns and Trae Watkins will be collecting signatures to run as independents if the courts don’t go her way.

There were 10 candidates in that firehouse primary, but to simplify things let’s suppose the two rival slates run as independents in the fall — Bratton, Misjuns and Watkins on one side, with Boswell, Reed and Taylor on the other. If that were a straight-up election, we’d finally get a good idea of how Lynchburg voters stand on the differences between them. That’s not what we’ll have, though. There are three Democrats running: Christina Delzingaro, Dave Henderson and Nat Marshall. The danger for both Republican slates is that they split the vote enough that the Democrats win. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won 49.4% of the vote in Lynchburg. In the 2024 presidential race, Democrat Kamala Harris took 45.0% of the vote in Lynchburg. Based on those numbers, it wouldn’t take much of a split to tip the balance to the three Democratic council candidates.

6. The Lynchburg Republican conflict has implications for the 5^th District congressional race

The 5^th District is a hard district for Democrats to win. Winsome Earle-Sears was the weakest Republican candidate for governor since 1965, yet she still won 53.7% of the vote in the 5^th District last year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Nonetheless, a Democratic win is not out of the question. Spanberger didn’t put much effort into Southside; the Democratic nominee in the 5^th — likely former Rep. Tom Perriello — will. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already declared the 5^th a targeted district. As of the spring campaign finance reports, Perriello had more than twice as much money as the Republican incumbent, John McGuire. Both candidates have primary challengers in the Aug. 4 primary, although McGuire’s opponent, Melanie Lucero, appears stronger than the ones Perriello will face. Let’s skip ahead and assume that McGuire and Perriello are the nominees (a safe bet). If Perriello is going to stand a chance, he’ll have to carry Lynchburg. It’s the second most-populous locality in the district and one of the few places with any significant pocket of Democratic voters. How much, if any, will this turmoil among Lynchburg Republicans hamper McGuire and help Perriello? We don’t know, but it’s something to keep an eye on. McGuire will need a full effort from Lynchburg Republicans but may not be able to get it. If Perriello wins narrowly, you can bet that the Lynchburg situation will get cited as one factor.

(If some of these observations seem familiar, it’s because I wrote about Lynchburg’s role in the 5^th District two weeks ago in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Yes, that’s a self-serving pitch to sign up for that newsletter. See below.)

7. Republicans may have just avoided legal action by the attorney general

If there’s a silver lining for the now-defunct Lynchburg Republican City Committee, it’s this: Its quest to find a legal way to hold a firehouse primary may have just gotten a reprieve.

Virginia now operates under a law — known as Helmer’s Law, for its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County — that all but requires parties to hold state-run primaries to pick their nominees for a general election. (It does exempt nominations for special elections, which is why there’s no controversy over the upcoming June 20 firehouse primary that Montgomery County Republicans are holding to nominate a sheriff’s candidate for a special election.) Lynchburg Republicans have tried to find the daylight in the “all but” provision of Helmer’s Law to hold a party-run nomination.

Last week, the attorney general’s office announced an “inquiry” into whether the Lynchburg Republican process complied with state law. Let’s just say that probably wasn’t a friendly inquiry. However, with the state Republicans now voiding the local results, that legal question is likely moot, which preserves the theoretical option of a firehouse primary for another day.

The irony is that none of the appeals that dissenting Lynchburg Republicans filed challenged the process itself, only the way it was run. Had Lynchburg Republicans run that firehouse primary in a different way — if they hadn’t gone on the radio to announce that voters would have their names listed in the local newspaper, for instance; if they hadn’t distributed literature that essentially disparaged certain candidates, if they hadn’t done many other things — the results might well have been the same and there would have been no appeals to get upheld. In that case, though, Jones might have been contemplating legal action. Now it’s Republicans who are.

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post 7 things to know about the Lynchburg Republican council nominations getting nullified (and how this matters statewide) appeared first on Cardinal News.

On the Chinese calendar, this is the Year of the Horse. In Virginia, it is the year of the voided election.

First, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the April 21 special election on redistricting on the grounds that it had been improperly placed on the ballot. On Saturday, the state Republican Party’s governing body threw out the results of the Lynchburg Republicans’ May 30 nominating event for the city council on the grounds that it had violated multiple party rules.

Two different elections (one state-run, the other party-run) and two different challenges (one constitutional, the other an intraparty matter), but the result is the same: Those votes don’t count. Broadly speaking, the theme that runs through both is that process matters.

This isn’t a dispute confined to the Hill City; what happened Saturday has statewide implications that reach into the office of Attorney General Jay Jones. For those who just want those, skip ahead to points six and seven.

For those trying to understand the rest of what happened with the Lynchburg Republicans, and what happens now, here’s a full seven-point guide, one for each of the hills in the “City of Seven Hills.”

1. This was about rules, not factions

In Lynchburg, what we see is a battle between two rival factions who are relatively evenly matched and whose disputes might be personal or ideological, depending on the framing. That’s not how the Republican State Central Committee saw things, though. What it saw was a violation of party rules and a local unit that was way out of bounds.

The party’s appeals committee detailed at least seven ways that the conduct of the May 30 “firehouse primary” violated party procedures. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee contended that there was no evidence that the final results would have been different if those rule violations hadn’t happened — there were no allegations, for instance, that ineligible people voted or that votes were miscounted. However, implicit in the appeal was the notion that the committee may have scared some eligible voters away because they supported candidates the committee didn’t want.

The majority report from the appeals committee said “irregular provisional balloting procedures, voting via email, disenfranchisement of military members, intimidation of voters, improper submission of election forms, and a myriad of questionable actions from the Party that is supposed to defend election integrity is puzzling at best, conniving at worst.”

That report went on to say that the “many” violations of party rules “represent egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia. This canvass, and the actions of certain actors in the LRCC, have tainted the reputation of the local Party beyond repair, and for that, there must be consequences.”

In the end, this did not come down to the state party choosing one Republican faction over another (although some in Lynchburg may see it that way); the state party came down on the side of the rules.

Lynchburg council member Marty Misjuns, one of the three firehouse primary winners who now no longer have nominations under this decision, countered that the party’s governing body “has been captured by consultants.”

2. The state Republican party vote on Lynchburg wasn’t close

There were many surprises in the state party’s ruling, but perhaps the biggest was the lopsided nature of the vote. The vote was initially recorded as 54-18, but should have been 55-17 because one member, who was also casting a proxy vote for an absent member, misunderstood her instructions and voted the “wrong” way. Regardless, this was, in political terms, a landslide that says something about how Lynchburg Republicans are viewed by their fellow party members statewide — at least at the leadership level.

In an interview after the vote with Lynchburg independent journalist Andre Whitehead, Veronica Bratton (who has been chair of the city committee and was one of the winners in the firehouse primary) blamed the appeals on council member Stephanie Reed, who lost the May 30 vote. “Our committee members have been stabbed in the back today by the Republican Party of Virginia because Stephanie Reed came in sixth place,” Bratton said. People in Lynchburg can judge the local dynamics for themselves, but I doubt that many of the State Central Committee members have heard of any of the local candidates. What State Central Committee members said at the meeting (and what some have told me since) is that they are simply sticklers for the rules and saw a local unit that was making them up as it went along.

3. It’s unusual for the state party to disband a local unit, but it happened here

The state party didn’t just nullify the committee’s firehouse primary results, it disbanded the whole Lynchburg Republican City Committee and ruled that the current members (with one exception) are barred from serving for the current term. State party chair Jeff Ryer will now appoint replacements. That’s clearly a major rebuke.

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for the state party to disband a local unit. The last time this happened was in Suffolk in 2023. As in Lynchburg, the issue in Suffolk had been clashes between two rival factions over nominating methods, although what pushed things over the edge was when the Suffolk Republicans passed a motion to censure then-Republican Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert for failing to allow certain gun legislation to come to a vote. Gilbert, who is set to become a judge in Shenandoah County in a few weeks, was hardly soft on Second Amendment issues, but knew that the bill in question would not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and saw no point in holding what would have been a symbolic vote that might have put some Republican delegates in a tough spot at reelection time. Suffolk Republicans didn’t appreciate those political calculations and censured him; the state party disbanded them.

Now Lynchburg Republicans will get reconstituted under direction from the state party. (The the from the appeals committee was 3-2 to do this.)

4. The state party barred Jeff Helgeson from party membership through 2027

The appeals committee report singled out three Lynchburg Republicans for special mention — one good, two bad.

It formally commended Steven “Doc” Troxel “for his efforts to attempt a fair process” and makes him the one exception to Lynchburg Republican City Committee members who must go.

It faulted Bratton: “We would be remiss if we did not mention the brutal optics of a Chairman of the Lynchburg Republican City Committee who, based on testimony, appointed the overseers of an election that she planned on participating in as a candidate before renouncing her Chairmanship.”

However, the most drastic thing the state Republican Party did Saturday was to formally censure Helgeson, a former city council member, and bar him from party membership through 2027. Ryer said he couldn’t remember the party taking such action against any individual since 2016.

Helgeson’s offenses aren’t listed in the appeals committee report but he appears to be referenced indirectly as the party’s electoral board member who “stated on a local radio show [that] the names of Firehouse Primary voters/participants will be published in the local News & Advance.” The appeals committee ruled that “these comments by an Electoral Board Member were meant to intimidate voters and discourage participation in the Party Canvass. With these comments, this Electoral Board member was not acting ‘in good faith, with reasonable care, skill, and diligence,’” as the party rules require. The appeals committee unanimously recommended he be suspended and, by an overwhelming vote, the state party’s governing body agreed.

What makes this so important is that Helgeson is central to understanding the Republican infighting in Lynchburg. Maybe the split between Lynchburg Republicans would have happened anyway (there are factions everywhere in every party), but what precipitated was the council vote for mayor in January 2023. Republicans had just won a 5-2 majority on the council. Three Republicans (Misjuns, Helgeson and Larry Taylor) voted to make Helgeson, their longest-serving member, the mayor. The other two (Reed and Chris Faraldi) thought the pugnacious Helgeson was unsuited to be mayor and joined with two Democrats for a 4-3 vote that made Reed the mayor and Faraldi the vice mayor. All the disputes that have followed can be traced back to that vote. Now here’s the state party voting to make Helgeson ineligible for party service until 2030. He’s gone from being one vote away from mayor to a 55-17 vote by his own party to suspend him.

5. The Republican State Central Committee just gave Lynchburg Democrats an opening to win a council majority

The party voided the nominations from the firehouse primary and said “all interested candidates” could run as independents without violating party rules. Almost immediately, the Team Lynchburg slate of Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell said it would. Misjuns talked about going to court to uphold his nomination. Bratton, on Sunday, said it’s the Republican Party of Virginia that would need to go to court to remove the names of the firehouse primary winners from the ballot.

I’m not a lawyer but the law appears to be on the side of the Republican Party of Virginia. The Code of Virginia says: “Should the nominee of any party die, withdraw, or have his nomination set aside for any reason, the party may nominate to fill the vacancy in accordance with its own rules.” That “set aside for any reason” likely covers situations like this where the state Republican Party says the nominations from firehouse primary are void, but maybe now we’ll get a judge to tell us for sure.

In the meantime, Bratton says the original slate that included her, Misjuns and Trae Watkins will be collecting signatures to run as independents if the courts don’t go her way.

There were 10 candidates in that firehouse primary, but to simplify things let’s suppose the two rival slates run as independents in the fall — Bratton, Misjuns and Watkins on one side, with Boswell, Reed and Taylor on the other. If that were a straight-up election, we’d finally get a good idea of how Lynchburg voters stand on the differences between them. That’s not what we’ll have, though. There are three Democrats running: Christina Delzingaro, Dave Henderson and Nat Marshall. The danger for both Republican slates is that they split the vote enough that the Democrats win. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won 49.4% of the vote in Lynchburg. In the 2024 presidential race, Democrat Kamala Harris took 45.0% of the vote in Lynchburg. Based on those numbers, it wouldn’t take much of a split to tip the balance to the three Democratic council candidates.

6. The Lynchburg Republican conflict has implications for the 5^th District congressional race

The 5^th District is a hard district for Democrats to win. Winsome Earle-Sears was the weakest Republican candidate for governor since 1965, yet she still won 53.7% of the vote in the 5^th District last year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Nonetheless, a Democratic win is not out of the question. Spanberger didn’t put much effort into Southside; the Democratic nominee in the 5^th — likely former Rep. Tom Perriello — will. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already declared the 5^th a targeted district. As of the spring campaign finance reports, Perriello had more than twice as much money as the Republican incumbent, John McGuire. Both candidates have primary challengers in the Aug. 4 primary, although McGuire’s opponent, Melanie Lucero, appears stronger than the ones Perriello will face. Let’s skip ahead and assume that McGuire and Perriello are the nominees (a safe bet). If Perriello is going to stand a chance, he’ll have to carry Lynchburg. It’s the second most-populous locality in the district and one of the few places with any significant pocket of Democratic voters. How much, if any, will this turmoil among Lynchburg Republicans hamper McGuire and help Perriello? We don’t know, but it’s something to keep an eye on. McGuire will need a full effort from Lynchburg Republicans but may not be able to get it. If Perriello wins narrowly, you can bet that the Lynchburg situation will get cited as one factor.

(If some of these observations seem familiar, it’s because I wrote about Lynchburg’s role in the 5^th District two weeks ago in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Yes, that’s a self-serving pitch to sign up for that newsletter. See below.)

7. Republicans may have just avoided legal action by the attorney general

If there’s a silver lining for the now-defunct Lynchburg Republican City Committee, it’s this: Its quest to find a legal way to hold a firehouse primary may have just gotten a reprieve.

Virginia now operates under a law — known as Helmer’s Law, for its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County — that all but requires parties to hold state-run primaries to pick their nominees for a general election. (It does exempt nominations for special elections, which is why there’s no controversy over the upcoming June 20 firehouse primary that Montgomery County Republicans are holding to nominate a sheriff’s candidate for a special election.) Lynchburg Republicans have tried to find the daylight in the “all but” provision of Helmer’s Law to hold a party-run nomination.

Last week, the attorney general’s office announced an “inquiry” into whether the Lynchburg Republican process complied with state law. Let’s just say that probably wasn’t a friendly inquiry. However, with the state Republicans now voiding the local results, that legal question is likely moot, which preserves the theoretical option of a firehouse primary for another day.

The irony is that none of the appeals that dissenting Lynchburg Republicans filed challenged the process itself, only the way it was run. Had Lynchburg Republicans run that firehouse primary in a different way — if they hadn’t gone on the radio to announce that voters would have their names listed in the local newspaper, for instance; if they hadn’t distributed literature that essentially disparaged certain candidates, if they hadn’t done many other things — the results might well have been the same and there would have been no appeals to get upheld. In that case, though, Jones might have been contemplating legal action. Now it’s Republicans who are.

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post 7 things to know about the Lynchburg Republican council nominations getting nullified (and how this matters statewide) appeared first on Cardinal News.

On the Chinese calendar, this is the Year of the Horse. In Virginia, it is the year of the voided election.

First, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the April 21 special election on redistricting on the grounds that it had been improperly placed on the ballot. On Saturday, the state Republican Party’s governing body threw out the results of the Lynchburg Republicans’ May 30 nominating event for the city council on the grounds that it had violated multiple party rules.

Two different elections (one state-run, the other party-run) and two different challenges (one constitutional, the other an intraparty matter), but the result is the same: Those votes don’t count. Broadly speaking, the theme that runs through both is that process matters.

This isn’t a dispute confined to the Hill City; what happened Saturday has statewide implications that reach into the office of Attorney General Jay Jones. For those who just want those, skip ahead to points six and seven.

For those trying to understand the rest of what happened with the Lynchburg Republicans, and what happens now, here’s a full seven-point guide, one for each of the hills in the “City of Seven Hills.”

1. This was about rules, not factions

In Lynchburg, what we see is a battle between two rival factions who are relatively evenly matched and whose disputes might be personal or ideological, depending on the framing. That’s not how the Republican State Central Committee saw things, though. What it saw was a violation of party rules and a local unit that was way out of bounds.

The party’s appeals committee detailed at least seven ways that the conduct of the May 30 “firehouse primary” violated party procedures. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee contended that there was no evidence that the final results would have been different if those rule violations hadn’t happened — there were no allegations, for instance, that ineligible people voted or that votes were miscounted. However, implicit in the appeal was the notion that the committee may have scared some eligible voters away because they supported candidates the committee didn’t want.

The majority report from the appeals committee said “irregular provisional balloting procedures, voting via email, disenfranchisement of military members, intimidation of voters, improper submission of election forms, and a myriad of questionable actions from the Party that is supposed to defend election integrity is puzzling at best, conniving at worst.”

That report went on to say that the “many” violations of party rules “represent egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia. This canvass, and the actions of certain actors in the LRCC, have tainted the reputation of the local Party beyond repair, and for that, there must be consequences.”

In the end, this did not come down to the state party choosing one Republican faction over another (although some in Lynchburg may see it that way); the state party came down on the side of the rules.

Lynchburg council member Marty Misjuns, one of the three firehouse primary winners who now no longer have nominations under this decision, countered that the party’s governing body “has been captured by consultants.”

2. The state Republican party vote on Lynchburg wasn’t close

There were many surprises in the state party’s ruling, but perhaps the biggest was the lopsided nature of the vote. The vote was initially recorded as 54-18, but should have been 55-17 because one member, who was also casting a proxy vote for an absent member, misunderstood her instructions and voted the “wrong” way. Regardless, this was, in political terms, a landslide that says something about how Lynchburg Republicans are viewed by their fellow party members statewide — at least at the leadership level.

In an interview after the vote with Lynchburg independent journalist Andre Whitehead, Veronica Bratton (who has been chair of the city committee and was one of the winners in the firehouse primary) blamed the appeals on council member Stephanie Reed, who lost the May 30 vote. “Our committee members have been stabbed in the back today by the Republican Party of Virginia because Stephanie Reed came in sixth place,” Bratton said. People in Lynchburg can judge the local dynamics for themselves, but I doubt that many of the State Central Committee members have heard of any of the local candidates. What State Central Committee members said at the meeting (and what some have told me since) is that they are simply sticklers for the rules and saw a local unit that was making them up as it went along.

3. It’s unusual for the state party to disband a local unit, but it happened here

The state party didn’t just nullify the committee’s firehouse primary results, it disbanded the whole Lynchburg Republican City Committee and ruled that the current members (with one exception) are barred from serving for the current term. State party chair Jeff Ryer will now appoint replacements. That’s clearly a major rebuke.

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for the state party to disband a local unit. The last time this happened was in Suffolk in 2023. As in Lynchburg, the issue in Suffolk had been clashes between two rival factions over nominating methods, although what pushed things over the edge was when the Suffolk Republicans passed a motion to censure then-Republican Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert for failing to allow certain gun legislation to come to a vote. Gilbert, who is set to become a judge in Shenandoah County in a few weeks, was hardly soft on Second Amendment issues, but knew that the bill in question would not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and saw no point in holding what would have been a symbolic vote that might have put some Republican delegates in a tough spot at reelection time. Suffolk Republicans didn’t appreciate those political calculations and censured him; the state party disbanded them.

Now Lynchburg Republicans will get reconstituted under direction from the state party. (The the from the appeals committee was 3-2 to do this.)

4. The state party barred Jeff Helgeson from party membership through 2027

The appeals committee report singled out three Lynchburg Republicans for special mention — one good, two bad.

It formally commended Steven “Doc” Troxel “for his efforts to attempt a fair process” and makes him the one exception to Lynchburg Republican City Committee members who must go.

It faulted Bratton: “We would be remiss if we did not mention the brutal optics of a Chairman of the Lynchburg Republican City Committee who, based on testimony, appointed the overseers of an election that she planned on participating in as a candidate before renouncing her Chairmanship.”

However, the most drastic thing the state Republican Party did Saturday was to formally censure Helgeson, a former city council member, and bar him from party membership through 2027. Ryer said he couldn’t remember the party taking such action against any individual since 2016.

Helgeson’s offenses aren’t listed in the appeals committee report but he appears to be referenced indirectly as the party’s electoral board member who “stated on a local radio show [that] the names of Firehouse Primary voters/participants will be published in the local News & Advance.” The appeals committee ruled that “these comments by an Electoral Board Member were meant to intimidate voters and discourage participation in the Party Canvass. With these comments, this Electoral Board member was not acting ‘in good faith, with reasonable care, skill, and diligence,’” as the party rules require. The appeals committee unanimously recommended he be suspended and, by an overwhelming vote, the state party’s governing body agreed.

What makes this so important is that Helgeson is central to understanding the Republican infighting in Lynchburg. Maybe the split between Lynchburg Republicans would have happened anyway (there are factions everywhere in every party), but what precipitated was the council vote for mayor in January 2023. Republicans had just won a 5-2 majority on the council. Three Republicans (Misjuns, Helgeson and Larry Taylor) voted to make Helgeson, their longest-serving member, the mayor. The other two (Reed and Chris Faraldi) thought the pugnacious Helgeson was unsuited to be mayor and joined with two Democrats for a 4-3 vote that made Reed the mayor and Faraldi the vice mayor. All the disputes that have followed can be traced back to that vote. Now here’s the state party voting to make Helgeson ineligible for party service until 2030. He’s gone from being one vote away from mayor to a 55-17 vote by his own party to suspend him.

5. The Republican State Central Committee just gave Lynchburg Democrats an opening to win a council majority

The party voided the nominations from the firehouse primary and said “all interested candidates” could run as independents without violating party rules. Almost immediately, the Team Lynchburg slate of Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell said it would. Misjuns talked about going to court to uphold his nomination. Bratton, on Sunday, said it’s the Republican Party of Virginia that would need to go to court to remove the names of the firehouse primary winners from the ballot.

I’m not a lawyer but the law appears to be on the side of the Republican Party of Virginia. The Code of Virginia says: “Should the nominee of any party die, withdraw, or have his nomination set aside for any reason, the party may nominate to fill the vacancy in accordance with its own rules.” That “set aside for any reason” likely covers situations like this where the state Republican Party says the nominations from firehouse primary are void, but maybe now we’ll get a judge to tell us for sure.

In the meantime, Bratton says the original slate that included her, Misjuns and Trae Watkins will be collecting signatures to run as independents if the courts don’t go her way.

There were 10 candidates in that firehouse primary, but to simplify things let’s suppose the two rival slates run as independents in the fall — Bratton, Misjuns and Watkins on one side, with Boswell, Reed and Taylor on the other. If that were a straight-up election, we’d finally get a good idea of how Lynchburg voters stand on the differences between them. That’s not what we’ll have, though. There are three Democrats running: Christina Delzingaro, Dave Henderson and Nat Marshall. The danger for both Republican slates is that they split the vote enough that the Democrats win. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won 49.4% of the vote in Lynchburg. In the 2024 presidential race, Democrat Kamala Harris took 45.0% of the vote in Lynchburg. Based on those numbers, it wouldn’t take much of a split to tip the balance to the three Democratic council candidates.

6. The Lynchburg Republican conflict has implications for the 5^th District congressional race

The 5^th District is a hard district for Democrats to win. Winsome Earle-Sears was the weakest Republican candidate for governor since 1965, yet she still won 53.7% of the vote in the 5^th District last year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Nonetheless, a Democratic win is not out of the question. Spanberger didn’t put much effort into Southside; the Democratic nominee in the 5^th — likely former Rep. Tom Perriello — will. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already declared the 5^th a targeted district. As of the spring campaign finance reports, Perriello had more than twice as much money as the Republican incumbent, John McGuire. Both candidates have primary challengers in the Aug. 4 primary, although McGuire’s opponent, Melanie Lucero, appears stronger than the ones Perriello will face. Let’s skip ahead and assume that McGuire and Perriello are the nominees (a safe bet). If Perriello is going to stand a chance, he’ll have to carry Lynchburg. It’s the second most-populous locality in the district and one of the few places with any significant pocket of Democratic voters. How much, if any, will this turmoil among Lynchburg Republicans hamper McGuire and help Perriello? We don’t know, but it’s something to keep an eye on. McGuire will need a full effort from Lynchburg Republicans but may not be able to get it. If Perriello wins narrowly, you can bet that the Lynchburg situation will get cited as one factor.

(If some of these observations seem familiar, it’s because I wrote about Lynchburg’s role in the 5^th District two weeks ago in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Yes, that’s a self-serving pitch to sign up for that newsletter. See below.)

7. Republicans may have just avoided legal action by the attorney general

If there’s a silver lining for the now-defunct Lynchburg Republican City Committee, it’s this: Its quest to find a legal way to hold a firehouse primary may have just gotten a reprieve.

Virginia now operates under a law — known as Helmer’s Law, for its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County — that all but requires parties to hold state-run primaries to pick their nominees for a general election. (It does exempt nominations for special elections, which is why there’s no controversy over the upcoming June 20 firehouse primary that Montgomery County Republicans are holding to nominate a sheriff’s candidate for a special election.) Lynchburg Republicans have tried to find the daylight in the “all but” provision of Helmer’s Law to hold a party-run nomination.

Last week, the attorney general’s office announced an “inquiry” into whether the Lynchburg Republican process complied with state law. Let’s just say that probably wasn’t a friendly inquiry. However, with the state Republicans now voiding the local results, that legal question is likely moot, which preserves the theoretical option of a firehouse primary for another day.

The irony is that none of the appeals that dissenting Lynchburg Republicans filed challenged the process itself, only the way it was run. Had Lynchburg Republicans run that firehouse primary in a different way — if they hadn’t gone on the radio to announce that voters would have their names listed in the local newspaper, for instance; if they hadn’t distributed literature that essentially disparaged certain candidates, if they hadn’t done many other things — the results might well have been the same and there would have been no appeals to get upheld. In that case, though, Jones might have been contemplating legal action. Now it’s Republicans who are.

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post 7 things to know about the Lynchburg Republican council nominations getting nullified (and how this matters statewide) appeared first on Cardinal News.

On the Chinese calendar, this is the Year of the Horse. In Virginia, it is the year of the voided election.

First, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the April 21 special election on redistricting on the grounds that it had been improperly placed on the ballot. On Saturday, the state Republican Party’s governing body threw out the results of the Lynchburg Republicans’ May 30 nominating event for the city council on the grounds that it had violated multiple party rules.

Two different elections (one state-run, the other party-run) and two different challenges (one constitutional, the other an intraparty matter), but the result is the same: Those votes don’t count. Broadly speaking, the theme that runs through both is that process matters.

This isn’t a dispute confined to the Hill City; what happened Saturday has statewide implications that reach into the office of Attorney General Jay Jones. For those who just want those, skip ahead to points six and seven.

For those trying to understand the rest of what happened with the Lynchburg Republicans, and what happens now, here’s a full seven-point guide, one for each of the hills in the “City of Seven Hills.”

1. This was about rules, not factions

In Lynchburg, what we see is a battle between two rival factions who are relatively evenly matched and whose disputes might be personal or ideological, depending on the framing. That’s not how the Republican State Central Committee saw things, though. What it saw was a violation of party rules and a local unit that was way out of bounds.

The party’s appeals committee detailed at least seven ways that the conduct of the May 30 “firehouse primary” violated party procedures. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee contended that there was no evidence that the final results would have been different if those rule violations hadn’t happened — there were no allegations, for instance, that ineligible people voted or that votes were miscounted. However, implicit in the appeal was the notion that the committee may have scared some eligible voters away because they supported candidates the committee didn’t want.

The majority report from the appeals committee said “irregular provisional balloting procedures, voting via email, disenfranchisement of military members, intimidation of voters, improper submission of election forms, and a myriad of questionable actions from the Party that is supposed to defend election integrity is puzzling at best, conniving at worst.”

That report went on to say that the “many” violations of party rules “represent egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia. This canvass, and the actions of certain actors in the LRCC, have tainted the reputation of the local Party beyond repair, and for that, there must be consequences.”

In the end, this did not come down to the state party choosing one Republican faction over another (although some in Lynchburg may see it that way); the state party came down on the side of the rules.

Lynchburg council member Marty Misjuns, one of the three firehouse primary winners who now no longer have nominations under this decision, countered that the party’s governing body “has been captured by consultants.”

2. The state Republican party vote on Lynchburg wasn’t close

There were many surprises in the state party’s ruling, but perhaps the biggest was the lopsided nature of the vote. The vote was initially recorded as 54-18, but should have been 55-17 because one member, who was also casting a proxy vote for an absent member, misunderstood her instructions and voted the “wrong” way. Regardless, this was, in political terms, a landslide that says something about how Lynchburg Republicans are viewed by their fellow party members statewide — at least at the leadership level.

In an interview after the vote with Lynchburg independent journalist Andre Whitehead, Veronica Bratton (who has been chair of the city committee and was one of the winners in the firehouse primary) blamed the appeals on council member Stephanie Reed, who lost the May 30 vote. “Our committee members have been stabbed in the back today by the Republican Party of Virginia because Stephanie Reed came in sixth place,” Bratton said. People in Lynchburg can judge the local dynamics for themselves, but I doubt that many of the State Central Committee members have heard of any of the local candidates. What State Central Committee members said at the meeting (and what some have told me since) is that they are simply sticklers for the rules and saw a local unit that was making them up as it went along.

3. It’s unusual for the state party to disband a local unit, but it happened here

The state party didn’t just nullify the committee’s firehouse primary results, it disbanded the whole Lynchburg Republican City Committee and ruled that the current members (with one exception) are barred from serving for the current term. State party chair Jeff Ryer will now appoint replacements. That’s clearly a major rebuke.

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for the state party to disband a local unit. The last time this happened was in Suffolk in 2023. As in Lynchburg, the issue in Suffolk had been clashes between two rival factions over nominating methods, although what pushed things over the edge was when the Suffolk Republicans passed a motion to censure then-Republican Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert for failing to allow certain gun legislation to come to a vote. Gilbert, who is set to become a judge in Shenandoah County in a few weeks, was hardly soft on Second Amendment issues, but knew that the bill in question would not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and saw no point in holding what would have been a symbolic vote that might have put some Republican delegates in a tough spot at reelection time. Suffolk Republicans didn’t appreciate those political calculations and censured him; the state party disbanded them.

Now Lynchburg Republicans will get reconstituted under direction from the state party. (The the from the appeals committee was 3-2 to do this.)

4. The state party barred Jeff Helgeson from party membership through 2027

The appeals committee report singled out three Lynchburg Republicans for special mention — one good, two bad.

It formally commended Steven “Doc” Troxel “for his efforts to attempt a fair process” and makes him the one exception to Lynchburg Republican City Committee members who must go.

It faulted Bratton: “We would be remiss if we did not mention the brutal optics of a Chairman of the Lynchburg Republican City Committee who, based on testimony, appointed the overseers of an election that she planned on participating in as a candidate before renouncing her Chairmanship.”

However, the most drastic thing the state Republican Party did Saturday was to formally censure Helgeson, a former city council member, and bar him from party membership through 2027. Ryer said he couldn’t remember the party taking such action against any individual since 2016.

Helgeson’s offenses aren’t listed in the appeals committee report but he appears to be referenced indirectly as the party’s electoral board member who “stated on a local radio show [that] the names of Firehouse Primary voters/participants will be published in the local News & Advance.” The appeals committee ruled that “these comments by an Electoral Board Member were meant to intimidate voters and discourage participation in the Party Canvass. With these comments, this Electoral Board member was not acting ‘in good faith, with reasonable care, skill, and diligence,’” as the party rules require. The appeals committee unanimously recommended he be suspended and, by an overwhelming vote, the state party’s governing body agreed.

What makes this so important is that Helgeson is central to understanding the Republican infighting in Lynchburg. Maybe the split between Lynchburg Republicans would have happened anyway (there are factions everywhere in every party), but what precipitated was the council vote for mayor in January 2023. Republicans had just won a 5-2 majority on the council. Three Republicans (Misjuns, Helgeson and Larry Taylor) voted to make Helgeson, their longest-serving member, the mayor. The other two (Reed and Chris Faraldi) thought the pugnacious Helgeson was unsuited to be mayor and joined with two Democrats for a 4-3 vote that made Reed the mayor and Faraldi the vice mayor. All the disputes that have followed can be traced back to that vote. Now here’s the state party voting to make Helgeson ineligible for party service until 2030. He’s gone from being one vote away from mayor to a 55-17 vote by his own party to suspend him.

5. The Republican State Central Committee just gave Lynchburg Democrats an opening to win a council majority

The party voided the nominations from the firehouse primary and said “all interested candidates” could run as independents without violating party rules. Almost immediately, the Team Lynchburg slate of Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell said it would. Misjuns talked about going to court to uphold his nomination. Bratton, on Sunday, said it’s the Republican Party of Virginia that would need to go to court to remove the names of the firehouse primary winners from the ballot.

I’m not a lawyer but the law appears to be on the side of the Republican Party of Virginia. The Code of Virginia says: “Should the nominee of any party die, withdraw, or have his nomination set aside for any reason, the party may nominate to fill the vacancy in accordance with its own rules.” That “set aside for any reason” likely covers situations like this where the state Republican Party says the nominations from firehouse primary are void, but maybe now we’ll get a judge to tell us for sure.

In the meantime, Bratton says the original slate that included her, Misjuns and Trae Watkins will be collecting signatures to run as independents if the courts don’t go her way.

There were 10 candidates in that firehouse primary, but to simplify things let’s suppose the two rival slates run as independents in the fall — Bratton, Misjuns and Watkins on one side, with Boswell, Reed and Taylor on the other. If that were a straight-up election, we’d finally get a good idea of how Lynchburg voters stand on the differences between them. That’s not what we’ll have, though. There are three Democrats running: Christina Delzingaro, Dave Henderson and Nat Marshall. The danger for both Republican slates is that they split the vote enough that the Democrats win. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won 49.4% of the vote in Lynchburg. In the 2024 presidential race, Democrat Kamala Harris took 45.0% of the vote in Lynchburg. Based on those numbers, it wouldn’t take much of a split to tip the balance to the three Democratic council candidates.

6. The Lynchburg Republican conflict has implications for the 5^th District congressional race

The 5^th District is a hard district for Democrats to win. Winsome Earle-Sears was the weakest Republican candidate for governor since 1965, yet she still won 53.7% of the vote in the 5^th District last year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Nonetheless, a Democratic win is not out of the question. Spanberger didn’t put much effort into Southside; the Democratic nominee in the 5^th — likely former Rep. Tom Perriello — will. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already declared the 5^th a targeted district. As of the spring campaign finance reports, Perriello had more than twice as much money as the Republican incumbent, John McGuire. Both candidates have primary challengers in the Aug. 4 primary, although McGuire’s opponent, Melanie Lucero, appears stronger than the ones Perriello will face. Let’s skip ahead and assume that McGuire and Perriello are the nominees (a safe bet). If Perriello is going to stand a chance, he’ll have to carry Lynchburg. It’s the second most-populous locality in the district and one of the few places with any significant pocket of Democratic voters. How much, if any, will this turmoil among Lynchburg Republicans hamper McGuire and help Perriello? We don’t know, but it’s something to keep an eye on. McGuire will need a full effort from Lynchburg Republicans but may not be able to get it. If Perriello wins narrowly, you can bet that the Lynchburg situation will get cited as one factor.

(If some of these observations seem familiar, it’s because I wrote about Lynchburg’s role in the 5^th District two weeks ago in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Yes, that’s a self-serving pitch to sign up for that newsletter. See below.)

7. Republicans may have just avoided legal action by the attorney general

If there’s a silver lining for the now-defunct Lynchburg Republican City Committee, it’s this: Its quest to find a legal way to hold a firehouse primary may have just gotten a reprieve.

Virginia now operates under a law — known as Helmer’s Law, for its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County — that all but requires parties to hold state-run primaries to pick their nominees for a general election. (It does exempt nominations for special elections, which is why there’s no controversy over the upcoming June 20 firehouse primary that Montgomery County Republicans are holding to nominate a sheriff’s candidate for a special election.) Lynchburg Republicans have tried to find the daylight in the “all but” provision of Helmer’s Law to hold a party-run nomination.

Last week, the attorney general’s office announced an “inquiry” into whether the Lynchburg Republican process complied with state law. Let’s just say that probably wasn’t a friendly inquiry. However, with the state Republicans now voiding the local results, that legal question is likely moot, which preserves the theoretical option of a firehouse primary for another day.

The irony is that none of the appeals that dissenting Lynchburg Republicans filed challenged the process itself, only the way it was run. Had Lynchburg Republicans run that firehouse primary in a different way — if they hadn’t gone on the radio to announce that voters would have their names listed in the local newspaper, for instance; if they hadn’t distributed literature that essentially disparaged certain candidates, if they hadn’t done many other things — the results might well have been the same and there would have been no appeals to get upheld. In that case, though, Jones might have been contemplating legal action. Now it’s Republicans who are.

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post 7 things to know about the Lynchburg Republican council nominations getting nullified (and how this matters statewide) appeared first on Cardinal News.

On the Chinese calendar, this is the Year of the Horse. In Virginia, it is the year of the voided election.

First, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the April 21 special election on redistricting on the grounds that it had been improperly placed on the ballot. On Saturday, the state Republican Party’s governing body threw out the results of the Lynchburg Republicans’ May 30 nominating event for the city council on the grounds that it had violated multiple party rules.

Two different elections (one state-run, the other party-run) and two different challenges (one constitutional, the other an intraparty matter), but the result is the same: Those votes don’t count. Broadly speaking, the theme that runs through both is that process matters.

This isn’t a dispute confined to the Hill City; what happened Saturday has statewide implications that reach into the office of Attorney General Jay Jones. For those who just want those, skip ahead to points six and seven.

For those trying to understand the rest of what happened with the Lynchburg Republicans, and what happens now, here’s a full seven-point guide, one for each of the hills in the “City of Seven Hills.”

1. This was about rules, not factions

In Lynchburg, what we see is a battle between two rival factions who are relatively evenly matched and whose disputes might be personal or ideological, depending on the framing. That’s not how the Republican State Central Committee saw things, though. What it saw was a violation of party rules and a local unit that was way out of bounds.

The party’s appeals committee detailed at least seven ways that the conduct of the May 30 “firehouse primary” violated party procedures. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee contended that there was no evidence that the final results would have been different if those rule violations hadn’t happened — there were no allegations, for instance, that ineligible people voted or that votes were miscounted. However, implicit in the appeal was the notion that the committee may have scared some eligible voters away because they supported candidates the committee didn’t want.

The majority report from the appeals committee said “irregular provisional balloting procedures, voting via email, disenfranchisement of military members, intimidation of voters, improper submission of election forms, and a myriad of questionable actions from the Party that is supposed to defend election integrity is puzzling at best, conniving at worst.”

That report went on to say that the “many” violations of party rules “represent egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia. This canvass, and the actions of certain actors in the LRCC, have tainted the reputation of the local Party beyond repair, and for that, there must be consequences.”

In the end, this did not come down to the state party choosing one Republican faction over another (although some in Lynchburg may see it that way); the state party came down on the side of the rules.

Lynchburg council member Marty Misjuns, one of the three firehouse primary winners who now no longer have nominations under this decision, countered that the party’s governing body “has been captured by consultants.”

2. The state Republican party vote on Lynchburg wasn’t close

There were many surprises in the state party’s ruling, but perhaps the biggest was the lopsided nature of the vote. The vote was initially recorded as 54-18, but should have been 55-17 because one member, who was also casting a proxy vote for an absent member, misunderstood her instructions and voted the “wrong” way. Regardless, this was, in political terms, a landslide that says something about how Lynchburg Republicans are viewed by their fellow party members statewide — at least at the leadership level.

In an interview after the vote with Lynchburg independent journalist Andre Whitehead, Veronica Bratton (who has been chair of the city committee and was one of the winners in the firehouse primary) blamed the appeals on council member Stephanie Reed, who lost the May 30 vote. “Our committee members have been stabbed in the back today by the Republican Party of Virginia because Stephanie Reed came in sixth place,” Bratton said. People in Lynchburg can judge the local dynamics for themselves, but I doubt that many of the State Central Committee members have heard of any of the local candidates. What State Central Committee members said at the meeting (and what some have told me since) is that they are simply sticklers for the rules and saw a local unit that was making them up as it went along.

3. It’s unusual for the state party to disband a local unit, but it happened here

The state party didn’t just nullify the committee’s firehouse primary results, it disbanded the whole Lynchburg Republican City Committee and ruled that the current members (with one exception) are barred from serving for the current term. State party chair Jeff Ryer will now appoint replacements. That’s clearly a major rebuke.

It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for the state party to disband a local unit. The last time this happened was in Suffolk in 2023. As in Lynchburg, the issue in Suffolk had been clashes between two rival factions over nominating methods, although what pushed things over the edge was when the Suffolk Republicans passed a motion to censure then-Republican Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert for failing to allow certain gun legislation to come to a vote. Gilbert, who is set to become a judge in Shenandoah County in a few weeks, was hardly soft on Second Amendment issues, but knew that the bill in question would not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate and saw no point in holding what would have been a symbolic vote that might have put some Republican delegates in a tough spot at reelection time. Suffolk Republicans didn’t appreciate those political calculations and censured him; the state party disbanded them.

Now Lynchburg Republicans will get reconstituted under direction from the state party. (The the from the appeals committee was 3-2 to do this.)

4. The state party barred Jeff Helgeson from party membership through 2027

The appeals committee report singled out three Lynchburg Republicans for special mention — one good, two bad.

It formally commended Steven “Doc” Troxel “for his efforts to attempt a fair process” and makes him the one exception to Lynchburg Republican City Committee members who must go.

It faulted Bratton: “We would be remiss if we did not mention the brutal optics of a Chairman of the Lynchburg Republican City Committee who, based on testimony, appointed the overseers of an election that she planned on participating in as a candidate before renouncing her Chairmanship.”

However, the most drastic thing the state Republican Party did Saturday was to formally censure Helgeson, a former city council member, and bar him from party membership through 2027. Ryer said he couldn’t remember the party taking such action against any individual since 2016.

Helgeson’s offenses aren’t listed in the appeals committee report but he appears to be referenced indirectly as the party’s electoral board member who “stated on a local radio show [that] the names of Firehouse Primary voters/participants will be published in the local News & Advance.” The appeals committee ruled that “these comments by an Electoral Board Member were meant to intimidate voters and discourage participation in the Party Canvass. With these comments, this Electoral Board member was not acting ‘in good faith, with reasonable care, skill, and diligence,’” as the party rules require. The appeals committee unanimously recommended he be suspended and, by an overwhelming vote, the state party’s governing body agreed.

What makes this so important is that Helgeson is central to understanding the Republican infighting in Lynchburg. Maybe the split between Lynchburg Republicans would have happened anyway (there are factions everywhere in every party), but what precipitated was the council vote for mayor in January 2023. Republicans had just won a 5-2 majority on the council. Three Republicans (Misjuns, Helgeson and Larry Taylor) voted to make Helgeson, their longest-serving member, the mayor. The other two (Reed and Chris Faraldi) thought the pugnacious Helgeson was unsuited to be mayor and joined with two Democrats for a 4-3 vote that made Reed the mayor and Faraldi the vice mayor. All the disputes that have followed can be traced back to that vote. Now here’s the state party voting to make Helgeson ineligible for party service until 2030. He’s gone from being one vote away from mayor to a 55-17 vote by his own party to suspend him.

5. The Republican State Central Committee just gave Lynchburg Democrats an opening to win a council majority

The party voided the nominations from the firehouse primary and said “all interested candidates” could run as independents without violating party rules. Almost immediately, the Team Lynchburg slate of Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell said it would. Misjuns talked about going to court to uphold his nomination. Bratton, on Sunday, said it’s the Republican Party of Virginia that would need to go to court to remove the names of the firehouse primary winners from the ballot.

I’m not a lawyer but the law appears to be on the side of the Republican Party of Virginia. The Code of Virginia says: “Should the nominee of any party die, withdraw, or have his nomination set aside for any reason, the party may nominate to fill the vacancy in accordance with its own rules.” That “set aside for any reason” likely covers situations like this where the state Republican Party says the nominations from firehouse primary are void, but maybe now we’ll get a judge to tell us for sure.

In the meantime, Bratton says the original slate that included her, Misjuns and Trae Watkins will be collecting signatures to run as independents if the courts don’t go her way.

There were 10 candidates in that firehouse primary, but to simplify things let’s suppose the two rival slates run as independents in the fall — Bratton, Misjuns and Watkins on one side, with Boswell, Reed and Taylor on the other. If that were a straight-up election, we’d finally get a good idea of how Lynchburg voters stand on the differences between them. That’s not what we’ll have, though. There are three Democrats running: Christina Delzingaro, Dave Henderson and Nat Marshall. The danger for both Republican slates is that they split the vote enough that the Democrats win. In last year’s governor’s race, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won 49.4% of the vote in Lynchburg. In the 2024 presidential race, Democrat Kamala Harris took 45.0% of the vote in Lynchburg. Based on those numbers, it wouldn’t take much of a split to tip the balance to the three Democratic council candidates.

6. The Lynchburg Republican conflict has implications for the 5^th District congressional race

The 5^th District is a hard district for Democrats to win. Winsome Earle-Sears was the weakest Republican candidate for governor since 1965, yet she still won 53.7% of the vote in the 5^th District last year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Nonetheless, a Democratic win is not out of the question. Spanberger didn’t put much effort into Southside; the Democratic nominee in the 5^th — likely former Rep. Tom Perriello — will. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has already declared the 5^th a targeted district. As of the spring campaign finance reports, Perriello had more than twice as much money as the Republican incumbent, John McGuire. Both candidates have primary challengers in the Aug. 4 primary, although McGuire’s opponent, Melanie Lucero, appears stronger than the ones Perriello will face. Let’s skip ahead and assume that McGuire and Perriello are the nominees (a safe bet). If Perriello is going to stand a chance, he’ll have to carry Lynchburg. It’s the second most-populous locality in the district and one of the few places with any significant pocket of Democratic voters. How much, if any, will this turmoil among Lynchburg Republicans hamper McGuire and help Perriello? We don’t know, but it’s something to keep an eye on. McGuire will need a full effort from Lynchburg Republicans but may not be able to get it. If Perriello wins narrowly, you can bet that the Lynchburg situation will get cited as one factor.

(If some of these observations seem familiar, it’s because I wrote about Lynchburg’s role in the 5^th District two weeks ago in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Yes, that’s a self-serving pitch to sign up for that newsletter. See below.)

7. Republicans may have just avoided legal action by the attorney general

If there’s a silver lining for the now-defunct Lynchburg Republican City Committee, it’s this: Its quest to find a legal way to hold a firehouse primary may have just gotten a reprieve.

Virginia now operates under a law — known as Helmer’s Law, for its sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County — that all but requires parties to hold state-run primaries to pick their nominees for a general election. (It does exempt nominations for special elections, which is why there’s no controversy over the upcoming June 20 firehouse primary that Montgomery County Republicans are holding to nominate a sheriff’s candidate for a special election.) Lynchburg Republicans have tried to find the daylight in the “all but” provision of Helmer’s Law to hold a party-run nomination.

Last week, the attorney general’s office announced an “inquiry” into whether the Lynchburg Republican process complied with state law. Let’s just say that probably wasn’t a friendly inquiry. However, with the state Republicans now voiding the local results, that legal question is likely moot, which preserves the theoretical option of a firehouse primary for another day.

The irony is that none of the appeals that dissenting Lynchburg Republicans filed challenged the process itself, only the way it was run. Had Lynchburg Republicans run that firehouse primary in a different way — if they hadn’t gone on the radio to announce that voters would have their names listed in the local newspaper, for instance; if they hadn’t distributed literature that essentially disparaged certain candidates, if they hadn’t done many other things — the results might well have been the same and there would have been no appeals to get upheld. In that case, though, Jones might have been contemplating legal action. Now it’s Republicans who are.

We have more political news and analysis every Friday in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up for it or any of our other newsletters here:

The post 7 things to know about the Lynchburg Republican council nominations getting nullified (and how this matters statewide) appeared first on Cardinal News.

A dance troupe in full regalia waited backstage at the Grandin Theatre to put on a show last October. There was just one issue. Every member of the Dream Dance Studio troupe needed to use the restroom. 

Taking that break inside the venue would have required them to either walk through the waiting crowd or go outside and come back into the lobby. Either way, it might look like part of the show, and would definitely spoil their colorful costume surprise.

Ian Fortier, the venue’s executive director, helped lead the group out the back door in a light drizzle to the back of a neighboring restaurant. Business done, everyone headed back to the theater for a Hispanic Heritage Month folklore dance.

A large hole that a crew has now dug behind the 94-year-old building is the first step to fixing that issue and others for performers who play the multipurpose theater. A dressing room/restroom area with a washer and dryer, an ADA-compliant shower, an ADA-compliant lift that will accommodate equipment moves, an office for the general manager and a mop closet will fill the hole by about October, Fortier said.

“And it can be for anybody, from world-class traveling artists getting off [Interstate] 81 to perform at the Grandin to the theater company across the alley who has 30 dancers that need to use mirrors and need to use bathrooms,” Fortier said.

The space will connect to the venue’s former boiler room, underneath the stage. In 2025, the theater converted that basement into an artist green room, complete with the bar from its former neighbor, Local Roots restaurant. Workers added a storage shed at stage level last year, too, for items including speakers, cables, microphones, mic stands and podiums.

“These Depression-era movie houses were not built to have people or stuff backstage, you know,” Fortier said. “There’s eight feet behind the screen, and then it’s the back of the building. Converting it into a performing arts facility is a bit of a trick.”

It’s a $535,000 project, about 92% donor-raised, he said. The theater will chip in the rest. “Every capital project, we want to make sure the Grandin is invested in as well,” he said.

Meanwhile, the movie schedule will continue unhindered, and two concerts — The Darkside Experience on June 24 and Darrell Scott on July 9 — are still on. Crews will load equipment in from the front of the venue. Construction will rarely coincide with scheduled events, he said.

“Shows scheduled for the fall, we’ve kind of programmed a little bit locally and regionally in case there’s a timeline adjustment, to make sure that we’re working with artists who would understand and be a little bit flexible until full completion and certificate of occupancy,” he said.

The dressing room will be the latest upgrade connected to a 2020 plan, in which the Grandin began to raise what would be at least $400,000 to renovate the main theater. The governing foundation raised it all during the COVID-19 era, then added items including extensive new lighting, sound gear, acoustic paneling and a stage revamp.

Such upgrades stem from the foundation’s decision to diversify its offerings in an era that has seen ever-declining movie theater attendance, Fortier said. Diverse programming has led to more consistent crowds and more stable operations, he said.

In 2025, the theater sold 45,000 tickets and estimated that between 6,000 and 8,000 more came through for non-ticketed events, he said.

A performer’s perspective

Last Halloween, the green room had just opened, and reggae act The Ambassador was among the first to use it. Singer Melissa Mesko, who is part of the band, had played plenty of Grandin gigs pre-green room. She was glad about the new accommodation, she said in a Facebook message exchange.

“In the past, we would sit in the wings when we were off stage,” wrote Mesko, a singer and songwriter who leads her own band and sings backing vocals for groups including The Darkside Experience. “There was no real private area to change clothes, etc. The green room is pretty fantastic.”

Dressing room construction will have recently begun when she takes the stage with Darkside, a Pink Floyd tribute band. She looks forward to when it’s finished.

The green room is “a nice place to chill, but if you need to use the facilities, you have to go outside, next door, or go into the theater,” she wrote. “Bathrooms are essential. Especially at my age!”

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A federal lawsuit brought by a Roanoke County supervisor against three members of the county school board was dismissed by the court this week.

The suit, filed by Martha Hooker, accused school board members Tim Greenway and Brent Hudson, as well as former board member Cheryl Facciani, of pushing for her to be fired from her part-time job with the school division. 

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Roanoke in 2023 and was dismissed Tuesday at the request of both sides, according to court records.

Hooker began working part-time as a work-based learning coordinator for Roanoke County schools in 2021. She was fired in May 2023.

Hooker argued in the lawsuit that the three board members pushed to fire her in retaliation for the way she had voted as a county supervisor on funding several major school renovation and construction projects.

The school board did not vote on the status of Hooker’s employment, but Hooker, who still serves on the board of supervisors, claimed that after she was let go, her former supervisor and Superintendent Ken Nicely both indicated that the school board had wanted her fired.

In October 2024, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Dillon denied the school division’s request to dismiss the lawsuit and allowed the case to advance to discovery. In March of this year, she heard additional arguments on a second motion to dismiss the case.

Roanoke County Public Schools officials said in a statement released Thursday that the dismissal was initiated by Hooker, “who chose to withdraw and forever relinquish her claims against us rather than to continue pursuing them.” 

“This outcome is not surprising. From the time Ms. Hooker initiated her lawsuit against us in November 2023, we have consistently maintained that her claims were completely without merit,” the statement said. “We remain confident that had this matter proceeded to trial, each of the individuals named in Ms. Hooker’s lawsuit would have prevailed as a matter of law. Nonetheless, we consented to the dismissal in order to quickly obtain the same result we expected at trial: a clear, final resolution in our favor. Now that the matter has permanently concluded, all parties may move forward without any further distraction or uncertainty.”

Hooker could not be reached for comment. Her lawyer, Tommy Strelka, did not return a message left Friday.

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Danville remembers Bloody Monday, 63 years later

On June 10, 1963, civil rights protesters were met with violence by police officers and deputized municipal workers in an effort to tamp down local demonstrations. Now called Bloody Monday, it was the first clash of the summer, during which peaceful protests would continue to be met with violence. 

On that evening 63 years ago, protesters gathered for a prayer vigil outside the city jail to support those who had been arrested earlier that day, when the police turned nightsticks and fire hoses on them, washing them down the streets and under cars. 

At the end of the night, at least 47 people had been injured and 60 arrested, according to a historical marker that now stands outside the courthouse on Patton Street. Most were Black. 

For decades afterward, the summer of 1963’s brutal and pivotal struggle for civil rights in Danville went unacknowledged by the city, passed over by institutional historians and seldom discussed even by former protesters, who were mostly teenagers at the time. 

In 2007, a historical marker was erected in front of the courthouse by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. 

Last week, on the anniversary of Bloody Monday, local ministers and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Alliance, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s organization, remembered the event. 

They stood under the marker, just steps from city hall, where protesters called for local integration and fair hiring practices. 

The Rev. William Avon Keen, president of the Danville-Pittsylvania SCLC chapter, spoke about the movement and connected it to current events, encouraging Black citizens to vote and emphasizing the importance of educating younger generations about Danville’s civil rights history. 

“Students marched up those steps into the city council,” Keen said. “They used love, they used nonviolence. … We get to sit in a restaurant today and relax because of these unsung heroes.”

Keen encouraged locals to take their children to the marker and to visit the civil rights exhibit at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History to educate them about the Danville movement that was underreported for decades. 

Danville City Council to approve budget, changes in tax rates

At its regular 7 p.m. Tuesday meeting, the Danville City Council is expected to approve a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, as well as several changes to tax rates and local fees. 

The budget will include the following, if council votes to approve each of these items: an increase in data center-related taxes, a decrease in personal property taxes and an elimination of the city’s vehicle license fee. 

City Manager Ken Larking presented his proposed $395.2 million budget to the council in March. Council members and city staff made modifications to the proposed budget in April, and public hearings were held in May and June. 

An overview of the budget can be found in the council’s meeting agenda here. 

The increase in data center taxes, if approved, would raise rates from 25 cents to $1.20 per $100 of assessed value. 

The personal property tax would decrease in 2027 by 10 cents, from $3.45 to $3.35 per $100 of assessed value, if approved. 

And the $25 annual local vehicle license fee would be eliminated in 2027, if approved by council on Tuesday. This fee was introduced after the city did away with a requirement for vehicle decals — which indicated that a vehicle was registered within city limits — in 2006. 

Council is also expected to approve an updated capital and special projects plan for fiscal year 2027. This plan is meant to assist the city in planning and prioritizing special projects, including the acquisition, construction and improvement of public facilities and utility systems. 

City staff recommends that council approve all of the above items, according to the meeting’s agenda packet, which can be found here. 

County holds joint meeting and public hearing on comprehensive plan

The Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors and its planning commission will convene in a joint meeting Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. to discuss the ongoing comprehensive plan update. 

The plan was last overhauled in 2010, and though it’s been revisited every five years, as mandated by the state, it hasn’t had a major update since then. 

The county has seen a lot of change and growth in the past 16 years, and local officials are working with consultants to make sure that the plan reflects Pittsylvania’s future. 

A comprehensive plan lays out a locality’s vision for the next 20 years, encompassing all pieces of its operations, including infrastructure, parks and recreation, housing, transportation and economic development. 

Last week, the county held its second community feedback meeting to gather input from residents about what they’d like to see in the updated plan. The first outreach event was in April. 

The consultant for the update, Charlottesville-based civil engineering firm Line and Grade, is now in phase two of four phases of the process, said Kelly Smith, senior planner for Pittsylvania. The first phase focused on gathering data and survey responses from residents. 

There will be a presentation at the joint meeting to share resident survey responses and the next steps in the update process.

The post Danville Field Notes: Local ministers remember city’s civil rights movement on its 63rd anniversary appeared first on Cardinal News.

Welcome back to Extra Credit, a weekly roundup of education-related news from across Southwest and Southside Virginia.

Have a story idea, tip or think there’s something I missed? Email me at meghan@cardinalnews.org.

Thanks for reading!

Students learn to fly at Virginia Tech drone adventure camp

More than 40 middle school students will learn to fly drones at Virginia Tech’s Imagination Drone Camp this week.

The camp, now in its fifth year, gives students the opportunity to build and fly drones and even earn a Federal Aviation Administration Recreational UAS Safety Test, or TRUST, certificate.

Owen Puckett of Forest attended the inaugural camp in 2022.

“It was fun,” Owen said in a news release from Virginia Tech. “I wasn’t the best at flying it, but I felt a lot of joy when I made something from my own hands that I was able to use.” 

Now 16, Puckett is a backyard drone enthusiast and aspiring engineer who will begin attending Lynchburg Regional Governor’s STEM Academy this fall.

For many middle schoolers, the drone camp is their first experience on a university campus, eating at dining halls and sleeping in residence halls, in addition to getting experience with cutting-edge technology.

“I hope that the attendees this year make new friends at camp,” Owen said. “I hope that they can learn new things that they like and new things about themselves. I hope overall they have a really good experience.”

The camp is offered as part of the Virginia Tech Center for Engineering Excellence and Discovery’s Imagination series and the university’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership. It runs through Friday.

Education outcomes worsen for Virginia children

Last week, my colleague Emily Schabacker reported that Virginia ranks among the top 20 states across all major measures of child well-being according to an annual report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But while the state ranks high, education outcomes have worsened for Virginia kids.

Every year, the KIDS COUNT Data Book evaluates states on 16 indicators across four areas: economic well-being, education, health, and family and community factors.

While health outcomes, such as the number of children without insurance or children and teens who are overweight or obese, have remained stable or even improved for Virginia kids, education outcomes have not.

More than half (55%) of 3- and 4-year-olds in Virginia aren’t in school compared to 54% nationally, and 69% of Virginia fourth graders are not proficient in reading — one indicator of future educational success.

The majority of eighth graders (71%) are also not proficient in math, a jump of almost 10 points since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year marked the first time states received a composite score in addition to rankings. Virginia earned an overall score of 661 out of 1,000, well above the national score of 547. But from 2019 to 2024, Virginia’s education score fell by 170 points, a larger drop than national trends.

While worsening education outcomes are not new, especially since school was disrupted for students during the pandemic, some Virginia leaders say the state’s drop underscores the need for investment in education and children’s economic well-being. 

“We know children and families need a solid foundation: stable housing, fully funded schools, nutritious food, meaningful relationships and opportunities to learn, play and grow. Policies that meet these needs are smart investments, fostering long-term gains like employment and economic growth,” Rachael Deane, chief executive officer for Voices for Virginia’s Children, said in a statement.

Voices for Virginia’s Children is the state’s KIDS COUNT partner organization. The group plans to advocate for related policy initiatives during the 2027 General Assembly session.

“The release of index scores this year is game-changing, as it allows us to make a stronger case to policymakers that the time is now for additional investments in education and economic justice in Virginia. This could look like expanding the child tax credit and implementing a fair share tax, which would generate billions of dollars to invest in public schools and early childhood, without increasing the financial burden on working families,” Liz Nigro, director of research for Voices for Virginia’s Children, said in a statement.

Learn more about Virginia’s rankings in the 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book here. 

Lynchburg names new principals

Three Lynchburg public schools will start the 2026-27 school year with new principals.

The Lynchburg City School Board approved the hirings last week.

Laura Morrison-Hussein has been named principal of Perrymont Elementary and Jeremy Hutchinson has been named principal of Hutcherson Academy, which serves pre-K students.

Susan Badger will serve as interim principal of E.C. Glass High School. The division announced on June 10 that April Goff, who recently served as principal of Southern Wake Academy in North Carolina, had been hired to helm E.C. Glass, but a day later announced that she had withdrawn her name. Badger has worked at Glass since 2023 and previously worked in administration for Danville and Franklin County public schools. 

Morrison-Hussein joins Lynchburg after serving in senior leading roles with the Department of Defense Education Activity, which serves the children of military families across the world, including as a principal at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, according to a news release. 

Hutchinson joins the division from Amherst County Public Schools.

All three new principals will start on July 1. 

Emory & Henry launches new online MBA program

This fall, students who are interested in obtaining a Master of Business Administration degree but need some flexibility will have a new opportunity at Emory & Henry University.

The university is launching a fully online MBA program starting this fall. The accelerated program is designed for working professionals and can be completed in 12 months.

“While we have offered an MBA for the past four years, we’re thrilled to now offer our MBA entirely online,” Jo Lobertini, dean of online learning for the university, said in a statement. “The online MBA provides flexibility for working adults who can complete their degree from anywhere.” 

The new program comes as colleges and universities across Virginia and the country expand online and distance learning offerings, in part to meet students where they are, as the same schools see changes in enrollment trends.

Learn more about the online MBA program here.

Bluefield University to offer first doctoral degree programs

Bluefield University will soon offer its first doctoral degree programs — in education and business administration.

The 103-year-old university recently won approval from its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, to offer the programs in what school officials are calling “a historic move.”

“This approval represents a historic milestone in the life of Bluefield University,” President Steve Peterson said in a statement. “Achieving a higher level of accreditation and launching our first doctoral programs reflects the strength of our faculty, the dedication of our staff, and our unwavering commitment to academic excellence. The Doctor of Education and Doctor of Business Administration will expand opportunities for students while strengthening our ability to serve the workforce and communities of Appalachia and beyond.”

The university already offers more than 50 academic programs, including master’s degree programs in education, business administration, nursing and counseling.

Bluefield University serves more than 1,300 students and has seen an increase in enrollment in recent years, even as some small colleges and universities across the country are seeing declines. 

Peterson praised the university’s ongoing growth last year.

“We believe people can live, learn, and serve in Appalachia. Our programs are helping students stay close to home while preparing for impactful careers in the region and beyond,” he said in a news release at the time.

The post Extra Credit: Students learn to fly at Virginia Tech drone adventure camp appeared first on Cardinal News.

The Roanoke region in Virginia’s Blue Ridge is thriving, and the Mountain Valley Pipeline is playing a significant role in our success. 

Since entering service two years ago, the pipeline system has done precisely what it was designed to do: safely and efficiently provide necessary supplies of affordable, reliable, lower-carbon natural gas to meet public demand and support the region’s economic security and growth. 

Now, with the need for natural gas continuing to grow, Mountain Valley has proposed a plan to help meet this increasing demand. The MVP Boost project would maximize the existing MVP system by adding additional compression to deliver more natural gas for use in Virginia, North Carolina and the entire Mid-Atlantic region. 

As the leaders of the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Salem-Roanoke County Chamber of Commerce, and on behalf of the 1,000-plus businesses and organizations that we represent across this great region, we think it’s important to review the facts underlying our support of the existing MVP and for the proposed MVP Boost. 

Affordability

Natural gas is an energy source preferred by large industrial users, including our region’s largest employers, and for generating electricity. For good reasons: It is cheap, reliable and domestically sourced, and it is cleaner than alternatives like coal, fuel oil or diesel. 

The U.S. Department of Energy has long recognized natural gas as the most affordable residential energy source. Second place isn’t even close. 

Opportunity

Since MVP brought a new supply to the Roanoke Valley, we’ve witnessed new economic opportunities that carry benefits across the region. Roanoke Gas Co. has used two taps on MVP to continue adding customers, adding more than 1,200 new customers since the MVP was placed in service. 

Roanoke Gas Co. also is now providing service to Franklin County’s Summit View Business Park and is exploring expansion of service to Rocky Mount. 

Reliability

A joint report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation credited MVP’s operation for strengthening the winter resilience of U.S. energy systems. Many of our region’s largest employers, including manufacturers, municipal governments, healthcare systems and universities, need natural gas, and the MVP strengthens Roanoke Gas Co.’s ability to meet this demand. 

Pipeline infrastructure is critical for residential and business energy needs and for electricity generation, yet many people don’t even realize it exists in their community. Natural gas pipelines run safely under local highways and the Spring Hollow Reservoir, and through neighborhoods, shopping centers and recreational spaces such as the Christiansburg Huckleberry Trail. They’re widely recognized as the safest and most efficient way to transport the energy we need to sustain a high quality of life. It’s easy to take these systems for granted; we go past them every day, often without even noticing. 

Responsibility

A comprehensive, seven-year study of data collected by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and U.S. Geological Survey concluded MVP’s construction and now operation have had no long-term impacts on Virginia waterbodies. 

This truth proves that Mountain Valley builds critical energy infrastructure in an environmentally responsible manner. 

The proposed MVP Boost is further evidence of this point. The project includes building a new compressor station along the existing MVP in eastern Montgomery County. This above-ground station will be built on a small portion of rural acreage that Mountain Valley owns. 

The compressor station will need a Minor New Source Review air permit from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to operate. This permit is the most commonly issued air permit in Virginia. That’s because it is for facilities that meet clear environmental impact standards and have a relatively minor amount of emissions. Virginia has issued hundreds of such permits over the past five years. Typically, these draw little attention — again, because the facilities are minor sources of emissions and operate within parameters designed to protect public health. Mountain Valley has voluntarily agreed to adopt additional measures to reduce emissions even further below the thresholds required by regulators.  

Mountain Valley continues to be a good community partner in our area. For more than a decade, the company has been a reliable supporter of local charitable groups and business, education, public safety and conservation causes. Its energy infrastructure, including MVP Boost, will sustain local benefits here in Virginia’s Blue Ridge and broader region for decades to come. 

Eric Sichau is president and CEO of the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce. Amanda Livingston is president of the Salem-Roanoke County Chamber of Commerce.

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At Virginia Tech’s Reynolds Homestead in Patrick County, history is not confined to the 1843 brick house that still stands on the property once known as Rock Spring Plantation.

It’s also in the spring where generations drew water. In the cemetery where members of the enslaved community are buried. In the fields, forests and paths that still carry traces of many lives and many hands.

As Virginia and the nation prepare to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, communities across the commonwealth are looking again at the places where America’s story unfolded — including quieter landscapes where its promises and contradictions were lived across generations.

At the Reynolds Homestead, that history comes into focus each year when descendants return for Juneteenth.

The day is often described as a celebration of freedom. It is also something else — an invitation to remember, to listen and to ask whose stories have been preserved, whose have been overlooked and how communities move forward together with a more honest understanding of the past.

In 1970, the Reynolds family gifted the property to Virginia Tech. Today, the Reynolds Homestead serves as a forest research center, historic site and educational and cultural center.

For generations, like many historic sites, much of the story told publicly centered on the people whose names appeared most prominently in written records. At Rock Spring, that often meant the Reynolds family, including tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds, his siblings and their descendants. 

But a place is never shaped by one family alone. 

Over the past decade, tours have broadened to include more about the enslaved men, women and children whose labor shaped the land and its legacy. Now visitors hear stories about the R.J. Reynolds tobacco empire and Reynolds Wrap, but also the lives of people whose stories were long less visible in the public record — an enslaved woman whose descendants would help change civil rights history, enslaved men who served in the Civil War and families whose ties to the land continue across generations. 

Honoring that deeper complexity is one reason descendant involvement matters so much. Through the Rock Spring Descendants Committee, oral histories, genealogy work, community conversations and collaborative planning are helping recover a story of resilience and relationships that might otherwise have been lost.

That work includes partnering with students and faculty from Virginia Tech’s Community Design Assistance Center to develop an interpretive trail between the Reynolds family cemetery and the cemetery where members of the enslaved community are buried, creating a place for learning and reflection. 

A place to remember together

Each June 19, descendants return to the property not simply to reflect on the past, but to reconnect with one another and with a place deeply tied to their family histories. They tour the grounds their ancestors once walked. Some pause to drink from the spring that sustained generations before them. They visit the cemetery where enslaved community members are buried.

Among those historical reflections, there are also moments of joy.

Families share meals and stories. Children play on the grounds and make corn-husk dolls. Relatives shake hands with cousins they never knew they had. Histories once scattered across counties and states begin reconnecting through conversation.

The Declaration of Independence set forth ideals that the country has spent nearly 250 years struggling to fulfill. That struggle is not separate from the stories of places such as Rock Spring Plantation. It is written into them.

Sites such as the Reynolds Homestead remind us that America’s early story was not lived only in capitols, courthouses, battlefields and taverns. It was also lived on plantations, in fields, along springs and in burial grounds, where people denied the promises of the Declaration carried their own freedom stories forward. 

The partnership taking shape here reflects what that can look like in practice — an ongoing commitment to conversation, relationship-building and shared care for the historical record. It means making room for difficult histories while also recognizing resilience, achievement, connection and community.

At the Reynolds Homestead, that understanding continues to shape how history is being shared — not as a finished narrative belonging to the past, but as an ongoing conversation that invites more people to the table.

That invitation is open to the public. The Reynolds Homestead’s Juneteenth celebration is free and open to all, and visitors are welcome throughout the summer for tours of the historic home and walks through the grounds, interpretive signage and 1-mile LEAF Trail.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom stories are community stories. They are Virginia stories. And they grow stronger when more voices are included in telling it. 

Julie Walters Steele is director of the Reynolds Homestead, a Virginia Tech community engagement center in Patrick County dedicated to lifelong education, cultural experiences and historical preservation.

Kimble Reynolds is a Virginia Tech alumnus and community leader who traces his lineage to Anthony and Kitty Reynolds, two of the more than 100 people enslaved at the former Rock Spring Plantation.

The post Reynolds Homestead: Who gets to tell the story of a place? 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:

Justice Department sues Virginia over mask ban, limits to federal agents. — The Washington Post (paywall).

Virginia law enforcement fielding questions about incoming assault weapons ban. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

Lynchburg commonwealth’s attorney says she will not enforce new gun legislation. — WSET-TV.

Economy:

Dominion pilots use a menagerie of drones to service power plants, lines, solar farms. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

Sports:

World Cup excitement comes to Virginia. — WVTF/RadioIQ.

Weather:

Bedford County church seeks healing following Friday’s wind-related tent collapse, death. — The Roanoke Times (paywall).

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: Justice Department sues Virginia over mask ban, limits to federal agents; more … appeared first on Cardinal News.

Giles County registrar says new voting machines needed

Acting Giles County Registrar Amy Wheeler is requesting a voting machine replacement because of slower processing speeds.

She sent the county administration a letter in May, detailing that the county’s 13 machines are nearing the end of their lifespan since they were first purchased in 2016. 

“We have observed problematic delays and inefficiencies with the current machines, especially our Early Voting machine, which processed 3,100 ballots in the most recent election,” said Wheeler in the letter. “On election night, when our CAP (Central Absentee Precinct) team closed the polls to generate the results of that machine and print the reports, the machine started processing and ended up freezing. Typical closure has taken up to 20 minutes in the past, but due to freezing and calls to technical support for assistance, total poll closure took 1 hour and 15 minutes. I had to do a hard reset and then manually print the results/reports. This obviously delayed the entire process on election night.”

The estimated cost for the new DS300 machines from vendor Election System & Software (ES&S) is $95,615, according to the request. The county currently uses the DS200 ES&S machines.

“We’ve asked the registrar to get back to us regarding necessity and some alternatives we at least want them to explore,” County Administrator Chris McKlarney said Friday. 

That includes whether the county could purchase fewer than the 13 requested, if software and hardware improvements can be made to the current machines, and if state funding resources are available, he said.

The registrar’s office has requested that funds be made available after July 1, in preparation for the Aug. 4 primary and the November general election. 

“We do have a budget hearing that’s coming up in just a few days,” said McKlarney. “We can’t really increase what we’ve advertised at this point. But, they can adjust other things inside the budget and try to make it work.”

Firehouse primary to nominate a Republican for Montgomery County sheriff is Saturday

Speaking of voting, a special election to nominate the Republican candidate for Montgomery County sheriff is Saturday.

The Republican candidates are interim Sheriff Robert Page and former county sheriff’s office Lt. Tim Shepherd.

Registered voters can participate in the party-organized firehouse primary at the Montgomery County Government Center from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Any registered voter is eligible, but they may vote in only one party’s primary. Voters will be asked Saturday to sign a pledge supporting the eventual Republican nominee in the general election. A photo identification is also required.

Based on a new state law, a May 30 Lynchburg Republican firehouse primary for city council candidates was under review by the state attorney general, but the results were voided by the GOP State Central Committee Saturday. The law requires political parties using their own nomination contests to accommodate certain voters, including students, active-duty service members, people temporarily living outside the country, individuals with disabilities and those with contagious diseases that pose a public health threat. The review is tied to concerns that didn’t happen.

The Montgomery County firehouse primary should not face such scrutiny because it’s a special election given an exception under the new law, according to Republican Committee Chairman Nic Lauer.

The government center is located at 755 Roanoke St. in Christiansburg.

There are also three Democrats in the sheriff’s race: retired county sheriff’s office Capt. Ed Hertling, Christiansburg police Lt. Tim Brown and former county sheriff’s office Lt. Greg Warden. The Democratic nomination will be decided in an Aug. 4 county-wide primary.

The candidates are running to fill the remaining term of former Sheriff Hank Partin, a Republican who retired in March. The term runs through 2027.

Find more by reading the Cardinal News voter guide.

A mailbag item: Virginia Tech Board of Visitors disclosure breakdown 

Finally, this column item is dedicated to a question from a reader.

Steve from Blacksburg asked whether members of the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors must disclose their business interests and if they must recuse themselves from decisions that may result in self-dealing.

According to the Board of Visitors Code of Ethics, board members are subject to Virginia law and must abide by the State and Local Government Conflict of Interests Act. 

The law prohibits state and local officials from accepting compensation for services performed and using their office to advance their self-interests. 

Board members are required to file financial disclosure statements annually and submit them to the Ethics Council, according to university spokesman Mark Owczarski. These disclosures are made public and can be found here: ethicssearch.dls.virginia.gov.

Regarding a recusal, the code of ethics says that “individual BOV members have a duty to report their own potential or actual violations of the Code of Ethics,” but no language specifically suggests members are required to recuse themselves. 

“There are many potential circumstances a board member may recuse themselves in board activity,” said Owczarski, which are documented in full board and full committee minutes. 

It is not uncommon for a board member to oversee matters that relate to separate business ventures in which they are involved. 

Board member Jeanne Stosser, for example, is the chair of the building and grounds committee. She is also president of Campus Management Group, whose business portfolio includes 13 different housing properties — including numerous large-scale student housing developments — in the New River Valley. 

Most recently, her committee reviewed the capital project to increase campus housing by 1,200 beds, which was approved by the board on June 2. 

Stosser has disclosed her interests in her financial disclosure statement. She did not recuse herself before the capital project approval.

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The Lynchburg Republican City Committee is now defunct and the results of its May 30 “firehouse primary” are void, following a decision by the Republican State Central Committee on Saturday. 

The roughly 80-member group, made up of leaders of the Republican Party, ruled 55-17 to uphold three appeals protesting the primary and the recommendations of its appeals committee to throw out the results, which had nominated Veronica Bratton, Marty Misjuns and Larry Taylor. (The official vote Saturday was 54-18, but party leaders said one proxy vote was misvoted and the tally should have been 55-17.)

That party action means that Lynchburg Republicans now have no official nominees for the three city council seats available in November. Under the ruling adopted Saturday, “all interested candidates” are allowed to file as independents. Shortly after the meeting, the “Team Lynchburg” slate of Taylor, Chris Boswell and Stephanie Reed announced it will run together in November. In the now-nullified firehouse primary, only Taylor had won.

Reed, a sitting council member who lost that May 30 vote, said in a statement: “Today’s decision is about restoring confidence in a process that many Republicans believed was unfair from the very beginning. The overwhelming vote demonstrates that Republican leaders across Virginia recognized serious problems and concluded that change was necessary.”

In a contentious meeting of the state central committee Saturday in Stafford County, state party chair Jeff Ryer asked Misjuns to leave the room for being disruptive.

Some of the shouting after the party’s governing body voted to overturn the Lynchburg results. City council member Marty Misjuns (in the blue jacket) can be seen leaving toward the end of the video. Video by Lindley Estes.

Misjuns maintained that he, along with Taylor and Bratton, remains “the Republican candidate” and suggested that the Republican State Central Committee might need to go to court to to sue the Virginia Department of Elections in order to replace the “already-certified candidates.”

Ryer’s take on the outcome of Saturday’s vote was different. He said the Republican State Central Committee does not believe that legal action is necessary because the Department of Elections was informed of irregularities after the primary. 

“When we became aware that there’d be an appeal, the party nomination was in doubt,” he said. 

Saturday’s vote by the state Republican Party’s governing board was another step in a long-running clash between two rival factions of Lynchburg Republicans. The side most aligned with the Lynchburg Republican City Committee appeared to triumph when two of its three candidates, Misjuns and Bratton, won the May 30 firehouse primary where 1,600 voters visited the Brookville Ruritan Club for the party-run nomination process to whittle 10 candidates down to three nominees. Then other Lynchburg Republicans filed appeals to allege multiple violations of party rules.

The appeals committee ruled in a 3-2 vote to side with the appellants, and on Friday approved its list of recommendations to correct the “egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia,” as described in the majority opinion, provided to Cardinal News. (See the panel’s recommendation and the dissenting opinion below.)

The list of seven remedies includes an order to nullify the results of the nomination and allow all interested candidates to file as independents in the general election. The deadline to do so is June 16.

The appeal committee’s other recommendations, which were upheld Saturday, also ordered that the Lynchburg Republican City Committee be declared defunct and directs the state chairman to appoint replacements to the local party’s executive committee and to review the Lynchburg committee’s bylaws. They direct the current executive officers of the Lynchburg Republican City Committee to be banned from serving through the current term, with the exception of Steven “Doc” Troxel, who was commended for his attempts to conduct a fair process. They also direct former city council member Jeff Helgeson to be censured and barred from all party offices for the remainder of the current term (through 2027).  

The state party action “makes it crystal clear that the Republican Party of Virginia is in bed with the Democrats in Richmond … [And] the people of Lynchburg will not get to choose their leadership for the Lynchburg Republican Party until after the election,” Misjuns said in an interview Saturday.

“I’m not going to stop fighting for the Republican voters that nominated me, and I am still the Republican nominee,” he said. “It takes a judge to change that, and if they can convince a court that that it should be different, then that’s what it is.”

The one change made to the appeals committee’s recommendations by the full Republican State Central Committee concerns the timing of the Lynchburg Republican committee’s leadership and activities. The state committee will appoint a new leader to the group within 30 days, but the Lynchburg Republican committee cannot “reconstitute” until between Nov. 3 and Jan. 15 — following the upcoming election. 

Misjuns was present at Saturday’s meeting and was censured for disruption after Del. Wendell Walker, R-Lynchburg, claimed Misjuns’ “side conversations and threats” made it impossible to conduct business.  

After the central committee’s vote carried, Misjuns boisterously asked the room, “Will Wendell Walker rip up the abortion resolution like he did the Lynchburg resolution? Will Wendell Walker rip up the pro-life resolution?” Ryer then asked Misjuns to leave the room.

He was not the only person who interrupted the proceedings. The Lynchburg Republican City Committee bused roughly 40 members to the Stafford County meeting location, and for most of the meeting they stood silent along the walls of the conference room holding posters that read “Voters Not Insiders,” “Say No! To Sore Losers,” and “Our Vote. Our Choice. Our City,” among other statements. 

But as they left the room following the vote, members hurled accusations at Walker and called the actions “illegal” and “undemocratic.”

Barbara Teveleev was among those carrying posters and urging state central committee members as they entered the meeting to “count our votes.”

With her was Andrea Yesalis, who said she was a poll worker at the May 30 firehouse primary. 

“We all worked so hard on that election,” she said. “I didn’t hear any complaints.”

However, Ryer said: “You heard a lot today about defuncting a committee or disbanding a committee. What that means in the terms of the party plan is it has been the determination of the state central committee that the Lynchburg Republican City Committee currently is not functioning,” he said. “Election integrity isn’t just for general elections.”

The state committee was swayed in large part, he said, by activities of the Lynchburg Republican committee to distribute flyers on three separate occasions endorsing or un-endorsing a candidate against party rules. 

The “firehouse primary” nomination method was the only process of its kind held in Virginia this year, and the first to be executed since a new state law that favors, but doesn’t explicitly require, state-run primaries was enacted. Lynchburg is the only place in Virginia that used this process for its nominations.  

Known as Helmer’s Law, the legislation took effect in 2024 and requires nomination methods to make provisions for absentee voters. It left little room for party-run nominations to operate, as absentee voting is an element that they have never included or aren’t logistically able to. In mid-March, Attorney General Jay Jones was asked to weigh in on the legality of Lynchburg’s nomination process in light of the new law. 

Jones’ office has not yet issued an opinion, but on Monday it sent the Lynchburg Republican City Committee a letter saying it has “opened an inquiry into the conduct of the recent firehouse primary election.” 

To assess the party’s compliance with Helmer’s Law, the attorney general’s office is requesting that the party submit 10 documents regarding the firehouse primary by June 29. 

Ryer said the firehouse primary process can yield good results in specific cases, citing the example of Virginia Beach using it to replace a deceased candidate when no other canvass opportunity existed. Ryer said that process was never appealed despite its quick turnaround and party-run nature because of the integrity shown by that local group.  

“I wish Lynchburg had lived up to that standard,” he said. 

He also questioned whether the inquiry with the attorney general’s office would need to continue, considering that the results have been voided. 

Walker also spoke following the meeting and said, “I think the first thing that we’ve got to do is just give some time to heal,” he said. “This is what happens when you get your priorities mixed up. Politics has become the god of the Lynchburg LRCC. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

He said if the Lynchburg Republican City Committee and Misjuns want to “pursue the radical method of going through the court, I think all they’re doing is just digging a deeper hole for themselves.”

“All I can say is, Marty, I apologize for not praying enough for you, because your attitude is what is destroying your individual life, your political life,” Walker said. “If you want to go out and attack people, and he has certainly has a record for that, you know, I’m not interested. I want to be a peacemaker. I want to bring healing back to our party.”

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