Life is finally quiet for Mike Ferrette and Mary Knapp. They spend their evenings sitting together on either the front or back porch of their Pittsylvania County home. When it gets dark, they turn out all the lights and look at the stars. When the sun rises again, Knapp likes to watch it, listening to the birds wake up. Not only the wild birds — Carolina wrens, blue jays, cardinals and woodpeckers — but also the chickens in their coops in the backyard. Between March and December, she’ll tend to her organic garden where she grows “a little bit of everything” or pick the fruit from her apple and cherry trees. During the three-month reprieve from gardening, she’ll stay inside and bake. Biscottis, recently. Ferrette and Knapp are unlikely Pittsylvania County residents. They moved from Fairfax County in 2021, after spending much of their lives there. Though they had never lived in a rural area before, the couple had grown tired of the hustle and bustle, the traffic and the noise of Fairfax County. “I watched it turn into something I don’t care to participate in anymore,” Ferrette said. “Too many people, too little space.” Now, they live on about 54 acres, enough space for their families to gather. Ferette and Knapp have 11 — soon to be 12 — grandchildren between them, and they love hosting. Childhood friends, the couple grew up on the same street in Fairfax. They reunited and began dating decades later, after respective marriages, kids and divorces. They both lost parents over the last decade, so there was little keeping them in Fairfax — especially as development and industry expanded. “I would drive past data centers up there, and I would think, ‘My God, how can anybody live next to this?’” Ferrette said. He may soon find out. The county board of supervisors is considering a rezoning application for about 740 acres, where Herndon-based company Balico wants to place a 12-building data center campus with onsite power. The project would be about a quarter-mile from Ferrette’s back porch. “I feel like I brought this down here with me like gum on my shoe,” he said. “This is exactly what we were trying to get away from.” Most nearby county residents feel the same way as Ferrette and Knapp, even if they haven’t recently relocated. “We have a very good melting pot of legacy families or multigeneration, and new birds, the folks who are coming in because they want to retire in a rural area,” said Amanda Wydner, one of the residents spearheading the local opposition to the data center project. Whether lifelong residents or new to the area, almost everyone in the four communities bordering the potential project feels the same way, Wydner said. It’s more than just NIMBY, she said. Residents have legitimate environmental, aesthetic and economic concerns, as well as a general distrust in the project developer and a fear that the cultural fabric of Pittsylvania County will be altered by a large data center campus. “I feel like this is my Yellowstone,” Ferrette said. “This is what I’m fighting for.”
The draw of Pittsylvania County
Wydner grew up on a tobacco farm in Pittsylvania, moving away from the area to attend college at Virginia Tech and jumpstart her career. She married her husband, Fred, in 1999, and they decided to move back to her family farm, which now raises cattle and show pigs and goats instead of growing tobacco. “It was always my intention to return here,” she said. “We wanted to have kids and raise them on our family farm, and we navigated our career paths to get back here. My parents worked very hard to put this together, an area to which we could return.” There’s a draw to the area, residents say, a reason people love to live there. Ferrette and Knapp were drawn to the beauty of the region, but what really blew them away was the people. In Pittsylvania, they’ve found a sense of community that they didn’t have in Northern Virginia, they said. Knapp and Ferrette got to know their neighbors quickly when they had a kitchen fire just a few weeks after moving to the area. The community was immediately supportive, gathering in the driveway to make sure everything was okay while firefighters pumped water on the house. “Word had spread within a week or so that we were the new people who had had the fire,” Ferrette said. After that, people recognized and remembered them, he said. “People are different down here. They look you in the eye when they’re talking to you and give you a sincere handshake,” Knapp said. “You can have wonderful conversations in the grocery store. Everyone’s very pleasant and people actually care.” Many of them have known each other so long, they can’t remember how they met. Wydner has been working with Kathy Stump, another resident, to rally grassroots opposition against the Balico project. They’ve gotten much closer over the past few months, but they’ve known each other for years. “My daddy was a schoolteacher for 39 years, and he started at Chatham High School teaching agriculture,” Wydner said. “Kathy’s late husband, Tommy, was one of his very first students. “I don’t even know if you knew that,” she said to Stump, looking over from across the cab of Tommy’s gray pickup truck. On that March morning, the two women were driving a loop around the parcels under consideration for the Balico project and meeting with the adjacent residents. “Are we kin?” Stump joked, earning a laugh from Wydner, who replied, “We probably are. Everybody else is.” This tight-knit — but diverse — community is one reason the opposition to the data center project has been so strong, Wydner said. “We cannot be boxed into a category,” she said. “We have Black and white, male and female, young and old, financially blessed and paycheck-to-paycheck, formally educated and not formally educated. This blend of people, we’ve basically refined ourselves to upholding the golden rule of respect for each other and trying to protect each other, and that’s what’s driven this movement.” The draw of Pittsylvania County doesn’t just attract newcomers like Knapp and Ferrette or returners like Wydner. It also makes folks want to stay. Many Pittsylvania residents have called the county home for their entire lives. Wayne and Libby Brown have lived on their 60-acre farm for almost as many years. And Dave and Amy Davis bought the 270-acre farm that Amy grew up on after her parents died. Though the data center campus might land right across their backyards, both couples say the same thing. “It’s home to us,” Amy Davis said. “There’s no place we want to be but here.”
The county’s cultural identity: What fits? What doesn’t?
Pittsylvania’s economy has historically been rooted in agriculture — primarily tobacco farming. Though that industry has declined and the region is rebranding itself as a manufacturing hub, there are certain industries that fit in with the existing culture, Wydner said. Data centers, as part of the tech industry, do not fit, she said. “Those who say we need to have a tech-driven job market in Southern Virginia, that is absolutely not the case … That’s not what our people are looking for,” Wydner said. “We need to have a manufacturing, hands-on, skillset-driven job market because that is our culture.” Companies like Tyson Foods and Microporous are recent additions to the county that fit with Pittsylvania’s identity, she said. “It’s manufacturing-based. People go in, they work a job and they go home with good pay. That fits our culture,” Wydner said. “But to say that Pittsylvania County is going to evolve into a tech-based employment scene, I think that’s a real far stretch.” A data center campus would also cause more tangible changes to the county, audibly and visibly altering the quiet, rural landscape of the area. “Usually, I’m the only thing out here making noise,” Ferrette said. “Well, and the chickens and cows.” Knapp and Ferrette’s home at night is “the closest thing to a planetarium that you can get,” he said. They believe that light pollution from a data center project would change that, interfering with the ability to enjoy sunsets and starry nights. That may not seem like a big deal to some people, but it’s part of why county residents live where they do, Wydner said. Wydner has heard residents debate about whether they’d relocate if the project goes through, she said. “It could change our life completely. I think we’d have to move,” said Libby Brown to her husband, Wayne, sitting on their sunporch. Wayne disagreed. The couple is in their 80s, and there’s nowhere else they want to live, he said. Linda Owen, a widow in her 80s living on property bordering the project, said she couldn’t afford to relocate. She’s another returner, leaving her native Pittsylvania to live in the Lynchburg area for about 30 years before moving back home. “I would not be able to move,” she said. “I’m not against progress, but a project of this magnitude needs to be in an industrial park somewhere.” Residents are also critical of Balico’s track record and its approach to the project in Pittsylvania. The company has never developed a data center before, though it
tried to build a power plant in Charles City County before opposition from environmentalists and rejected permits prevented it. Balico said in a statement that the data center campus could be a transformational opportunity for the county. The company “is committed to being a strong partner to Pittsylvania County, both by investing in the utilities and public safety infrastructure necessary to support this proposal and by helping the region to attract skilled, high-paying jobs at data centers that will train and retain local talent,” according to a Dec. 12 statement. Wydner sees it differently. “They call it a campus, I call it a destructive land grab,” she said. Residents also said that Balico has not done enough to communicate with them. The company held two community meetings in the fall, but there was no advance notice of the project to neighbors before the rezoning application was submitted, Wydner said. “They sent the letters the same time the rezoning request came out,” Wydner said. “There wasn’t any community outreach.” Dave Davis, who lives on farmland adjacent to the data center parcel, said that Balico wanted to buy his land for the project. But he was approached by a neighbor who had already agreed to sell, rather than anyone from the company, he said. “I never saw anyone from Balico until the first community meeting,” Davis said.
‘A poison to your community’
The project — even just its proposal — has already changed relationships between residents. The landowners who have agreed to sell to Balico have faced some animosity from other residents. And those who wouldn’t sell feel like they’ve been betrayed by old friends, Stump said. “It’s really hard because you feel like people that you thought a lot of are stabbing you in the back,” she said. Balico’s rezoning application is a scaled-down version of its initial proposal, which included 84 data center buildings and a 3,500 megawatt power plant spanning 2,200 acres. Steven Gould, local attorney for Balico, said at a January planning commission meeting that the company hopes to expand the project to that size in the future, should the first rezoning application be approved. That means the company would need to purchase even more land from residents. “It puts a stranglehold on us, because we don’t want to live near it and we don’t want to sell our land,” Wydner said. “But if you do leave, nobody wants to buy it for farming or living, so it puts a stranglehold to do what? To sell to the developer.” This same story is playing out in Prince William County, where data centers are far more common and new projects are being introduced constantly. There, the data center industry has “turned communities against each other,” said Elena Schlossberg with the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, a grassroots organization that opposes the spread of the industry. “We are experiencing a time where you don’t know if you can trust your neighbor. Are they going to sell out?” Schlossberg said. “It’s a poison to your community.” Still, selling to a data center developer can be a hard thing to say no to, because the industry usually offers much more money for land than another buyer. Dave and Amy Davis were offered “a very, very nice amount” for their 270-acre farm, they said. After saying no, this amount increased. The couple had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to hear the offer, so they couldn’t share the exact price. According to sales agreements obtained by Cardinal News, Balico offered land sellers upfront deposits in addition to a price per acre. Under the contract terms, sellers would receive a $30,000 deposit at the end of a feasibility period, during which the company would determine if the land is suitable for the project. Balico would pay the seller another $50,000 every six months should the feasibility period need to be extended. “Amy and I talked about it and we decided we didn’t want to do it,” Dave Davis said. “At our age, to sell this and pick up and go somewhere else. … There’s nowhere else.” Amy Davis’ parents bought the land in 1963, and she and Dave bought it in 1992. They raised their children there, and now one of their sons lives across the street. “It’s home. And money doesn’t buy everything,” Amy Davis said. “Sure, it’s nice to have. I’d love to see the county have enough revenue coming in that we can have all new fire stations and safety equipment and new schools. But there are other projects that will come our way that won’t devastate these rural communities.”
The fight before the final vote
Residents are putting everything they can into the effort before Tuesday, when the county board will take a final vote on the rezoning application. Banners line the backroads of the county along the proposed project’s borders. Signs, one after another, dot front yards. Residents wear T-shirts and buttons to every public meeting they can. The stakes feel sky high, and residents are thinking of little else in the days before the board’s decision. The vote was originally scheduled for February but has been postponed twice at Balico’s request. “I’m hopeful that they’re looking at the future and not just the money,” Knapp said. “This would irrevocably change the area. And once you change an area, there’s no going back.” The fight has been a main priority for Wydner for months. It’s important to her, but it’s not what she’d prefer to be doing. This has taken time away from her kids, her farm and the house she and her husband are renovating, she said. “How do you feel comfortable investing in and renovating a historic home if you think that you’re going to pull out of your driveway to 517 acres of data centers?” she said. “It literally puts a pause on your life and some of the goals that you have for your family.” Wydner, Stump, Knapp, Ferrette, Owen, the Davises and the Browns are all planning to attend the board meeting, and many of them are signed up to speak alongside their neighbors. Ferrette said he plans to speak about what drove him to leave Northern Virginia for Pittsylvania County. “That’s the angle I’m going to come from,” he said. “I’ve seen how this plays out, and it’s not going to be good.”
