Editorial-Opinion
Rural America is vanishing. This tiny county is fighting back.
By Dana Milbank
10 July 2024
Washington Post.com
Copyright 2024, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
CULPEPER, Va. — Culpeper National Cemetery, on the edge of this rural town’s historic center, has for more than 150 years been the final resting place for about 1,300 Union soldiers killed in the Civil War. Stone monuments honor regiments from Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania that fought the battles of Cedar Mountain, Brandy Station and others nearby.
But these hallowed grounds are about to become a monument to something else: the destruction of the American countryside.
Look east from the cemetery, to an adjacent field where cattle graze, birds sing and a brook babbles: This will become a 116-acre data center housing 2.2 million square feet of massive structures with concrete walls up to 70 feet high. Look to the south from the cemetery at another green field: Here will rise the electrical substation powering the 600-megawatt monster.
This soon-to-be eyesore, in turn, borders the approved sites for two more data centers of 2.1 million square feet apiece, one of which adjoins the site for a 2.4 million-foot center, which abuts the Keyser family’s farm. Last week, the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors voted to turn that farm’s pasture land into yet another data center of 1.5 million square feet, over passionate objections from residents who complained about wells running dry, noise, traffic, insufficient electricity and the loss of Culpeper’s vistas.
“These data centers will definitely destroy the county,” pleaded resident Don Haight.
But Supervisor Gary Deal lectured constituents that they “have to understand that we have to plan for the future.” That future, he said, involves millions of dollars in tax revenue from data centers. “We have a low tax rate right now,” Deal acknowledged, but he thinks Culpeper can “even do better.”
The lure of easy dollars explains why, on a former horse farm seven miles outside of town, a massive crane is erecting the walls for still another data center. And in August, county supervisors will vote on a gargantuan, 4.6 million-square-foot data center six miles out of town in Brandy Station, spoiling the nearby Culpeper Battlefields State Park.
Sarah Parmelee of the Piedmont Environmental Council calculates that Culpeper has approved 12 million square feet of data centers, or the equivalent of 66 Walmart Supercenters. (The one in Brandy Station would add another 25 Supercenters.) When completed, the sites already approved will suck up 2.5 gigawatts of power — more than 10 times the entire county‘s current electricity usage of 240 megawatts — and put an incalculable strain on the area’s water supply to cool the plants. Powering them would require some 25,000 acres of solar fields, and the construction of miles of high-voltage transmission lines across the countryside.
This anything-goes approach to development isn’t limited to data centers. At the northern end of the county, a developer is deforesting upward of 500 acres in an area known as Clevenger’s Corner. The cookie-cutter development of more than 700 single-family homes and townhouses is miles from any town; the only nearby amenity to speak of is an Exxon station. But residents have already begun moving into this “beautifully designed masterplan community,” where you can buy a nearly 4,900-square-foot home with golf-course views and a three-car garage for “mid $800K.”
Given such frenetic development, the rural county‘s population has exploded, rising more than 50 percent from 2000 to 2020. New arrivals need schools and roads and fire departments, and so Culpeper hungers after additional tax revenue — but never seems to seek them from the residents themselves. Data centers could provide more than $100 million a year in taxes, equivalent to a third of the county‘s current budget. Culpeper’s economic development director, Bryan Rothamel, tells me that “overall, we like the picturesqueness of Culpeper.” But he says Culpeper needs to “evolve to what is needed in the 21st century,” which means still more development. “We’re going to see a lot of construction” related to the data centers, he says. “We’re going to see a lot of small businesses that are created in support of that — places to eat, places to shop.”
It’s the latest chapter in the story of how the internet ate Northern Virginia. The insatiable need for computing infrastructure, first for the cloud and now for artificial intelligence, has already consumed suburban counties such as Loudoun and Prince William in Northern Virginia. Now it is threatening to devour rural counties such as Culpeper. Back in 1749, a 17-year-old George Washington served as surveyor for what was then the frontier county of Culpeper. Now, after nearly three centuries as a rural community, Culpeper is on the frontier of rural destruction.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Culpeper’s neighbor, Rappahannock County, has gone in the opposite direction. Its board of supervisors has for years rejected almost all development, and its population hasn’t grown at all. With 7,348 residents in the 2020 census, Rappahannock has roughly the same population it had in 2000 — and in 1920, for that matter. Rappahannock fends off development with its 25-acre minimum zoning requirement, and resists construction of cellular towers to protect its “view shed,” content to leave most of the county in a dead zone. “I don’t even want to talk about growth. It’s not a word that should be in our active vocabulary,” Keir Whitson, vice chairman of the board of supervisors, tells me.
Whitson even torpedoed a local philanthropist’s plan to build three dozen affordable housing units in the town of Washington, Va., the county seat. He forced the already modest development to reduce its size to 18 apartments and townhouses, all but two offered below market rate. It was a tough decision to reject what was, for the county, a gift of free affordable housing. It followed an easier decision to reject a 53-unit rental property on the approach to Shenandoah National Park.
I think Whitson went too far in rejecting the affordable housing gift, but I respect his reason. “I was speaking on behalf of my 1,500 constituents who, generally speaking, don’t really see the need for upending the way Rappahannock County looks and feels,” he says. “And of those 1,500 constituents, at least half of them, if not more, are people whose families have been here for multiple generations. They carry a lot of weight with me when they say, ‘Hey, we don’t need this, and we don’t want change.'”
Anti-development thinking comes at a cost, driving up property prices and leaving Rappahannock County with a shortage of affordable housing and a shoestring county budget that funds only bare-bones services. But that’s a trade-off Rappahannock is willing to make. While Culpeper and other nearby counties surrender to development, tiny Rappahannock has built a firewall to preserve its rural way of life.
“We’re not chasing additional revenues,” Whitson says flatly. “Nobody wants housing developments.” And data centers? Fuhgeddaboudit. “We don’t want Rappahannock to be Anywhere USA, and we do not need to give up its unique rural character.”
Similar tensions between development and rural character are playing out across the country. The American Farmland Trust reports that the United States lost more than 11 million acres of farmland and ranchland between 2001 to 2016 to urbanization, low-density residences and other development. An apparent trend toward dense urban living lit hopes in the world of land-use planners, but those hopes are guttering out. The growing popularity of urban living has been offset by the rise of remote work. “Even though we were on a good trajectory for a while to have less cookie-cutter development and less suburban sprawl, I think we’re back in a place where it is almost as worrisome as it might have been 15 or 20 years ago,” says John Piotti, president of the trust.
Industrial development and Amazon-style warehouses jeopardize rural life on the edges of America‘s metropolitan areas. Solar fields to help power these energy gluttons are expected to gobble up 10 million acres of rural land over the next 10 years. What might be lost? “Some of the absolute best farmland we have,” Piotti says, “is also the land that’s most threatened.” The county seats of Culpeper and Rappahannock are both about 90 minutes from downtown Washington.
Northern Virginia — by far the nation’s largest data center market — had 51 million square feet of data centers at the end of 2023, the real estate giant JLL reported, with another 58.6 million planned. Some 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic reportedly goes through six square miles in Ashburn, Va., called “Data Center Alley.” Prince William County last year approved what would be the world’s largest data center, at 23 million square feet — and data center mania has pushed further out, to Fauquier, Caroline, Louisa, Spotsylvania, Orange and Henrico counties, in addition to Culpeper. Orange has approved data centers as part of a 2,600-acre mixed-use development called Wilderness Crossing — prompting the National Trust for Historic Preservation to put the nearby Civil War Battle of the Wilderness area on its list of “America‘s 11 Most Endangered Historic places.” Even deeply rural Madison County, Rappahannock’s neighbor to the south, is considering data centers.
As The Post has reported, Northern Virginia will need the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the planned data capacity. The federal government is considering chewing up more rural land by clearing a massive transmission line to bring power to the area, possibly from coal-fired plants in West Virginia. In Loudoun, a county supervisor recently wrote a white paper suggesting that power for data centers could be provided by on-site nuclear reactors. But as the development and the damage has spread, so has the resistance. In March, Loudoun supervisors rejected a data center application after dozens of residents spoke out against it.
Here in Culpeper, residents overwhelmingly opposed the latest data center at last week’s county supervisors meeting. “We run the risk of losing what Culpeper is,” pleaded resident Bob Sachs. A couple of residents suggested the industry was bribing county supervisors.
The only resident speaking in favor of the project was the guy who was selling his farm to the developers. “When it comes down to it, it’s dirt,” he said. “It’s my right and my family’s right to do whatever they feel with their dirt.”
The supervisors went ahead with the plan, in a 4-3 vote. But there are signs that sentiment is turning. “I think we’re kind of nearing our fill,” Rothamel says, promising that future development projects will be smaller. There are also signs that Culpeper has pulled back from the sort of housing policies that allowed ecological monstrosities of the sort occurring at Clevenger’s Corner (which was approved years ago).
Yet the county has already committed itself to a level of development that will transform its rural character. Only half a million of the approved 11.7 million square feet of data centers are operational. The county has no plan for the tenfold increase in power consumption this involves, nor for the corresponding increases in water usage and electrical transmission. “Who’s driving this bus?” asks the Piedmont Environmental Council’s Parmelee. “It’s this absolute lack of planning.”
Rappahannock has a plan: no development.
“There’s a group in the county we refer to as the no’s; they just say no to everything,” says Chuck Akre, a wealthy investor who lives in the county. “They have prevailed.”
Akre is the philanthropist who attempted to build the affordable housing development that got halved by the county supervisors. “Looking a gift horse in the mouth” is how Akre’s adviser Betsy Dietel puts it.
The scaled-back project, called Rush River Commons, is under construction now. One building, just opened, houses the Rappahannock Food Pantry in a sprawling 4,500-square-foot spread. Another, wrapped in Tyvek now and opening in November, will be home to the county‘s social services department, along with a nonprofit serving seniors and a cafe. The housing units, offered on a sliding scale to those earning well below the area’s median income, open in February. The whole thing occupies an unused area of the village just two-tenths of a mile from the county‘s renowned upscale amenity, the Inn at Little Washington. It’s exactly the sort of “smart growth” development that planners most admire, adding needed housing and services while protecting rural areas.
It could have made a bigger dent in the county‘s affordable housing shortage. The intergovernmental Rappahannock-Rapidan Regional Commission, which covers Rappahannock, Culpeper and three adjacent counties, reported in 2020 that the region needed an additional 4,600 homes, equivalent to a 7 percent increase in the housing stock, to meet existing needs. Adequate housing is a problem throughout the region, but home prices were significantly higher, relative to median income, in Rappahannock than in Culpeper.
Some worry that the county‘s hostility to development will backfire. There’s a fear that a wily builder could successfully challenge Rappahannock County‘s 25-acre zoning in court and then force large-scale development on the county. Even John McCarthy, who was county administrator when the 25-acre zoning went into effect, admits it “doesn’t pass the sniff test on economic equity.”
But Whitson, the county supervisor who forced Akre to scale back his development, believes Rappahannock can solve its housing problem while holding development at bay. The supervisors have tried to free up more rental housing by blocking residents from offering their properties for short-term rentals such as Airbnb. Whitson is looking at ways to subsidize property owners to rehab unused tenant houses on their farms to use as rental homes.
Whitson looks with sadness at what is happening across the county line. “Culpeper is going the way of a lot of counties: People are moving there and they’re having to chase additional revenues,” he says. “It’s just this Loudoun County-type cycle.”
From all that I’ve seen, most Rappahannock residents agree. They’re content to live in a place with few amenities, few services and few jobs if it means preserving their unhurried rural life, their tightknit community, their panoramic views and their abundant wildlife. Life here is pretty much as it always was. No traffic lights. More cattle than people. Everybody knows everybody. And the closest thing to a “data center” is the cluttered office of the Rappahannock Historical Society.
“People say to me, pretty consistently, ‘Come on, buddy, get over it. You know Rappahannock County‘s got to change,'” Whitson says. “I’m like, ‘No, it doesn’t.’ I understand change is inevitable, but in Rappahannock County, change can be tiny, tiny change.”
To save our countryside, we’re going to need a lot more such leaders with the courage to think small.