On Thursday, President Trump stood at Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters and announced that the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, his administration’s promise that the AI boom won’t show up on your electric bill, now covers roughly 80% of all power delivered to American homes and businesses. Utilities signed. Data center developers signed. Twenty three governors signed something adjacent to it.

Here’s what none of them signed, anything enforceable.

The pledge is voluntary. There’s no rulemaking behind it, no penalty for breaking it, no auditor checking compliance, and nothing for you to do anything about it when your bill goes up. Your electric rates are set by state utility commissions in debated legal proceedings. Nowhere is that clearer than Virginia, where the pledge’s newest and most famous signatures, Dominion Energy’s and Google.

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What actually happened Thursday

Per the EPA’s release, the pledge expanded from its original seven signatories, who signed at the White House on March 4. Now there is 187 new organizations: 55 utilities, 105 electric power companies, and 27 data center companies.

The White House says the expanded coalition covers 263 million Americans, about 75% of the country. This list includes nearly every utility name you’d recognize: Duke Energy, Southern Company, American Electric Power, NextEra, Entergy, Exelon, and Dominion. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the federally owned utility serving seven states, signed too.

POWER Magazine went through the White House’s list and found duplicate entries of 4 companies.

The pledge

Data centers and their power suppliers will build or buy new power supply instead of draining what already exists. They’ll pay for the grid upgrades their facilities require, including network upgrade costs. They’ll pay negotiated rates for power brought online for them whether or not they use it. They’ll hire locally. And they’ll coordinate with grid operators, making backup generation available when the grid is strained.

Reasonable list. If it were binding, it would be genuinely good policy.

The “national policy of the United States” currently rests on the honor system.

The White House’s pledge page frames the expansion as a response to skeptics, it names The Wall Street Journal, who pointed out the obvious, power prices are set by state regulators, buyers, and sellers, so a pledge signed by AI companies alone couldn’t bind anyone.

That’s an answer about who signed. It is not an answer about what happens when a signatory doesn’t comply. Nothing happens. That’s the answer.

The governors signed something even softer

The 23 governors, all Republicans, didn’t sign the pledge itself. They signed an addendum committing, as POWER Magazine quotes it, to “implement the principles established in the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, to the greatest extent possible in our respective positions.”

Read that twice. “To the greatest extent possible in our respective positions” is the kind of language a lawyer writes when the client wants credit for signing without committing to anything. And there’s a structural problem. Governors don’t set electric rates. Public utility commissions do.

Also worth noticing who isn’t on the list, Virginia. The state with the highest concentration of data centers on the planet has a Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger.

Exhibit A: Virginia, where the pledge meets a rate case

Dominion Energy signedThursday. Here’s what Dominion’s year has actually looked like.

In November, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) the body that sets Dominion’s rates, issued a final order in Dominion’s rate case approving a $775.6 million revenue increase over two years. Typical residential bills rose $11.24 a month this year and climb another $2.36 next year. Dominion had asked for about $1.2 billion, so the commission cut the request, while also raising Dominion’s authorized profit margin to 9.8%.

To its credit, the SCC did something no pledge does, it wrote data center cost rules into an actual tariff. Starting in 2027, a new rate class covers customers drawing more than 25 megawatts, locks them into 14 year contracts, and makes them pay minimum demand charges, 85% on transmission and distribution, 60% on generation, whether they use the power or not. That’s the pledge’s third commitment, except enforceable, which is why it took a contested legal proceeding instead of a signing ceremony to produce it. The Piedmont Environmental Council’s president, Chris Miller, argued it still doesn’t go far enough: “During a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, the SCC is asking their constituents to continue to subsidize the energy needs of the richest companies in the world. It doesn’t make sense.”

And right now, with the ink still wet on Thursday’s pledge, Dominion is back before the SCC asking to recover $1.58 billion in transmission costs through its Rider T-1 (Case No. PUR-2026-00056). The central question in that case is precisely the pledge’s second commitment, who pays for the transmission lines and substations that data centers require. Spanberger’s administration filed comments urging the commission to make data centers cover the transmission costs their projects necessitate. Dominion’s director of regulation for customer rates, Robert Hines, testified: “It would be prudent for the Commission to allow these mechanisms to mature before directing any further substantial changes to the transmission cost recovery framework.”

Sit with that. In the docket, Dominion’s rate director testifies against further changes to how transmission costs get allocated. At the EPA, Dominion signs a pledge promising data centers will pay for all new delivery upgrades, network upgrade costs included. Both of those cannot be the company’s operative position.

Spanberger’s record here isn’t spotless either, she amended data center cost-shift bills this spring in ways critics said weakened them, before signing the Dominion-backed versions in May.

Meanwhile, in Chesterfield

Google, a two time participant in this promise, is building out three data center campuses in Chesterfield County, part of a $9 billion Virginia investment.

A few weeks ago, hundreds of residents showed up to Google’s open houses to ask basic questions, how much power, how much water and came away without numbers. Google’s said that operational data gets disclosed after the projects are operational, and the company defended its use of non disclosure agreements as standard business practice.

The version with actual teeth

Two days before the EPA event, the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the Ratepayer Protection Act (H.R. 9340) by a vote of 52-0. Fifty two to nothing, in this Congress. It was introduced June 18 by Rep. Gabe Evans, a Colorado Republican, and Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, and Consumer Reports endorsed it.

The bill amends the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) the federal law that pushes standards down to state utility regulators to add a standard for “large-load customers,” defined as non residential customers contracting for 100 megawatts or more at a single site. The standard would require rates for those customers to recover, in the bill’s words, “the full, incremental cost of any generation, transmission, or distribution upgrade necessary to serve the load.”

Section 111(d) standards don’t force states to do anything except consider the standard, open a proceeding within a year, decide within two. States that have already implemented something similar, or run a proceeding, or whose legislature has voted on the question, are exempt from even the considering. Virginia, with its new rate class, would likely check that box. That’s why analysts at the R Street Institute writing in Utility Dive call state utility law the real battleground, and why Brookings’ assessment of the pledge concluded it needs enforcement, in those words, to mean anything.

A 52-0 committee vote says even Congress understands a pledge isn’t a policy. The bill still has to pass the full House and the Senate.

The states aren’t waiting to find out

The Rockefeller Institute of Government counts 14 states that have considered moratoriums on new data center construction this year. New York went first. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62, a temporary statewide moratorium pausing environmental permits for data centers of 50 megawatts or more until the state completes a full environmental impact study, with no deadline on the study.

And in Louisiana, whose governor stood on Thursday’s stage, the Public Service Commission fast-tracked data center infrastructure approvals in December over a lone dissent, in a policy the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded shifts more data center costs onto ratepayers, not fewer. The live example there, Entergy’s plan to buy a gas plant for Meta’s Hyperion data center, which a consultant estimated could add $8 to $13 a month to residential bills. Entergy is on the White House signatory list.

Watch the docket, not the podium

The test of the Ratepayer Protection Pledge is not the signature count. It’s whether “data centers pay the full cost” survives contact with an actual rate proceeding, argued by actual utility lawyers, in front of the regulators who actually set your bill. That test is running right now, in Richmond, in Case No. PUR-2026-00056, where the newest pledge signatory is asking for $1.58 billion and urging the commission not to change how the costs get split.

Eighty percent of the country’s power is covered by a promise. Your electric bill is covered by a rate case. Only one of those has lawyers billing hours to decide it.

At last night’s Board of Supervisors meeting, staff announced the county had just launched chesterfield.gov/datacenters a page collecting, for the first time in one place, the paperwork behind the county’s data center boom. The non-disclosure agreements. The fixed tax rate agreements. The zoning files, the water numbers, even the lawsuit the county filed against its own zoning appeals board, more on that one below, because it’s the most interesting thing anyone said to me all night. Interim County Administrator Matt Harris told the board the page “just went live today,” and said it sets up a formal data center presentation at the August 26 meeting, with a portal for residents to submit questions in advance.

Board chair Dr. Mark Miller (Midlothian) framed the launch: “this is absolutely 100% as transparent as we possibly can on everything from water usage to power to the non disclosure agreement is all out there.”

It took a while to get here. Two months of packed board meetings. A petition. Some 600 residents, by counts cited at the meeting, showing up to Google’s open houses with questions. And if the county hoped a webpage would calm things down, last night was not encouraging. Residents came back to the podium across three separate comment periods demanding a moratorium and an audit, and the sharpest criticism of Google’s outreach came from the board itself.

I was there. I spoke. And two board members told me something in person that the county’s own documents only half proved.

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What’s actually in the documents

Start with the deal, because the county just published it. In 2020, five years before anyone said “Google” out loud, the county signed a Fixed Tax Rate and Water and Wastewater Capacity and Service Agreement with Peanut LLC, a Delaware shell company. Every page is stamped “TRADE SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION EXEMPT FROM PUBLIC DISCLOSURE.” The agreement locks the data center equipment tax rate at $0.24 per $100 of assessed value, and its term runs thirty years.

Here’s the part that deserves more attention than it’s gotten. Setting the rate was only half the deal. The other half neutralizes any future board that tries to change it:

“In the event the County increases such ad valorem tax rate assessed by the County above $0.24 per $100.00 of assessed value, the County agrees to issue to the Customer a grant annually for the remainder of the Term of this Tax and Service Agreement, through the Economic Development Authority of the County of Chesterfield (the “EDA”), to refund to the Customer an amount equal to the marginal increase in the tax rate above $0.24 per $100 of assessed value.”

Read it again. A future board can vote to raise the data center tax rate and the county will hand the increase straight back to the company as an annual “grant” through the EDA. Raise the rate, cut a refund check. For thirty years. For scale: Hanover County is studying whether to push its data center equipment tax from $0.45 toward $3 per $100. Clover Hill supervisor Jessica Schneider told VPM last month that Chesterfield’s 24-cent rate is the lowest in Virginia, against a statewide average of $2.50 to $3.50.

The NDAs are their own genre. In the Peanut LLC non-disclosure agreement, the county’s EDA didn’t even sign with the actual company, it signed with an agent acting for a “Client” that the agreement says goes unnamed “for confidentiality purposes.” The county signed a secrecy agreement with a middleman for a company it couldn’t name. There’s a second NDA with an entity called Anchor Designs, LLC, signed in October 2024 by EDA director Garrett Hart and, for Anchor, by “authorized signatory” Carl H. Bivens, a Troutman Pepper attorney who, the Roanoke Rambler reported, also signed the performance agreement for Helio Capital LLC, the unnamed-company shell in Google’s $1 billion Roanoke area data center deal. Same lawyer, different shell. There are also fixed rate agreements for projects code named “Sky” and “Air”, and a June 2026 air-permit certification form for “Skyward Holdings LLC” the entity behind Project Skye, listing diesel fired emergency generators, fuel storage tanks and cooling towers. Google wasn’t publicly confirmed as the company behind any of it until August 2025, when Miller celebrated landing “the Rolls Royce of data center operators.”

By the county’s own figures, Google’s three campuses, Project Peanut in Chester (307 acres, under construction), Project Skye at Upper Magnolia Green (880 acres, zoning approved) and Project Loch at Watkins Centre (350 acres, zoning approved) can draw a combined maximum of 8.6 million gallons of water a day. Peanut alone is listed at 6 million.

“The answers that Google gave was wrong”

The most striking commentary of the afternoon (not evening) didn’t come from a citizen. It came from Matoaca supervisor Kevin Carroll, describing Google’s outreach events at Cosby High School and Brightpoint Community College two weeks ago.

Carroll said Google flew in staff from other parts of the country who didn’t know the zoning case or the local roads. His example: residents asked how construction workers would reach the Skye site, and a Google rep told them the workers would come up Westerleigh Parkway, a route Carroll says the zoning case specifically walls off, with construction traffic restricted to entrances on Mount Hermon Road. “There’s a lot of false information that’s being portrayed out to the community,” he said, but his bottom line pointed at the company: “the answers that Google gave was wrong.”

The company behind a $9 billion Virginia investment sent people to reassure the neighbors, and per the supervisor, they got the basics wrong. Carroll said he’s committed to making Google correct the record.

The citizens weren’t buying any of it

The evening comment periods were the main event, enough speakers that the board reshuffled its agenda to take the second period early rather than make people keep waiting through public hearings.

Katherine McMahon of the Data Center Defiance community coalition formally delivered a petition: more than 2,500 signatures, plus over 750 emails to the county, demanding an end to new data center approvals. Her group also debriefed families after Google’s open houses. “Out of 60 families, two of them said they felt like their questions were answered. More than 40 families said they were actively considering leaving Chesterfield because of data centers,” she told the board. When residents asked why the events weren’t run as a town hall, “we were told by a rep that they chose not to do a town hall because they can get too emotional.”

She dismissed the county’s new page in five words: “a website is not enough.” Then she put two supervisors on notice. Miller and Schneider, she said, have both said as recently as last week that the county is “considering a moratorium on data centers.” Words, she said, are not enough.

Courtney Bernhardt, a Midlothian resident who said she has worked over a decade at a national environmental enforcement nonprofit, pulled the violation notices Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has issued to data centers statewide. Her tally: a dozen campuses began construction or installed generators without a permit, 14 failed their first emissions tests (including Google), and more than half failed notification, reporting or recordkeeping obligations. How did Google get back into compliance? By asking DEQ to raise its permit limit, she said. She asked the board to stop certifying air-permit site suitability for facilities near schools and homes, and to push DEQ to allow public participation in “minor source” air permitting, a category she argued is a misnomer for facilities this size.

Mike Carabinos, who said he’s spent 25 years in IT infrastructure and has helped design data centers, did the math out loud. Chesterfield’s average countywide power draw is around 450 megawatts, “every light, every business, every house” while “the combined draw of the three proposed Google data centers could be as much as 1.9 gigawatts.” Roughly four times the county’s average draw, from three campuses. He called for a county and statewide moratorium, and closed with a shot at the meeting format itself: “This empty room is why you do not separate your public comment periods into two sections.”

And then there was Crew, an 11 year-old who just finished fifth grade at Old Hundred Elementary. He asked his mom to sign him up to speak, brought a recording of data center noise from Virginia and played it for the board, and noted that Project Skye’s 880 acres is “larger than Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion combined.” On the NDAs: “if I can see that at just 11, why can’t you?” Miller’s review from the dais: “The little man stole the show.”

The FedEx thing

Here’s the part I haven’t seen reported anywhere.

Two board members approached me at yesterday’s afternoon meeting about the Watkins Centre site. Both told me the same thing: the choice there was a FedEx facility or a data center. Those were the options.

That framing sounds like after the fact justification, until you read the documents the county just published, because Chesterfield litigated exactly that choice, on exactly that land.

In September 2021, an agent for SunCap Property Group a Charlotte developer whose portfolio is stacked with FedEx Ground facilities asked the county about building a 432,000 square foot “warehouse distribution center” on roughly 200 acres at Watkins Centre Parkway. The planning director initially said it was permitted. Then he saw the details. The sheer volume of tractor trailer traffic told him this wasn’t a warehouse at all, but a hub for sorting freight and moving it to other trucks. In July 2022 he formally determined it wasn’t a permitted use. SunCap appealed, and on November 2, 2022, the county’s Board of Zoning Appeals sided with SunCap, 4-1.

So the Board of Supervisors went to circuit court against its own zoning appeals board, petitioning to reverse the decision and naming SunCap and the landowners, Watkins Land LLC and Watkins Hughey LLC.

Now cross reference the parcels. The tax IDs in that 2022 court filing 718-705-6022, 718-706-3636, 715-705-2469, 715-706-3037 reappear three years later in the minutes of the May 28, 2025 board meeting, inside zoning case 25SN1040: the rezoning of 750 Watkins Centre Parkway and surrounding parcels for what is now Google’s Project Loch. Same land. The county fought in court to keep a distribution hub off that property, then rezoned it for a data center campus, unanimously.

The Magnolia site has no FedEx subplot that I’ve found, what it has is a paper trail of the county steering it to industry on purpose. Magnolia Green was zoned residential (R-9) in 1991 under case 89SN0343, planned as a community of homes. The county’s EDA bought roughly 2,000 acres of it in 2020 for $13 million, specifically to control what got built there. Then in May 2022, case 21SN0676 rezoned 1,728 acres from Residential (R-9) and Agricultural to General Industrial (I-2) that history is laid out in the county’s own staff report. Land zoned for houses, bought by the county, rezoned for industry, then handed to a data center. Nobody forced that sequence.

How we got here, if you’re new to this

In 2020, the county’s Economic Development Authority (EDA), a public body that can buy land and cut incentive deals, signed the Peanut agreements and bought roughly 2,000 acres near Moseley from the developer of Magnolia Green, branding it “Upper Magnolia.” Supervisors have acknowledged NDAs on the data center project dating back to 2018. In May 2022, over resident opposition, the board rezoned Upper Magnolia Green West into a “technology village” with data centers explicitly among the permitted uses, on a 3-2 vote, Carroll voted no. In May 2025, the site specific data center rezonings for Upper Magnolia (case 25SN1038) and Watkins Centre South (case 25SN1040) passed unanimously, Carroll himself moved approval of the Magnolia case. That August, Google went public as the buyer, part of a $9 billion Virginia investment. Since January 1, 2026, new data centers require a conditional use permit, a public process and two developers who missed the by right window are fighting it. The zoning appeals board rejected one challenge in June, and another appeal involving the James River Industrial Center is pending.

The bill for all this doesn’t stay inside county lines. The state legislature’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), projected in December 2024 that data center growth will add an estimated $14 to $37 a month to a typical Dominion residential bill by 2040.

What I told the board

I got my three minutes in the afternoon. My issue is the deal structure. That grant back clause is a mechanism designed to undo any future board’s vote on the tax rate. No current board is able to bind the next one’s taxing power legally, so the county routed around that principle through the EDA. I asked the board for four things. Direct the county attorney to write an opinion on the grant back clause and request an official Attorney General’s opinion under Va. Code § 2.2-505; create a data center tax rate commission like Hanover’s; adopt a policy of no more NDAs and no more votes on deals hidden behind shell companies; and order a state audit of the EDA’s data center land deals under Va. Code § 15.2-2511(B), which lets the board do exactly that by majority vote.

The clock that actually matters: Tuesday

One thing residents can still do becomes part of a federal record and it expires in days.

Google needs a Clean Water Act permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build Project Skye, because the campus would permanently impact 17.99 acres of forested wetlands and 8,115 linear feet of stream channel in waters associated with Deep Creek. Google proposes to buy mitigation bank credits to offset the loss. The Corps must consider every public comment it receives on permit NAO-2026-00282 — and the comment window closes July 28. That’s Tuesday. Comments go through the Corps’ online portal (search “NAO-2026-00282”), and commenters can also request a public hearing. The window for Project Loch’s permit another 4.7 acres of wetlands and 2,828 feet of stream already closed in June. Skye is the one still open. Residents aren’t going in blind, either: a step by step comment guide started circulating in the Magnolia Coalition’s 4,500-member Facebook group the day of the board meeting, arguing among other things that the Corps should assess all of Google’s Virginia applications together instead of one at a time.

Jason Knapp, a retired Navy commander seeking the Democratic nomination in the 1st Congressional District, used his three minutes to push exactly this point about Google’s open houses: “Not one word said at these open houses is documented. It’s not official and it’s not part of any proceeding.” The federal comment record is different, every submission counts.

The county says the real conversation happens August 26, with a formal presentation and a question portal. Residents heard a version of that promise before the open houses too, and by the coalition’s count, 58 of 60 families left those without answers. The difference now, the county has published the documents, and the residents have read them. August should be interesting.

The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) the Virginia General Assembly’s own research and oversight agency published its study of data centers in Virginia. Inside it, Figure 2-5 answers a simple question? If the exact same data center, holding $150 million in taxable computer equipment, landed in different Virginia localities, what would each collect over five years?

Data centers pay local taxes mostly through the business personal property tax, a tax on equipment, and for a data center, the equipment is nearly everything. Two levers set the take. The tax rate, and the depreciation schedule (how fast the locality writes down the equipment’s taxable value each year). Here’s JLARC’s answer, same facility, five years:

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Culpeper collects $10.8 million. Loudoun, $9.3 million. Fauquier, $9.1 million. Louisa, $8.4 million. Fairfax, $8.0 million. Prince William, $6.7 million. The Fredericksburg region, $2.3 million. Mecklenburg, $2.0 million. Henrico, $1.3 million. Chesterfield: $500,000. Only Wise County, in far Southwest Virginia, collects less, at $400,000.

Chesterfield’s 24 cents per $100 rate, paired with a fast depreciation schedule, means the county collects roughly one eighteenth of what Loudoun gets from an identical building full of identical servers. JLARC’s own words, localities that slashed rates to attract the industry “collect far less revenue than other localities with a higher tax rate” would for a comparable project. Clover Hill Supervisor Jessica Schneider put it more bluntly to VPM News: “We are the lowest in the whole state.”

The discount that buys nothing

Here’s what makes the chart devastating rather than merely embarrassing. The counties at the expensive end of it are the ones drowning in data centers.

Fairfax charges $4.57. Prince William charges $3.70. Loudoun charges $4.15 and Loudoun is home to the largest concentration of data centers on the planet. JLARC found Loudoun pulled in roughly $733 million in data center attributable local revenue in a single fiscal year, and that data center money has let both Loudoun and Prince William lower their real estate tax rates on residents. Louisa County charges $1.90, eight times Chesterfield’s rate and still collects $8.4 million per facility in the JLARC model while hosting major data center development.

Data centers, per JLARC’s analysis, go where the transmission lines, fiber, and large flat parcels are. The tax rate is a rounding error next to the power bill. Northern Virginia proved you can charge full freight and the industry shows up anyway, because it has to.

Henrico ran the experiment. Twice.

If you want to know what the low rate strategy is worth, watch the county that pioneered it and then abandoned it.

In 2017, Henrico cut its data center equipment rate from $3.50 to 40 cents per $100, the lowest in Virginia at the time, an explicit play to attract the industry, per The Richmonder. It worked, helped enormously by the QTS Richmond Network Access Point, where three subsea cables come ashore. Henrico became a hub.

Then Henrico looked at its own math. In its FY2025-26 budget, per Richmond BizSense, the county proposed raising the data center rate from 40 cents to $2.60, a six and a half fold increase, projected to generate $13.6 million a year in new revenue. County Manager John Vithoulkas noted $2.60 would still sit below the state average of $3.09 and at least a dollar under the Northern Virginia localities Henrico competes with. The Board of Supervisors adopted it unanimously on April 8, 2025, per the county’s own release and used the money to help fund what officials called the county’s largest tax relief for residents since 1987. The data centers did not pack up their servers and leave. Development has continued.

Read that sequence again, cut the rate to attract the industry, land the industry, raise the rate 550%, keep the industry, hand residents a tax cut. It took one budget cycle to correct, because Henrico never signed anything promising not to.

Hanover is now walking the same road back. In June 2026, its supervisors moved to reinstate the county’s data center equipment tax, per Richmond BizSense, with a further increase to as much as $3 per $100 under study, per WTVR.

Chesterfield signed away the Henrico option

Which brings us to the reason this chart is a Chesterfield story and not just a Virginia curiosity.

Chesterfield cannot do what Henrico did. On June 25, 2025, its Board of Supervisors approved agreements with two LLCs behind the western data center projects, Skyward Holdings and Aeris Investments locking the 24-cent rate in place for 30 years.The mechanism matters. If a future board raises the countywide rate, the county pays the developers annual grants equal to the increase for the rest of the term. Chesterfield built itself a Henrico proof box. Any supervisor elected between now and the 2050s who looks at Figure 2-5 and reaches the same conclusion Henrico’s board reached can raise the rate and then mail the difference back to Google.

This is a documented pattern, not a hunch

The research on rate cutting as recruitment keeps reaching the same conclusion. JLARC’s November 2025 annual report on economic development incentives found Virginia’s state level data center sales tax exemption cost $2.7 billion from FY2015 through FY2024, 53 percent of all state incentive spending, hitting $1 billion in FY2024 alone, up from $685 million the year before, per Virginia Business. A JLARC associate director called it the “largest economic development incentive that the state is supporting.” A separate JLARC analysis, cited by VPM News, found the state recoups only 48 cents for every dollar it abates through the exemption.

Good Jobs First, a subsidy tracking watchdog whose figures lean critical of incentives, so treat its framing accordingly, has published a run of reports on the same dynamic nationally. 32 states exempt data center equipment from sales tax, ten of the twenty states that disclose costs lose over $100 million a year, and the states that computed returns lose between 52 and 70 cents per dollar spent. Its June 2026 update put Virginia’s combined state and local FY2025 loss at $1.94 billion. Its April 2026 Virginia report estimated roughly $267 million a year of that would otherwise flow to K-12 schools and found that of Virginia’s 133 counties and cities, only 36 disclosed any tax abatement programs at all, and exactly one mentioned data centers by name. That one, credit where due, was Chesterfield. The county disclosed the discount. It just also notarized it for three decades.

JLARC also found data centers impose minimal demands on local services, few kids in schools, little traffic. Chesterfield’s economic development staff project more than $4.2 million a year in county revenue per $1 billion invested, and what Figure 2-5 shows is what the bet cost and Henrico shows the bet didn’t need a 30 year term.

Eleven localities, one identical data center. Ten of them kept the right to change their minds. Chesterfield collects $500,000, second to last, and put it in writing until the 2050s.

There will be more articles expanding on all angles of this deal. Chesterfield is known for being a leader among localities. This deal cannot be explained by any members of the Board of Supervisors in any meaningful way. More to come on that.

You couldn’t have. It doesn’t stand for election.

I’ve been pulling minutes, filing FOIA requests, and showing up to board meetings, and last week to Google’s own open house. And the more records I read, the clearer it gets.

Meet your shadow government

It’s called the Economic Development Authority. Seven members. Not one of them elected. By the county’s own description, they’re appointed for staggered four-year terms and “act at the direction of the Board of Supervisors,” under a state law that grants powers “not available to municipal governments” including the power to buy, sell, and develop land.

There’s nothing illegal about an EDA. Nearly every Virginia locality has one. The question is what ours was used for.

On March 27, 2020, the EDA bought 353 acres near Meadowville and the same day — sold 307 of them to a shell called “Peanut LLC” for $18.1 million. Nobody outside the deal knew Peanut LLC was Google. A nondisclosure agreement kept it that way for five years and it didn’t just gag staff. One resident told the Richmonder that when she pressed her own supervisor for answers, she got: “I can’t tell you anything about it, because we signed an NDA.”

Sit with that. The people you elected to represent you say they were contractually barred from telling you what your own county government was doing with your own county’s land.

Then in February 2025, when the two western campuses needed rezoning, guess who filed the applications? Not Google. The EDA. The county asked itself for permission to rezone 1,300 acres for a company it wouldn’t name.

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What your elected board did

I pulled the official minutes from May 28, 2025, the night both rezonings passed. The hearings happened. Residents showed up and did their job one of them, Dave Stritzinger, asked about backup power and on site diesel storage and told the Board to “know what it is buying.” His question was better than anything in the file, because the file contained no company name, no megawatts, no water numbers, and nothing about what this does to your electric bill.

The Board voted yes anyway. Twice. 5-0 and 5-0.

Four weeks later, on June 25, 2025, the same five supervisors froze the data-center equipment tax at 24 cents per $100 for 30 years for LLCs whose owner was, in BizSense’s word that week, still a “mystery.” A tax rate locked until the 2050s, granted to entities the public couldn’t identify.

Google finally said its own name on August 27, 2025, on a stage with Governor Youngkin. That night, in the county’s press release, Supervisor Kevin Carroll praised Google’s ability to “deliver what they say they’re going to do.” What they’d said to the citizens, for five years, was nothing.

And before anyone at the county tries to put daylight between the elected board and the appointed one, read the EDA’s own website: the Board of Supervisors “has final control over most of the decisions” of the EDA, explicitly including incentives and land deals. The shadow government wasn’t freelancing. It was doing exactly what the people you elected directed it to do. They just arranged it so the directing happened where you couldn’t see it, and the only public part was a yes vote on a file with the important pages missing.

This wasn’t bad luck.

I went looking at Google’s other recent builds to see if we were uniquely unlucky. We weren’t.

In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a shell called Heaviside LLC signed for “one or more” data centers; the state approved $56 million in tax breaks against a $576 million project promising 31 jobs; Google took the break while claiming it was still “evaluating”; and when it finally confirmed the project, after a year of visible construction, a spokesperson said the $576 million everyone had negotiated around “is not representative” of the real thing, which turned out to be part of $7 billion. This June, with buildings already standing, the city was still sorting out whether the data center’s steam plumes might interfere with planes landing at the local airport.

In Becker, Minnesota, Google announced $600 million, collected tax breaks while the county promised $20.5 million in water and sewer upgrades, then built nothing, gave no reason, and let the deal die by not filing paperwork.

In The Dalles, Oregon, Google bankrolled the city’s lawsuit against its own local newspaper to keep its water use secret. The records, once forced out, showed use had grown from 104 million gallons in 2010 to 355 million in 2020, 29% of the entire city’s water.

Shell company. Lowball number to price the tax deal. Build first, confirm later. Real numbers only after the ink dries or after a lawsuit. Everywhere Google goes, it looks for the room where the public isn’t. In Chesterfield, we had one pre built. It meets the third Thursday of every month, and I’d bet most of my neighbors couldn’t name a single person on it.

Here’s the part that should give you hope

The shadow government has an off switch, and you’re holding it.

Go back to the county’s own words: the EDA’s seven members are appointed by, and act at the direction of, the Board of Supervisors and the Board has final control over what it does. That means everything you just read traces to five elected people. And all five of their seats are on the ballot in November 2027.

Don’t let anyone tell you it won’t matter. Prince William voters fired the board chair who championed the state’s biggest data center project, and this month that project died completely followed by the new board rejecting the next mega-project 8-0. Spotsylvania voters flipped one seat and the new board reversed county policy 6-0 within weeks. Elections are the one lever that has actually worked, twice, within an hour’s drive of here.

I won’t sell you false hope, because that’s the county’s product, not mine. A new board will have a hard time reversing anything already signed, however there is a doctrine called “legislative entrenchment.” Essentially it says one legislature cannot enact irrepealable laws because it would tie the hands of future elected officials. Again, something to look into. But here’s what a new board absolutely can do: appoint different people to the EDA as terms expire and direct it, in public, to stop signing NDAs on the public’s land. Enforce the new ordinance that makes every future data center get its own public vote. Refuse the next incentive agreement. And show up to every remaining decision on Loch and Skye, which, remember, are still mostly paper, asking Dave Stritzinger’s question: what exactly are we buying?

Last Thursday at Cosby High School, at Google’s first open house, I watched my neighbors walk out of a noisy room full of poster boards saying they’d learned nothing six years after the land deal, eleven months after the reveal. Being angry about that is the correct response.

The date is November 2027. Every seat. The shadow government serves whoever wins.

I’ll keep pulling the records until then.

Not everyone left persuaded. “I want to see them cancel the project and go away,” one attendee told me.

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The timing matters. The same week Google was fielding questions in a school cafeteria, Dominion Energy and NextEra Energy filed their merger application with the State Corporation Commission on July 16, starting a six-month clock on the largest utility acquisition in U.S. history, a deal built around serving exactly this kind of load. And opponents are holding their first rally against that merger at Capitol Square in Richmond on July 20 at noon.

What Google is proposing

Google is planning roughly $9 billion across three Chesterfield campuses: Project Peanut, a 300-plus-acre site already under construction on Bermuda Hundred Road in Chester; Project Skye, an 880-plus-acre site on Moseley Road; and Project Loch, a roughly 350-acre site at Watkins Centre Parkway in Midlothian. Together that’s about 1,500 acres, what county officials have called the largest capital investment in Chesterfield’s history.

The tradeoffs are in Google’s own paperwork. Federal filings show Project Skye would permanently impact more than 20 acres of wetlands and about 8,000 feet of streams, triggering Clean Water Act review by the Army Corps of Engineers. Project Loch’s filing lists nearly five acres of wetlands and 2,828 feet of stream channel.

And the county’s cut is thin: Chesterfield taxes data center computer equipment at 24 cents per $100 of assessed value, which Clover Hill Supervisor Jessica Schneider, who voted to approve Skye and Loch, called the lowest rate in Virginia, against a statewide average she put at $2.50 to $3.50.

Googles boards.

Board: “Data centers help keep electricity costs down.” The fine print at the bottom names the source: a “Data Center Coalition Letter to Congress.” The Data Center Coalition is an industry lobbying organization whose members include Google, according to a December 2025 letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren and colleagues. Google’s evidence that data centers lower your bill is a letter written by Google’s own trade group.

Board claim on Virginia: The board says the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) found data centers “are currently paying their full cost of service.” That sentence is accurate and it is half the report. The same December 2024 JLARC study projected that a typical Dominion residential customer could see generation- and transmission-related costs rise an estimated $14 to $37 per month by 2040, in constant dollars, because of data-center-driven demand growth. JLARC also told lawmakers that powering unconstrained growth could cost up to $18 billion and that modern data centers are “largely incompatible with residential use.” The board quotes the page that helps and skips the pages that don’t.

Board claim on Georgia: The board says Georgia Power’s data centers are “helping them keep rates frozen for the next three years.” Georgia’s Public Service Commission did approve a three-year base-rate freeze in July 2025 but the freeze excludes fuel costs and roughly $862 million in Hurricane Helene storm recovery, so bills can still rise during the “freeze.” It also followed six rate increases in the prior three years.

Board: “Will these projects cause a lot of noise pollution?” Answer: “No.” JLARC identified noise as one of the biggest nuisances from data centers built near homes, and noted local ordinances often aren’t designed to address the constant low-frequency hum. Google’s board does make one checkable promise, specific dBA limits at the property line with active monitoring. Whether that lands as an enforceable county condition, or stays a poster, is the question for the Board of Supervisors.

Board claim on jobs: “thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of full-time positions.” On the floor, Google representatives gave me a harder number: about 50 employees per data center. Either way it squares with JLARC, which found an average of about 1,500 workers per facility during construction, with “relatively few staff” once built. The construction jobs are real and temporary. The permanent payroll, by Google’s own on-the-record count, is a rounding error against 1,500 acres.

And the numbers Google wouldn’t put on any board: Asked how much electricity and water these campuses will draw, Google representatives told me the company will not release those figures until the data centers are built. Sit with that. The county is being asked to approve, and residents are being asked to accept, industrial facilities whose defining feature is their resource consumption and the consumption numbers are being withheld until the concrete is poured. For context, JLARC found data-center water use in Virginia currently sustainable statewide while recommending stronger rules so localities with less water aren’t disproportionately tapped but JLARC was working with disclosed numbers. Chesterfield doesn’t have Google’s.

“We’ll pay for the infrastructure” read the meter, not the promise

At the open houses, Google said it will pay for any necessary infrastructure improvements for all three projects. That promise is narrower than it sounds, and Virginia ratepayers are already watching the difference show up on their bills.

Google can pay for its driveway, the substations, hookups and road work at its own fence line. It is not paying for the highway: the new power plants, regional transmission and capacity purchases the whole system needs because of load like Google’s. Those are Dominion investments, and Dominion recovers them from every customer. In November 2025, the SCC approved a 9.8% return on equity for Dominion, the utility’s guaranteed profit margin on that capital along with base-rate increases of $11.24 a month in 2026 and $2.36 more in 2027 for a typical household.

The Chesterfield gas plant is the proof of concept. The SCC approved the $1.47 billion Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center in the same Nov. 25 order, citing a data-center-driven reliability exception to the Virginia Clean Economy Act and authorized a rider to recover the cost from customers. That rider has been on every Dominion residential bill since March 1, 2026 (0.0754 cents per kWh, about 75 cents a month for a typical household, per Dominion’s filed tariff), and the 9.8% profit margin applies to it. Google didn’t write that check. You did, and Dominion’s shareholders collect a return on it.

Then there’s the regional layer. PJM, the 13-state grid operator, runs auctions to secure future power capacity, and its own market monitor attributes the recent record price spikes primarily to data center demand. The Dominion zone cleared at $444.26 per megawatt-day for 2025–26, among the highest anywhere on the grid. Those charges pass through to your bill at cost (no profit margin on that piece, the markup applies to the plants and wires Dominion builds). Either way, the money comes from the same wallet: yours.

To be fair to the fine print: the SCC created a new GS-5 rate class, effective January 2027, that forces customers over 25 megawatts to contract for minimum payments — a real step toward making data centers carry their own weight. But JLARC’s warning came after accounting for how today’s rules assign costs, and the $14–$37 projection still stands. “Google pays for the infrastructure” and “your bill goes up 9.8%-profitably to build infrastructure for Google-scale load” are both happening at once. Only one of them was on a board.

What the protest signs were pointing at

The hand-made signs outside were shorthand for fights already underway in dockets and courtrooms.

“Dominion: No Gas Plant for Data Centers.” That’s CERC, above. The Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the Chesterfield NAACP, Appalachian Voices and Mothers Out Front, appealed the approval to the Supreme Court of Virginia in late May 2026, arguing the plant violates the Clean Economy Act and dumps its pollution on the same fenceline communities that lived beside the old coal plant.

“Rally to Take Back Our Power” (July 20). The flyer targets the $66.8 billion NextEra acquisition of Dominion, filed with the SCC on July 16. The companies propose $1.78 billion in Virginia customer bill credits over the first two years; Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi and others have pushed the SCC to slow down and demand answers before the six-month statutory clock runs out.

“Our land is more important than your data center.” See the wetlands and stream figures above, plus the Project Loch site map Google displayed, which places the campus a short distance from Old Hundred Elementary School and the Tomahawk Creek corridor.

“My WiFi doesn’t need this much water.” The sign asks the exact question Google declined to answer on the floor: how much water? Until Google releases site-specific figures, nobody in Chesterfield can check the sign’s math or Google’s.

“Grow Tomatoes, Not Data Centers” (stophanoverdatacenters.com). The sign came from the fight one county over, a reminder this is now a regional movement, not only a Chesterfield protest.

“Power and water or AI?!” The blunt version of PJM’s math: data centers are the primary driver of the grid’s record capacity prices, and everyone on the grid pays them, data center or not.

What residents can actually do

Three levers are open right now. The SCC merger case will take public comments once the docket is fully set up, the six-month review began July 16. The county’s site plan and permitting reviews for Skye and Loch run through the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission, where noise, buffer and water conditions get decided and where residents can demand the consumption numbers before approval, not after construction. And the July 20 rally at the Capitol Square Bell Tower is the first organized public showing against the merger itself.

Google’s boards weren’t wrong about everything. Data centers do pay their own bills today, Virginia’s own auditors said so. But the pitch in that cafeteria ran on three moves: cite your own lobbyist as an authority, quote half a report, and hold back the numbers that would let anyone check the rest. Fifty jobs per center. No power figures. No water figures. A 9.8% guaranteed profit for Dominion on the buildout, billed to you.

To find out more about this project and all updates from Google, they have provided a link for the public: HERE

Here’s what that number means. One gigawatt can power roughly 750,000 homes. And the most electricity Virginia’s grid has ever needed at one time, every home, business, and factory on the hottest day, is about 25 gigawatts. So Dominion has promised data centers alone about twice as much power as the entire state has ever used at once. The Piedmont Environmental Council calls this a “crisis by contract”, and there are requests for roughly 70 gigawatts more waiting in line.

Meeting those promises means building power plants, substations, and transmission lines across the state for decades. In May, Florida-based NextEra agreed to buy Dominion for about $66.8 billion, largely to get its hands on that data center business.

Now here’s the question, is the money behind all those data centers as solid as it looks?

You’re already paying for this

First, understand that this isn’t a future problem. It’s on your bill now.

Virginia’s grid is part of PJM, a regional network covering 13 states. Every year, PJM runs an auction to make sure enough power plants will be available a few years out. Think of it as buying insurance against blackouts. Utilities pay the auction price, and the cost flows through to customers.

In 2022, that insurance cost $28.92 per megawatt-day. By July 2025, it had hit a price cap of $329.17 — more than ten times higher. It has slammed into the ceiling in every auction since, including the one held this week, on July 14, 2026. In the auction covering the Dominion zone for 2025–2026, Virginia’s price was even higher than the regional one: $444.26.

Why? PJM’s independent watchdog, Monitoring Analytics, gave a plain answer: data centers. The watchdog found data center demand, much of it from data centers that haven’t even been built yet caused 63% of the 2025 price spike and 40% of the costs in the December 2025 auction. That’s billions of dollars a year, paid by everyone in the region, for facilities that exist mostly as forecasts.

One more thing worth knowing: data centers don’t use power the way homes do. Your house spikes in the evening and on hot afternoons. A data center runs near full blast around the clock, every day. That constant load is why serving them requires so much new hardwired capacity and why their arrival reshapes the whole grid, not just their corner of it.

The strange part: where the data center money comes from

The companies filling Data Center Alley, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and cloud firms like CoreWeave are spending historic amounts on AI. But when you trace where those dollars come from, they keep going in a circle.

Start with the biggest example. In September 2025, chipmaker NVIDIA said it would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. That same month, OpenAI agreed to buy about $300 billion in computing power from Oracle. And Oracle fills its data centers with NVIDIA chips. Follow it around: NVIDIA gives money to OpenAI. OpenAI gives money to Oracle. Oracle gives money back to NVIDIA. Each stop gets counted as somebody’s booming sales.

Or take CoreWeave, one of Dominion’s own named data center customers. NVIDIA is CoreWeave’s chip supplier. NVIDIA is also one of its owners. And NVIDIA signed a deal, disclosed in September 2025, promising to buy up whatever computing power CoreWeave can’t sell — at least $6.3 billion worth — through 2032. CoreWeave even borrows money using its NVIDIA chips as the collateral. Meanwhile, Microsoft alone provided 62% of CoreWeave’s revenue in 2024, per CoreWeave’s own stock-offering paperwork.

The pattern repeats across the industry. Amazon, the biggest data center operator in Virginia has invested up to $33 billion in the AI company Anthropic, and Anthropic has promised to spend more than $100 billion back on Amazon’s cloud over ten years. Japan’s SoftBank sold its entire $5.83 billion stake in NVIDIA to help fund its investment in OpenAI, which buys NVIDIA chips.

None of this is secret. It’s all announced in press releases and securities filings. And it isn’t illegal. But there’s an old name for part of this pattern: vendor financing, a seller helping its customers afford its products. It’s like a car dealer lending you the money to buy the car. Sales look fantastic, right up until the loans go bad. It’s what telecom equipment makers did in the late 1990s, and when their customers collapsed, the “demand” collapsed with them.

Why a circle in Silicon Valley lands on a bill in Virginia

JLARC named the risk before most of these deals were even signed. If forecast demand doesn’t show up, or several big data centers close, the report warned, utilities could be stuck with infrastructure costs “that would have to be recouped from their existing customer base.” In plain terms: the power plants get built either way, and if the tech customers shrink, the leftover mortgage lands on the households that stay.

There’s a reason the utility isn’t the one pumping the brakes. Under Virginia’s regulated-monopoly system, Dominion earns a guaranteed profit, set by state regulators on the money it spends building infrastructure. More building means more profit, whether or not the demand forecasts pan out. The forecast risk sits with you; the building profit sits with the company.

And the federal referee for the regional grid has its own tangle. In December 2025, federal energy regulators approved new rules letting data centers plug directly into power plants on the PJM grid, Virginia’s grid. The commission’s new chair, Laura Swett, came straight from a law firm whose clients are in those very cases, and she declined to step aside from them, POLITICO’s E&E News reported. An agency ethics official cleared her to participate anyway.

What Virginians can watch and where your voice counts

Several decisions that shape your bill are still open. Virginia’s State Corporation Commission must review the NextEra–Dominion merger, and that process takes public comment. The SCC has also created a separate rate class for giant data centers (Case No. PUR-2025-00058), which is meant to keep their costs off your bill the details of how it’s enforced will matter more than the headline. And the General Assembly keeps debating bills on who pays for data center growth, along with the state tax exemption that JLARC says mostly benefits Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

The honest bottom line: AI demand may turn out to be real and lasting the companies certainly say so. But Virginia is committing decades of grid spending based on contracts whose money moves in a loop among a handful of companies that invest in each other. State analysts have already told us who covers the difference if the loop breaks. It isn’t the tech companies. It’s you.

Here is a look at the real, structural forces straining the system today.

The 21st-Century Tech Boom

The most significant driver of new power demand is the explosion of artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The massive data centers required to train and run AI models consume an unprecedented amount of electricity.

Unlike traditional residential demand, which peaks for a few hours when people come home from work, hyperscale data centers require massive, continuous power 24/7. When this sudden technological surge is combined with a broader national push toward electrification, including the adoption of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and new domestic manufacturing, the baseline demand for electricity is growing at a rate not seen in decades.

The Timeline Disconnect

The core friction lies in the difference between digital speed and physical reality.

• Tech moves fast: A massive new data center can often be planned, permitted, and built in just one to two years.

• The Grid moves slow: Building the heavy infrastructure required to power those facilities, such as high-voltage transmission lines, electrical substations, and new commercial power plants can take five to ten years due to complex zoning, supply chain bottlenecks, and physical construction limits.

We are currently operating a 20th-century grid trying to support a 21st-century technological revolution. The infrastructure simply cannot be deployed fast enough to comfortably meet the surging wave of new tech customers.

Extreme Weather on a Maxed-Out System

Because the gap between energy supply and energy demand is shrinking rapidly, the grid is operating with a much smaller safety buffer than it used to. This lack of a reserve margin makes the system highly vulnerable to extreme weather events.

Prolonged, intense heatwaves push both human demand (air conditioning) and physical equipment (transformers and cables) to their absolute breaking points. For example, when the Department of Energy recently had to authorize emergency measures for the massive PJM region, it was directly driven by forecasted extreme temperatures combining with a “sudden increase in demand” and a “shortage of facilities for the generation of electric energy”.

When the grid is already running near its maximum limit just to support normal operations, even a standard summer heatwave can push it into emergency territory.

The Bottom Line

Chris Wright recently criticized New York on pausing construction on data centers. His argument was that the more data centers you have the less residential customers will pay. Now, when you first hear this, you may think it’s a load of crap, and it might be. His stance is that the grid will have data centers that will require a massive 24/7 load of power, much higher than the peak demand houses would need.

He also asserts that data centers will bring more money to States and pay for the grid expansion. That is a great dream to have, but that is not what is happening. All of the major tech companies made a “promise” that they would pay for the grid upgrades and power generation facilities, that “promise” has not come true.

On July 14, 2026 Chris wrote an order to PJM essentially telling them that they will generate power and not allow a blackout for the Northeast. The order expires July 21st.

You already know how this lands on your own bill, we’ve walked through how a Dominion residential customer quietly picks up part of the cost of a grid being rebuilt for data centers. Here’s the part that never shows up in Virginia: other states looked at the exact same problem and refused to spread the cost around. They made the data centers pay for the plants themselves, every dollar.

And here’s what makes all of it matter: you can’t shop your way out. In most of the states in this article Virginia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Utah, Georgia, your electric company is a government-granted monopoly. There’s no competitor to switch to. Dominion alone serves about 2.7 million Virginians with no alternative. A couple of these states, Texas and Maryland, let you pick who supplies your electricity, but even there, the poles, wires, and long-distance transmission lines stay a regulated monopoly you’re stuck with, and that’s exactly where the data-center buildout costs land. So when a regulator lets those costs slide onto households, there’s no escape hatch. The rule is the only protection you get.

Wisconsin drew the hardest line. On April 24, 2026, the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin took a rate plan the utility We Energies had proposed and rewrote it in customers’ favor. The utility had floated letting data centers cover just 75% of the cost of new power generation, with everyone else absorbing the last 25%. Regulators threw that out and required the biggest customers to pay 100% of the cost of the plants — and the fuel — built to serve them.

They didn’t stop there. The commission lowered the size threshold from 500 megawatts down to 100, made the contracts longer, and added public-reporting requirements so the deals aren’t hidden. (One megawatt is enough to power hundreds of homes; a single large data center can pull hundreds of megawatts, around the clock.)

Then the commission did the thing that made a trillion-dollar company flinch. It required any data-center developer with a shaky credit rating to post cash or a letter of credit up front so that if the company goes bankrupt or walks away, its unpaid bills don’t land on everyone else. Oracle, a partner in a $15 billion data center in Port Washington and carrying a middling “BBB” credit rating, sued the commission in Ozaukee County Circuit Court on June 19, 2026, arguing the rule could cost it more than $100 million a year. The case is ongoing.

That lawsuit tells us alot. A rule Big Tech spends lawyers to kill is a rule they worry about.

Wisconsin isn’t alone. In March 2025, Utah passed a law (SB 132) that flips the usual deal: if serving a giant new customer would force expensive grid upgrades, the utility can tell the data center to go find its own power supply instead of putting the bill on everyone else. Maryland’s law that same spring (HB 1035) tells regulators in plain statutory language to write data-center rates that “protect residential retail customers from financial risks.” And Texas passed SB 6, which makes large users pay for their own grid hookups and lets the state’s grid operator remotely cut a data center’s power during an emergency to keep the lights on for homes critics nicknamed it the “kill switch” bill. That should tell you something. TEXAS is not letting these companies rule the State.

None of this is fringe. By the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators’ count, at least 22 states introduced more than 60 bills in 2025 aimed at data centers’ grid impact — most of them about protecting ratepayers. The common thread is a principle regulators call “cost causation”: whoever creates the cost pays for it.

Why utilities need to be pushed at all comes down to how they make money. A regulated utility doesn’t profit by selling more electricity, it profits by building things (plants, wires, substations) and earning a guaranteed percentage return on that construction. So a data center asking for a gigawatt of power isn’t a headache. It’s the best building opportunity in a generation. The catch is that the financial risk of all that construction doesn’t automatically stay with the utility or the tech company. A Harvard Electricity Law Initiative study, Extracting Profits from the Public, reviewed dozens of rate cases and found utilities repeatedly cutting special, sometimes secret deals with data centers and when a deal charges a customer less than it costs to serve them, the shortfall gets quietly shifted onto households in the next rate case. Left alone, that’s the default. The guardrails are the exception.

They could pay for this out of petty cash. The objection you’ll hear is that making data centers cover their own power would scare off the investment. Look at the numbers. The four biggest data-center companies: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta all plan to spend roughly $725 billion combined on capital projects in 2026, up 77% from the year before, the vast majority on AI data centers. Meta alone guided as high as $145 billion for the year. Against that, the $550 million transmission line Entergy admits it’s building only for Meta in Louisiana is about four-tenths of one percent of Meta’s spending for a single year. Oracle is suing Wisconsin over a rule that might cost it $100 million a year, while planning roughly $50 billion in capital spending in 2026. These companies aren’t fighting to socialize grid costs because they can’t afford to pay. They’re fighting because they’d rather you did.

What “no guardrails” looks like: Louisiana. Meta is building a data center in Richland Parish so big that the company’s own cost estimate jumped from about $10 billion to $50 billion in under two years. To power it, Entergy Louisiana got approval in August 2025 to build three new natural-gas plants, and in 2026 moved to fast-track seven more. Meta says it’s covering construction. But under Louisiana rules, Entergy can pass fuel costs straight through to customers, the plants are built to run for roughly 30 years, and the expected cost increases have been kept out of the public record.

Then it got worse. On the same day in August 2025 that regulators approved the plants, Meta restructured the deal: in a venture with Blue Owl Capital, it sold off about 80% of the data center to a debt firm and kept a 20% stake a setup the Wall Street Journal dubbed “Frankenstein financing.” The structure lets Meta walk away from the data center after roughly four years. The gas plants would still have about 26 years left, and if Meta leaves, the leftover cost lands on Louisiana households. In February 2026, consumer groups asked the state to investigate; regulators declined. Wisconsin regulators had already named that exact danger out loud, a commissioner warned that overbuilt lines could leave existing customers holding a “huge stranded asset.”

So why do some states protect their customers and others don’t? Follow the money.

The clearest proof isn’t in a data-center case at all, it’s next door in Ohio. The utility FirstEnergy admitted paying about $60 million to pass a 2019 law that stuck roughly $1 billion in bailouts for aging coal and nuclear plants onto customers’ bills, and separately admitted paying $4.3 million to a man just before he became chair of the state’s utility commission. The former Ohio House Speaker who ran the scheme was convicted of federal racketeering and sentenced to 20 years; Ohio ratepayers paid the coal piece for five and a half years, roughly half a billion dollars. That’s not an allegation. It’s a conviction and a corporate admission, a clean picture of what utility money buys when nobody’s watching.

Most utility political spending is perfectly legal and looks nothing like a crime. But it’s aimed at the same target: friendly rules. Virginia is the textbook case. Dominion has been the state’s largest corporate political donor for decades, and it gives to the leaders of both parties. The same General Assembly that writes the laws it operates under. In the 2025 cycle it put more than $3 million into each party; Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell and Appropriations Chair Louise Lucas each took $100,000. For years, a few legislators have tried to ban utility campaign money outright and the bills keep dying in committee. When one such Senate bill went down, nine of the ten senators who voted it down had taken Dominion money. A counterweight group, Clean Virginia, now funds candidates who refuse utility cash, and a growing list of both Democrats and Republicans have started turning Dominion down. For its part, Dominion says its political giving is fully legal, publicly disclosed, and part of participating in the process like anyone else.

None of the Virginia spending is illegal. That’s exactly the point: the influence is legal, which is what makes it durable and the lawmakers who would have to pass a Wisconsin-style rule are the same ones cashing the utility’s checks.

Which brings it back home. The state with the most data centers in the country and, by its own Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission’s estimate, households potentially facing $14 to $37 more a month from the buildout has taken real steps, which we’ve covered. But it hasn’t gone as far as Wisconsin’s flat 100% rule, Utah’s right to say no, or Maryland’s black-and-white order to protect residential customers.

The useful thing about the other states isn’t that they got it perfect. It’s that they knock down the two biggest excuses at once. Big Tech can’t say it can’t afford to pay, it’s spending three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year. And no one can say it can’t be done. Wisconsin did it in April, and the data centers are still coming. What’s left is a question about who your lawmakers work for: the companies that could pay for this out of petty cash, or the people who were already here and can’t switch to anyone else.

Read that definition, then look at Dominion Energy Virginia and the state government that oversees it. We’re not calling anyone a criminal. We’re holding a well-known concept up against the public record and letting you judge the fit. Every claim below links to its source.

Element 1: The monopoly, and the captive customer

Start with the part that makes everything else possible: if you live in Dominion’s territory, you cannot shop for another electric company. More than 8 in 10 Virginians get power from a state-granted monopoly, and Dominion serves about 2.8 million customer accounts. As the ratepayer group Clean Virginia puts it, these companies are “free from the price-setting mechanisms of market competition.” There’s no rival to switch to when the bill climbs.

In exchange for the monopoly, the state is supposed to stand in for competition. The State Corporation Commission (SCC), three judges who regulate utilities, sets how much Dominion can charge and how much profit it’s allowed to earn. That profit is called return on equity (ROE), and it’s the number to watch: Dominion earns a guaranteed return on every wire, plant, and substation it builds. Regulatory economists have flagged the obvious incentive for half a century, a utility paid to build makes more money by building than by running the system efficiently. The whole system rests on one referee doing its job. Keep that referee in mind.

Element 2: The money

Here’s where the definition’s “campaign funds” line gets uncomfortable. For decades, Dominion has been Virginia’s single largest corporate political donor. Clean Virginia tallies more than $34 million to both parties over the past several decades; in the 2025 cycle alone the company spent nearly $15 million across campaigns.

And Virginia makes this easy: the commonwealth sets no limits on how much corporations, PACs, or individuals can give candidates. Which is convenient if you happen to be the biggest giver. In 2018, Dominion donated to 121 of the 140 members of the General Assembly, the same legislators who write the laws that set its profits. The giving is bipartisan by design: recent tallies show the company splitting money almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

What does that money buy? At minimum, a very durable status quo. Bills to bar utilities from donating to the politicians who regulate them have been introduced and killed for years, often in committees stocked with lawmakers who take Dominion’s money. In one year, nine of the ten senators who voted a ban down had received Dominion contributions.

Element 3: When you can’t capture the referee, rewrite the rulebook

The cleanest illustration of the whole idea is a law called SB 1349. In 2015, Dominion won legislation that froze its base rates and suspended the SCC’s regular rate reviews, meaning the referee was legally barred from lowering rates or ordering refunds, even if it found customers were being overcharged. Dominion argued the freeze was needed to shield customers from a coming federal climate rule. That federal rule never took effect. The freeze stayed anyway, for about seven years.

This was not a small thing. Before the freeze, the SCC had found Dominion’s rates were set to overcharge customers by roughly $280 million a year. One SCC commissioner, dissenting when the commission was forced to apply the law, called the idea that the legislature was only “postponing” oversight a “fiction of grand proportion.” A 2018 follow-up, the Grid Transformation and Security Act, let the company reinvest excess earnings in its own projects instead of refunding them. All told, the SCC’s own figures show Dominion overcharged customers by at least $1.9 billion since 2009. Clean Virginia has a blunt name for the markup, the “Dominion Tax,” about $254 a year per household.

Element 4: The tax break

The definition also flags tax breaks handed to favored businesses. Virginia has a spectacular one, though it goes not to Dominion but to its biggest customers, the roughly 450 data centers on Dominion’s grid.

Since 2010, data-center equipment in Virginia has been exempt from the state sales-and-use tax. When it was created, the state projected the break would cost about $1.54 million a year. By fiscal 2025 the actual cost had ballooned to roughly $1.9 billion, that’s not a typo. The exemption now runs more than half of all the money Virginia spends on business incentives combined, and in one recent year accounted for nearly 80% of it.

And these are not job factories. A 250,000-square-foot data center might employ about 25 people; by one watchdog’s math using the state’s own numbers, the break works out to roughly $1.2 million in subsidy per net new job.

In fairness this one isn’t a Dominion special or a partisan gift. The exemption was created by Democrats during the 2008–09 recession, signed under Gov. Tim Kaine and extended to 2035 under Gov. Terry McAuliffe. The industry argues the deal pays off, pointing to state figures crediting data centers with 74,000 jobs and $9.1 billion in annual GDP and a study finding most wouldn’t have built here without it. Other analysts say the state loses about 52 cents on every subsidy dollar. That fight is unresolved and in 2026, Gov. Abigail Spanberger blocked an effort to phase the exemption out, saying she wouldn’t break a deal the state had signed.

Element 5: The rent and who actually pays it

Here’s the piece that lands on your bill. Building the power supply for all those data centers costs a fortune, and under rules set decades ago, much of that cost is spread across every customer, including households whose own usage is flat. Data-center demand has grown eightfold, from 462 megawatts in 2013 to 5.8 gigawatts in 2024, and Dominion is now fielding roughly 70,000 megawatts of large-load requests, far beyond its all-time peak. The regional grid operator’s capacity prices, driven partly by this demand, jumped more than 800% in one recent auction.

The capstone: the whole thing is about to get bigger

Now the stakes jump. On May 18, 2026, Florida-based NextEra Energy announced it would buy Dominion in an all-stock deal worth about $67 billion, the biggest power-company acquisition in U.S. history, creating the world’s largest regulated electric utility. And here’s the part that ties the bow: for it to happen, the deal must be approved by the Virginia SCC, the very regulator this story is about, after a review clock of just 180 days.

Dominion is sweetening the pot with about $1.8 billion in promised bill credits for Virginia customers, roughly $10 a month for a while, though whether customers actually see that is up to regulators. Critics are wary: Clean Virginia points to NextEra’s Florida utility, which just won a roughly $6.9 billion rate increase opponents called the largest in U.S. history, and notes again that “Virginians don’t choose their electric utility.” Lieutenant Gov. Ghazala Hashmi has already asked the SCC to slow down and demand answers to 64 questions before the clock starts, warning of “unprecedented implications for Virginia’s customers.”

The takeaway for the person paying the bill

Strip out the jargon and the arrangement is simple. A monopoly you can’t leave earns a guaranteed profit, set by regulators. The monopoly is the state’s biggest political donor to, under rules the monopoly helped write, while the tax code hands its wealthiest customers a $1.9-billion-a-year break and much of the cost lands on your household. Whether that adds up to “crony capitalism” is a judgment, but now you know what the term means and what the record shows.

The levers, if you want them, are public: the SCC’s docket for the merger and rate cases, the legislature’s work group reviewing the data-center exemption this fall, and the campaign-finance bills that die in committee every year, until enough people who pay the bill decide they shouldn’t.

Start with the households. In 2024, all 2.4 million of Dominion Energy Virginia’s residential customers used a combined 28.7 million megawatt-hours of electricity. Spread evenly across the 8,784 hours in a leap year, that works out to an average continuous draw of about 3.3 gigawatts, roughly the round-the-clock output of three large nuclear reactors, shared among every home Dominion serves in Virginia.

But homes don’t use power evenly. Residential demand spikes on hot summer afternoons and frigid winter mornings, then drops off overnight. Dominion’s all-time system peak, every customer at once, was about 24.6 gigawatts, hit during a cold snap in January 2025. PJM, the regional grid operator, records similar highs. The point is that a home’s average draw is a small fraction of its peak, and the peak is what forces a utility to build.

The Data Center Math

That is exactly where data centers change the grid. They run around the clock at near-constant load, meaning their average draw sits almost exactly at their peak.

By early 2026, Dominion’s pipeline of data-center power requests had swelled to an astonishing 70 gigawatts. That pipeline is nearly triple Dominion’s all-time peak for the entire grid, and more than 20 times the average draw of every household in the state combined. To prevent phantom projects from clogging the system, Dominion was forced to rewrite its rules in early 2026, capping preliminary design requests at 300 megawatts at a time.

A Historic Capital Surge

Meeting the demand that is real requires unprecedented new generation and transmission lines. To fund it, Dominion recently updated its five-year (2025–2029) capital expenditure plan to a massive $50.1 billion, explicitly earmarking $17 billion specifically for data center growth and the clean energy transition.

At the regional level, supply is buckling under the strain. In December 2025, PJM’s capacity auction fell 6.6 gigawatts short of its reliability requirement. To prevent a supply crisis without bankrupting households, PJM stakeholders approved a “Reliability Backstop Procurement” plan in June 2026. This triggered a special one-time capacity auction set for September 2026, using a subscription model designed to bill massive data centers directly for the power procured on their behalf.

Building Financial Firewalls

Virginia regulators are deploying their own firewalls to keep the long-term costs of this buildout off ordinary ratepayers. In 2026, the State Corporation Commission (SCC) finalized the aggressive terms for the new “GS-5” rate class, which takes effect January 1, 2027, for customers demanding 25 megawatts or more.

The GS-5 class shifts the multi-million-dollar risk of underutilization directly to tech operators through two mechanisms:

• 14-Year Minimum Contracts: Data centers must commit to the grid for over a decade, with steep collateral requirements in case they default.

• The 85% Demand Floor: If a facility requests 100 megawatts but only ever uses 50, they are legally required to pay for 85. This ensures operators cannot artificially hoard grid capacity without paying for the generation and transmission infrastructure Dominion had to build to serve them.

Despite these long-term protections, the upfront costs of upgrading the grid today are already landing on residential bills. Following an SCC base rate review, residential consumers saw their bills rise in January 2026, an increase of over $11 a month for a standard 1,000-kWh home with another hike scheduled for January 2027.

So the next time Dominion or a data-center developer talks in “gigawatts,” remember it isn’t the unit on your bill and ask whether they mean average or peak. A single flat-load data campus drawing three gigawatts leans on the grid harder, and more constantly, than 2.4 million homes that average the same, because the homes’ peak comes and goes, and the data center’s never does. The gap between those two numbers is exactly where the cost lands.

Until this year, Dominion Energy Virginia billed that building the way it billed an office park. Or a grocery store. Same general commercial rate class. Same bucket.

On November 25, 2025, the State Corporation Commission decided that had to stop. The three regulators who set electricity prices in Virginia created a new category, GS-5 for any customer demanding 25 megawatts or more. It takes effect January 1, 2027. The Commission’s stated goal, in its own words, is ensuring data centers pay their own costs.

That is a real change, and it is worth understanding precisely.

It is also not a rate cut. In the same order, on the same day, the Commission approved base-rate increases of $565.7 million for 2026 and another $209.9 million for 2027. For a typical residential customer, that is $11.24 more per month next year and another $2.36 the year after. Dominion had asked for more, $822 million and $345 million and got less. But less than what a utility asks for is still an increase.

What a rate class is, and why it decides who pays

Every customer of a regulated utility sits in a bucket. Households in one. Small businesses in another. The utility charges everyone in a given bucket the same rates.

The buckets matter because of something called cost allocation, the process of deciding which group of customers pays for which power lines, which substations, which generating plants. Utilities do not simply bill for the electrons you consume. They bill you for a share of the machinery built to deliver them.

Here is the problem that creates. When one customer’s demand forces a utility to build something expensive, and the cost of that thing gets spread across every bucket, the other buckets are paying for a decision they had no part in. That is a subsidy. It does not require anyone to behave badly. It only requires the buckets to be drawn in the wrong places.

For years in Virginia, a data center’s demand sat in the same bucket as a dentist’s office.

Creating GS-5 is step one, the bucket now exists. The Commission will set rates for it separately, based on what it actually costs to serve those customers.

Who ends up inside it

The threshold is 25 megawatts of demand. Most data centers clear it without effort; many clear it by a factor of ten or more.

They are not alone in there. The Newport News shipyard is large enough to qualify. GS-5 is written around data centers, but it is not written only for them, and that distinction may matter later.

The four obligations

Beyond a separate rate, the Commission attached conditions.

A minimum monthly charge. GS-5 customers must pay at least 85% of the transmission and distribution costs of serving them every month, whether or not they use the electricity. Think of a gym membership. You pay whether or not you show up. This applies to new and existing large customers alike, with one exception: anyone whose service began before January 1, 2016, is exempt.

A 14-year commitment. Any large-load customer signing a service agreement on or after January 1, 2027, must take and pay for electricity for at least fourteen years. The logic is not complicated. Dominion builds generation and transmission on the assumption that announced demand is real demand. If a company declares it needs 500 megawatts, triggers a decade of construction, and then walks away, the plants and lines still exist. They stay in the rate base. Everyone else pays for them.

Collateral. New GS-5 customers without sufficient credit may be required to guarantee up to 60% of their minimum charges across the full contract term, money Dominion can collect if the customer defaults.

Interconnection review. The Commission ordered Dominion to submit its process for connecting large customers to the grid for regulatory approval, due on or before February 2, 2026.

What the order leaves unfinished

The Commission also raised Dominion’s authorized return on equity, the profit percentage regulators guarantee shareholders on money the company invests, from 9.7% to 9.8%. Dominion had asked for 10.4%.

And it did not, in fact, finish the cost allocation. The Commission ordered Dominion to file alternative allocation proposals in future proceedings: generation costs in the next biennial review, transmission costs in the next rider case. Until those cases are decided, the decades-old formulas still govern who pays for what.

The retroactivity is also narrower than it first appears. The rate class covers both new and existing customers above the threshold. The 14-year contract and the collateral requirement bind only customers who sign on or after January 1, 2027.

Why environmental groups called it a win

The Southern Environmental Law Center, which intervened in the case, said the Commission shifted financial responsibility onto Dominion’s largest customers while approving a smaller increase than the utility sought.

The Piedmont Environmental Council made a more fundamental argument during the proceeding: Dominion does not separately track what data centers cost it to serve. If you do not measure it, you cannot know whether they are paying their way. That, more than any rate figure, is the reason a separate class exists at all.

The Thomas Jefferson Institute read the same outcome from a different direction and reached a different conclusion. The final terms, it noted, came out close to Dominion’s own proposal. The utility got most of what it asked for on GS-5. A compromise floated by the data center companies was largely rejected.

Both readings can be true. Dominion wanted this bucket too.

Three dates

January 1, 2027. GS-5 takes effect. The first 14-year contracts begin.

The 2027 biennial review. Dominion must put forward a new method for allocating generation costs. That proceeding determines how much of the buildout lands on residential bills. If you follow only one of these, follow that one.

The merger. On May 15, 2026, Dominion agreed to be acquired by NextEra Energy in an all-stock deal valued around $67 billion. The companies have not yet filed with the SCC. Once they do, state law gives regulators six months to rule. On July 6, 2026, Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi wrote the Commission asking it to require answers to 64 questions before that clock starts running.

GS-5 is a Virginia rule, written for a Virginia utility, by three Virginia regulators. Whether it survives a change of ownership is a question no one has answered.

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In 2007, the average Dominion residential customer paid $90.59 a month. Today, after a fuel increase in July and a base-rate increase in January, Dominion’s first base-rate increase since 1992 a typical bill runs somewhere between $160 and $178.

And Dominion’s own long-range plan, filed with state regulators, projects a typical bill of roughly $255 a month by 2035. That’s nearly triple the 2007 bill (a 181% increase), just to keep the lights on.

Two things you need to know before anything else makes sense

Dominion is a monopoly. If you live in its territory, you can’t shop around. You buy electricity from Dominion or you sit in the dark.

Because it’s a monopoly, the government sets its prices. In Virginia, that job belongs to the State Corporation Commission, or SCC, think of it as the referee that decides what Dominion is allowed to charge you. But here’s the catch: the General Assembly writes the rules the referee has to follow.

In 2023, the General Assembly changed the rules.

The politician who carried the bill

Terry Kilgore has represented far southwest Virginia in the House of Delegates since 1994. In November 2025, his caucus elected him House Republican leader. He hasn’t faced a serious general-election opponent since 2007.

So if nobody’s really running against him, why would Dominion give him so much money?

Before Kilgore sponsored Dominions bill, he had received at least $435,891 from Dominion over his entire career. In 2023, the year he carried the bill, he received roughly $465,000. More in one year than in the previous three decades combined. By late 2025, his career total from Dominion was reportedly approaching $1 million.

He took the most, but he wasn’t alone. Of the 52 delegates who voted for the bill, 49 had taken Dominion money, nearly $2.4 million combined.

What the law did to your bill

When the Dominion bill became law, Dominion’s spokesman called it “a win for consumers.” Ratepayer advocates called it “a bill written by Dominion for Dominion.”

Some background: the rules that existed before this law had already let Dominion overcharge customers by roughly $2 billion over 15 years, according to state regulators. The new law did three big things.

1. It raised Dominion’s guaranteed profit

This is the part nobody explains. Because Dominion is a regulated monopoly, the law guarantees its shareholders a profit. When Dominion spends money building power plants, poles, and wires, it gets to charge customers enough to cover those costs plus a profit on top.

Dominions bill raised that guaranteed profit rate from 9.35% to 9.7%. (Early drafts of the bill wanted 10.07%.) It also tied future profit rates to what utilities earn in seven other states, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. So Virginia’s rate now follows the pack instead of being set independently.

A fraction of a percent sounds small. It isn’t. State regulators estimated the profit provisions would cost customers about $4 billion.

One more thing to understand. Since Dominion’s profit is a percentage of what it spends on building things, the company makes more money by building more stuff. You pay for the stuff, and you pay the profit on the stuff.

2. It hid charges instead of removing them

Your Dominion bill isn’t one price. On top of the base rate, there are separate surcharges called riders. Each one a line item that pays for a specific project, like a new power plant or a wind farm. Think of them like the fees stacked at the bottom of a cable bill.

Dominions bill took about $350 million a year of these rider charges and folded them into the base rate. The visible line items on your bill dropped by about $6.75 a month, which let supporters say the law cut bills.

But the costs didn’t go down. They just stopped being labeled. You kept paying the same money. A cost with its own line on your bill is a cost you can question. A cost blended into the base rate is invisible.

3. It put you on a payment plan for fuel that’s already been burned

During the fuel price spikes, Dominion spent about $1.3 billion more on fuel than it collected from customers at the time. This bill let Dominion handle that through something called securitization, a word designed to make your eyes glaze over, so here’s what it actually means.

Dominion borrowed the money from investors, and you are paying those investors back, with financing costs, over 7.25 years, through a line on your bill called the “Deferred Fuel Cost Charge.”

The power company put last year’s fuel on a loan, and your name is on the payments. You’re paying interest on gas that was burned years ago. And a second round, roughly $1 billion more is pending right now.

The riders that were left on your bill keep growing

The riders that didn’t get folded into base rates tell you where this is going.

A Rider called RPS, which pays for Virginia’s renewable-energy requirements, was 18 cents a month in 2021. Today it’s $7.98. Offshore wind adds $11.23. Transmission adds $11.79. Altogether, a typical bill carries about $43 a month in riders before you flip a single light switch.

Remember that the next time a new charge is introduced as “only a few dollars a month.” Rider RPS started at 18 cents.

This is coming to your neighborhood next

The biggest driver of future bills is data centers. Virginia already has more of them than anywhere else on Earth, and they use enormous amounts of electricity.

In Central Virginia, the SCC just approved a 944-megawatt, $1.47 billion gas plant with its own new rider on customer bills, largely to serve that growth. Nearby, Google is building three data-center campuses as part of a $9 billion Virginia investment.

Here’s the question that will decide your bill for the next decade. When new plants and power lines get built to serve data centers, who pays? The companies creating the demand, or households? Under the current rules, those costs land on residential bills. And remember the incentive, the more Dominion builds, the more guaranteed profit it earns.

One story that explains the whole system

According to AP reporting compiled by the Energy and Policy Institute. Kilgore worked as a paid fundraiser for the Appalachian College of Pharmacy, earning about $126,000. In 2012, Dominion donated $10,000 to that school and the SCC allowed $4,000 of that donation to be counted as a cost of doing business, charged to ratepayers.

Money from your power bill helped fund a donation to the school that was paying your delegate.

Every dollar of this is legal and that’s the problem

Nobody has been charged with anything. There’s no proof any donation bought any vote. And in Virginia, none of it has to be hidden, because Virginia has no meaningful limits on campaign contributions.

Dominion has been the state’s largest corporate political donor since 1997, giving to both parties. $13.1 million in 2022–23, and $19.3 million in 2024–25.

That’s why this should bother you. Nothing has to be bought. The system just has to keep working out this way, year after year, bill after bill, with the people who write the rules funded by the monopoly the rules are supposed to control.

Bills to ban utilities from donating to the legislators who regulate them get filed nearly every year. They die in committee, often without a recorded vote, under both parties. That keeps happening because, so far, there’s been no political cost to letting it happen.

What you can actually do

You don’t need a law degree for any of this:

1. Look up your own delegate. The Virginia Public Access Project (vpap.org) tracks every donation. Search your delegate’s name and see what they’ve taken from Dominion.

2. Tell the referee what you think. SCC rate cases have public comment periods, and regulators read what ratepayers submit. You can comment through the SCC’s website.

3. Ask one question. The next time someone asks for your vote, ask them: “Do you take money from the monopoly you regulate?” Then watch how they answer.

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You're not paying for the grid with taxes at all and the tax money is flowing the other direction.

Roads, bridges, schools, water systems, tax-funded public infrastructure. The electric grid is not on that list. Every substation, transmission line, and power plant in Dominion's territory is private, investor-owned property, funded one way, through your electric rates, with a state-guaranteed 9.8% profit stacked on top. Even the tax lines on your actual bill the sales-and-use surcharge, the consumption tax, the county utility tax flow to government general funds. Not one of those dollars goes back into the grid.

So no, you are not taxed to maintain the grid. The tax relationship between you and Dominion runs backwards, three ways.

One: you pay their income taxes. A regulated utility's rates are built from a "revenue requirement" everything it costs to run the business, plus profit. Income taxes are counted as a cost of the business. They're baked into the rates you pay, the same as poles and payroll. When Dominion owes taxes, the money comes from you.

Two: they often don't owe much anyway. In 2018, the year after the corporate tax cut, Dominion reported $3.02 billion in U.S. profit. It’s federal income tax bill? It didn't have one. It received a $45 million rebate, an effective rate of negative one percent using accelerated depreciation, $21 million in alternative-energy subsidies, and $59 million in investment tax credits. And Dominion wasn't an outlier; it was the industry standard. Across the first five years of that tax law, ITEP found gas and electric utilities as an entire industry paid a collective federal rate of negative 0.1% — zero, taken as a whole, mostly by immediately writing off their capital spending.

The capital spending that raises your bill the $65 billion plan, every substation earning its 9.8% is the same capital spending that erases their federal tax bill through depreciation write-offs. The buildout charges you coming and going, you fund the project through rates, you fund their return on the project, you fund the income-tax line in your rates, and the project itself wipes out the actual taxes owed.

Three: federal taxpayers subsidize the projects directly. Offshore wind projects that began construction before 2026 qualify for a 30% federal investment tax credit. On a roughly $11 billion project like Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, that's on the order of $3 billion in federal tax credits. To be fair in regulated ratemaking, those credits are supposed to flow back to customers over time as offsets to the rider you're paying. But that means taxpayers in Ohio and Texas are helping underwrite a Virginia utility's project and Dominion earns its guaranteed return on the gross cost regardless.

And Virginia added its own layer. The state's sales tax exemption for data center equipment — the customers driving the buildout cost $2.73 billion in forgone revenue in just four fiscal years (2021–2024), per the legislature's own watchdog. Follow the whole loop, taxpayers subsidize the data centers, ratepayers fund the grid the data centers need, ratepayers pay the utility's tax allowance, and the utility's actual federal tax bill rounds to zero or below.

The infrastructure is kept current by your electric bill, at a guaranteed profit, by a company whose taxes you pay and who, some years, pays none.

They're not freeloading on the system. They are the system.

Last June, the fuel charge on our bill was 2.0733 cents per kilowatt-hour. This June: 2.9680 cents. Up 43.2% in one year and that matches the State Corporation Commission’s approved fuel factor to the fourth decimal place, so this isn’t a billing error.

Fuel is supposed to be the “honest” part of the bill, a pure pass-through, no profit allowed. But pass-through cuts one way. When a January cold snap forced Dominion to buy expensive gas and wholesale power, customers absorbed 100% of it. Dominion is now carrying $1.078 billion in past fuel costs it hasn’t collected yet, $567 million from a single cold month and its proposal is to finance that debt and bill you roughly $1.80 a month for ten years, with interest, to pay it off. You may already be paying the last installment plan, it’s the “Deferred Fuel Cost Charge” line on your bill.

Divide every line of the bill by the kilowatt-hours used, and the all-in price of electricity at our house went from 14.70 cents to 17.47 cents per kWh, up 18.8% in a single year, with our usage mathematically removed. Generation alone rose 21.7%. Nothing about our house changed. What changed is what each kilowatt-hour has to carry. A base-rate increase, an offshore wind rider, a nuclear-study rider, transmission step-ups, and that 43% fuel jump, each approved in its own separate proceeding, so no single headline ever showed the total.

833%, this is the data center number. PJM, the 13-state grid operator that includes Virginia, runs an annual auction to pay power plants for being available at peak demand. That capacity price went from $28.92 to $269.92 per megawatt-day in one auction, up 833% and Virginia’s zone cleared at $444.26, the highest anywhere in the region. The next auction hit the federal price cap.

Why? PJM’s own independent market monitor answered: data centers were responsible for 63% of the increase, $9.3 billion in higher costs in a single year, passed to ratepayers across thirteen states.

And the buildout is just starting. In February, PJM approved $11.8 billion in new transmission, $4.8 billion of it Dominion’s, including a $2.3 billion underground line designed to deliver 3,000 megawatts into Loudoun County’s data center alley, with costs shared across the region. Dominion raised its five-year capital plan 30% to $65 billion. And here’s the part that explains everything. Dominion earns a guaranteed 9.8% return on the infrastructure it builds. The more grid it pours, the more profit it books and the bill lands on the one customer class that can’t negotiate, can’t relocate, and can’t say no.

Amazon can leave. Google can leave. You can’t. 43%, 18.8%, 833%, multiply that against your own bill, and then remember the number they announced: $11.24.

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A former bank auditor who was told he'd never make it into the Bureau, Seamus landed on the legendary C-10 squad as a brand-new agent in 1998 just as a botched World Trade Center robbery cracked open one of the most significant organized crime cases in FBI history. Assigned to arrest violent DeCavalcante soldier Anthony Capo, the rookie agent chose respect over intimidation, played a patient game of mental chess, and did what no one in the family's 100-year history had ever done: he got a made member to flip.

Seamus takes us deep into the real-life world that inspired The Sopranos - the panel of bosses, the Queens strip club, the murders, and a consensual recording of mobsters watching the show and naming which characters were them. Along the way he breaks down how cooperation actually works: proffers, "eating the indictment," the Witness Security Program, RICO and its predicate acts, and why numbers beat letters when it comes to a plea.

He also shares the human cost — contracts on his witness and on law enforcement, losing his father mid-case, 9/11 grinding everything to a halt, friends lost in the towers, and a White House commendation for dismantling not one but two crime families at once.

A masterclass in patience, teamwork, and the principle that carried his whole career: persistence beats resistance, and credit will find you.

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On Saturday afternoon, President Trump posted that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated” and would be “announced shortly,” and that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. By Sunday morning, the tone had shifted hard. In a new Truth Social post, he wrote that he’d told his negotiators “not to rush into a deal” because “time is on our side,” and that the U.S. blockade would stay “in full force and effect until an agreement is reached, certified, and signed.”

That’s not a small drift. That’s “announce it any minute” on Saturday and “let’s not rush this” on Sunday. And the reporting suggests it wasn’t simply strategic patience that was there all along: per NBC News, the walk back came after senior Republican lawmakers warned that a deal could be a “disastrous mistake.” When the public position moves that fast, that’s worth noticing on its own regardless of what you think the right Iran policy is.

What’s actually in the deal

This part is real and increasingly corroborated by both sides. According to U.S. officials and matching reports from Iranian state media, the framework on the table is roughly, a 60-day ceasefire extension; the Strait of Hormuz reopens with no tolls and Iran clears the mines it laid there; the U.S. lifts its naval blockade on Iranian ports; some sanctions relief and a phased unfreezing of Iranian assets; an official declaration that the war has ended; and a 60-day window to negotiate the thing this was all supposedly about, Iran’s nuclear program.

The notable new development as of this morning. Iran is no longer just being described by Washington as a willing party. Iranian state media reported the deal could return Hormuz shipping to “pre-war levels” within 30 days, and President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran is “ready to assure the world” it isn’t seeking nuclear weapons. That’s the first real sign of Iranian buy-in, which matters, because the entire problem with the last ceasefire was that one side announced peace the other side hadn’t agreed to.

It is also where the sharpest criticism lives, and it’s not a partisan one. The Hill noted, the emerging deal would not impose immediate restrictions on Iran, and the nuclear material already inside the country would stay there. You can think that’s an acceptable price to end a war that’s spiking gas to record highs, or you can think it’s the core flaw. But that’s the real debate, not the one happening in the Truth Social post.

The claim that gets the history backwards

The Sunday post leans hard on a familiar contrast, that the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal was “one of the worst deals ever,” a “direct path to Iran developing a Nuclear Weapon,” and that the current negotiation is “THE EXACT OPPOSITE.”

Two of those are political characterization. But “direct path to a weapon” is a factual claim, and it inverts what the 2015 deal actually did. That agreement capped Iran’s uranium enrichment at under 4 percent, nowhere near weapons grade, slashed its centrifuges, cut its stockpile by about 98 percent, and subjected it to intrusive IAEA inspections that repeatedly certified Iran was complying.

The strongest critique was always that its key limits were temporary, the “sunset clauses” set to expire in the late 2020s and 2030s, meaning it delayed an Iranian weapon rather than permanently foreclosing one. That’s a real argument. But “delayed it with caps and inspections” is close to the opposite of “direct path to a weapon.”

And here’s the uncomfortable irony for the “exact opposite” framing. The deal now being negotiated reportedly leaves Iran’s existing nuclear material in place with no immediate restrictions. Anyone could ask how a deal that defers restrictions is the opposite of a deal that imposed them.

The Abraham Accords line

The post closes by thanking Middle Eastern countries for their cooperation and floating that “perhaps the Islamic Republic of Iran would like to join” the Abraham Accords “as well!”

The Abraham Accords are the 2020 agreements in which several Arab states normalized relations with Israel. The entire premise is recognition of, and ties with, Israel. Iran “joining” would mean Iran recognizing Israel, a state whose destruction is a foundational pillar of the Islamic Republic’s identity, and a country the U.S. and Israel are currently at war with, three months after a joint strike killed Iran’s Supreme Leader.

That’s why the sentence “who knows, perhaps.” is only aimed at people who do not know any better.

Said vs. Did, in real time

This is the part that ties the weekend together, and it’s why I keep urging caution before celebration. We have watched this exact sequence before, six weeks ago.

On April 8, a ceasefire was announced with confidence; the President called it a big day for world peace and said most major issues were resolved. What followed, both sides violated it within days, the follow up talks in Pakistan collapsed, and the U.S. responded with a naval blockade. That ceasefire technically still “exists” on paper and has been violated essentially the entire time.

So when the language this weekend went from “announced shortly” to “time is on our side” in a day, the honest read is, we’ve heard the optimistic version before, and the gap between the announcement and the reality was six weeks of blockade and stalemate.

What to actually watch

If you want to know whether this one is real, here are the three things that will tell you, and they’re things you can verify yourself.

First, does Iran confirm it in Iran’s own words, through its own government, not just through U.S. characterization?

Second, do the mines actually come out of the Strait, and does shipping resume?

Third, does it hold past two weeks? Because last time, two weeks is exactly where it broke.

A signed framework is not peace. “Largely negotiated” is not “certified and signed.” And a Truth Social post is not a treaty.

Within a single budget cycle, the experiment would collapse. Not metaphorically, mathematically, line-item by line-item. The schools in Henry County would not open in August. The sheriff’s office in Lee County would not make payroll. The state share of road maintenance in Buchanan and Dickenson would be gone. Medicaid reimbursements at small hospitals from Galax to Emporia would be cut to the bone. And Virginia’s AAA bond rating, one of the last ratings standing among the 50 states would be on the table within months.

That is not hyperbole. That is what the numbers say.

The fiscal map and the political map are mirror images

Northern Virginia is roughly 29.4% of the state’s population, but it generates roughly 42% of Virginia’s general fund revenue, contributes 47.4% of all individual income tax collected by the Commonwealth, and accounts for 46.3% of state GDP. Fairfax County alone, one locality, one board of supervisors, contributes about $4 billion to state income tax collections, or roughly 23.4% of the total, while receiving back only 8.7% of cost adjusted intergovernmental revenues. Put plainly, nearly a quarter of every income tax dollar that flows into Richmond is generated in a single suburban county.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The 2025 State of the Commonwealth Report, published in December by the Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy at Old Dominion University, wrote an entire chapter called “Is It Better to Give Than Receive? Exploring the Distributional Dimension of Virginia’s Budget”. It includes mapping which Virginia localities are net contributors to the state and which are net beneficiaries. The headline finding, distilled by Cardinal News editor Dwayne Yancey in a December 22 column, is blunt: 22 Virginia localities subsidize the other 111.Eight of the ten biggest “givers” are in or around Northern Virginia. Nine of the ten biggest “takers” are in Southwest and Southside.

The political map is almost to identical. Compare ODU’s giver list with how those same places voted in November 2024 and November 2025. Falls Church, Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax County, Fairfax City, Loudoun County, Charlottesville, Albemarle, Richmond City, Henrico, and James City County all backed Kamala Harris in 2024 and Spanberger by even larger margins in 2025. James City was notable enough that Wikipedia’s election summary highlighted Trump as “the first Republican to win the presidency without carrying James City County since Richard Nixon in 1968.”

Now look at the taker list: Henry, Lee, Wise, Dickenson, Buchanan, Tazewell, Russell, Patrick, Halifax, Norton, Buena Vista, Galax, Covington, Martinsville, Emporia. With one significant exception Petersburg, these are the same precincts where Trump cleared 70% and where Winsome Earle-Sears posted her best numbers on her way to a 15.4 point statewide loss.

Virginia’s political geography, in other words, is an almost perfect match of its fiscal geography. The places that yell loudest about being ignored by Richmond are the places Richmond is paying to keep solvent.

The math, in dollars per resident

The cleanest way to see this is per capita. Using the ODU figures published in Cardinal News, every resident of Falls Church sends $3,799 a year to the state government and gets back just $1,123 in services, a net contribution of $2,676 per person. Multiply that across a small but affluent jurisdiction and you can see the engine churning. Travel 350 miles southwest to the city of Norton, and the polarity reverses: each Norton resident sends $628 a year to Richmond and receives $3,153 back, a net subsidy of $2,526 per person. The dollars Falls Church loses on net are, roughly, the dollars Norton receives on net. That is not a metaphor about “two Virginias.” That is a wire transfer.

The dependence ratios are even starker when you measure each locality’s total budget. Fairfax City is the least dependent local government in the Commonwealth. It raises 86.6% of its own funding and takes only 13.1% of its budget from the state and a microscopic 0.3% from the federal government. Henry County, in Southside, sits at the opposite end. Henry raises only 14.6% of its own funding; the state supplies 65.4% of the county’s budget and the federal government supplies the rest, for a combined 85.4% reliance on outside governments. By any reasonable definition, Henry County is not a sovereign rural county. It is, as Yancey put it in Cardinal News, “practically a ward of the state.”

Henry is not alone. ODU identifies 19 Virginia localities that get a majority of their funding from the state government before you even count federal dollars. The list reads like a roll call of the Republican voter map, Alleghany, Appomattox, Craig, Giles, Greensville, Halifax, Henry, Lee, Lunenburg, New Kent, Nottoway, Patrick, Pittsylvania, Russell, Tazewell, Wise, and Wythe counties, plus the cities of Buena Vista and Radford. With the single exception of New Kent, a fast-growing county between Richmond and Williamsburg. Every one of them is in Southwest or Southside. Every one of them voted Republican for governor in 2025. And every one of them, without state aid, would not be able to fund its public schools.

What blue tax dollars actually pay for downstate

Virginia’s general fund is on track to be roughly $32 billion in fiscal 2026 (general fund revenues totaled $31.2 billion in FY 2025 per the state’s own revenue forecast), with about 70% of that drawn from individual income taxes, the line item Northern Virginia dominates. That money does not vanish into a Richmond vault. It pays directly for the basic functioning of local government in the parts of the state that distrust Richmond most.

Start with K–12 schools. The state funds its share of the Standards of Quality through a Local Composite Index that explicitly redistributes from wealthier to poorer localities. The introduced 2026 budget alone provides $543.8 million over the biennium for SOQ. Without that transfer, divisions like Lee, Buchanan, Wise, and Henry, which already cannot meet their local match without strain would be looking at teacher layoffs and consolidated schools by Labor Day. When we add Medicaid, Virginia’s expansion population is funded with a federal state match that requires the state to put up roughly 10% of the bill for hundreds of thousands of low income Virginians, a disproportionate share of whom live in rural Southside and Southwest. The general fund dollars that cover that match are, again, mostly raised in Fairfax, Loudoun, and Arlington. Add VDOT secondary road maintenance. Every paved mile in Patrick County and every mountain switchback in Buchanan is fixed with money raised somewhere else. Add the state’s share of compensation for sheriff’s deputies, commonwealth’s attorneys, clerks of court, and registrars under the Compensation Board. In rural counties with thin local tax bases, those state funded salaries are not a contribution to the local justice system they are the local justice system.

Even outside NoVA, the givers are blue

It is worth mentioning that one more pattern in the ODU data. Northern Virginia gets the headline because it is the biggest source of money, but it is not the only blue island propping up red counties. According to the report, five localities supply roughly 90% of the state’s net intergovernmental contribution: Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Arlington County, Alexandria and Albemarle County, the home of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia. Richmond City, Henrico, James City County, and the City of Charlottesville itself also rank as net givers. Every one of them voted for Harris in 2024 and Spanberger in 2025.

The exceptions are instructive rather than disqualifying. Two rural Chesapeake Bay counties, Lancaster and Northumberland, sneak onto the giver list largely because affluent retirees moving in from elsewhere have inflated their per capita income tax base. Bedford and Montgomery counties land near the bottom of the giver list Montgomery in particular because it is, in essence, a college town built around Virginia Tech. The pattern is consistent, where there is a concentrated knowledge economy workforce, there is a net giver. Where there is not, there is a net taker. And in 2024–25 Virginia, the knowledge economy precincts vote blue.

The political irony and a real-world warning

This is where the rhetoric breaks down on contact with the ledger. The story rural Virginia tells about itself independent, self sufficient, fed up with subsidizing welfare for someone else is, in fiscal terms, the exact opposite of what is happening. The transfer is going the other direction, and it is going there at scale. Henry County is not subsidizing Fairfax. Fairfax is subsidizing Henry, by something close to two-to-one on a per capita balance of payments basis.

There is also a near term reason this stops being an academic exercise. The 2025 ODU report and a parallel UVA Weldon Cooper analysis both document that Northern Virginia is now losing jobs as Trump administration federal layoffs, DOGE cuts, and tariff disruptions ripple through the region’s federal contractor economy. Virginia’s GDP growth has fallen from 6.2% to 1.7%. Moody’s Analytics has placed Virginia on its list of states “in or close to” recession. And while S&P reaffirmed Virginia’s AAA rating in 2025, a status Maryland just lost, the rating agencies have been explicit that the Commonwealth’s fiscal strength rests on the income tax engine of Northern Virginia. If that engine sputters, the people who feel it first will not be the lobbyists in Tysons. They will be the school superintendents in Wise and the Medicaid patients in Martinsville.

So the next time someone in Galax or Tazewell says that Virginia would be better off if it just gave Northern Virginia to DC and let the “real Virginia” govern itself, it is worth running the numbers back through the calculator one more time. Send Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, Alexandria, and Falls Church to the District, and Virginia loses roughly 42 cents of every dollar in its general fund overnight. The schools that close first would not be in Reston.

The data is the data. Virginia’s blue counties are the ones keeping the lights on. The political map and the fiscal map are pointing in opposite directions and only one of them pays the bills.

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Sources and further reading: Old Dominion University, “2025 State of the Commonwealth Report” (Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy), particularly Part 4, “Is It Better to Give Than Receive?”; Dwayne Yancey, “Northern Virginia and the Richmond exurbs subsidize the rest of the state. Here’s the math,” Cardinal News, Dec. 22, 2025; Cardinal News, “Virginia’s GDP growth drops from 6.2% to 1.7%,” Oct. 21, 2025; Virginia Department of Planning and Budget, FY 2026 revenue forecast and budget documents; Virginia Department of Elections, certified 2024 presidential and 2025 gubernatorial returns; The Center Square, “Virginia retains ‘AAA’ bond rating from S&P,” 2025; VPM News and NPR coverage of the 2025 statewide elections; Virginia Public Access Project locality-level vote maps.

On April 21, 2026, Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment letting the General Assembly redraw the Commonwealth’s congressional districts mid decade, overriding the bipartisan redistricting commission that voters had created by a 66-34 margin in 2020. Less than 24 hours later, a circuit court judge in Tazewell County ordered the State Board of Elections not to certify the result and ruled the entire amendment process “void ab initio.” (void from the beginning) The Supreme Court of Virginia hears oral argument Monday, April 27.

This fight isn’t about whether the amendment is constitutional. It’s a fight on whether the general assembly violated the Virginia constitution to get it to a vote.

Either way, the result will land before the Virginia Supreme Court, and the decision will set the procedural rules for every constitutional amendment in the Commonwealth for decades to come.

The Timeline

April 17, 2024 — HJR 428

The General Assembly passes House Joint Resolution 428 by a two-thirds vote, formally calling on Gov. Glenn Youngkin to convene a special session “for the purpose of considering Budget Bills.” This is the constitutional trigger under Article IV, SubSection 6, special sessions can only be called by the Governor or by a 2/3 vote of each house.

May 13, 2024 — HJR 6001

On the first day of the special session, both chambers adopt House Joint Resolution 6001, the procedural resolution governing how the special session would conduct business. Like any ordinary joint resolution, it was passed by simple majority under the standard Article IV, SubSection11 threshold, the actual votes happened to be 99-0 in the House and 39-1 in the Senate, but only a majority was required.

The important text says that “except with unanimous consent of the house in which the legislation is offered, no bill, joint resolution, or resolution shall be offered or considered” outside five enumerated categories: Budget Bills and revenue bills; single house commending and memorial resolutions; resolutions affecting rules of procedure or schedule of business; election of judges; and confirmation of appointments. Redistricting and constitutional amendments are not on that list.

This will become important later. HJR 6001 was a majority passed procedural resolution that contained an internal unanimous consent rule. Whether that internal rule binds future majorities is one of the central legal questions in the case.

Same day — HB 6001 (the budget bill)

Lawmakers pass the budget. The session’s stated purpose is fulfilled. But the legislature does not formally adjourn the special session the Senate never gavels out. The session remains technically open.

November 2024 — November 2025

The 2024 Special Session sits open while the 2025 regular session convenes in January 2025 and runs alongside the still open special session.

This is the resolution that almost no one talks about, but it changes the entire legal analysis. On the same day the 2025 regular session adjourns, the General Assembly gavels back into the 2024 Special Session and passes House Joint Resolution 6004.

HJR 6004 does three things:

1. Adds a sixth substantive category of permissible business: bills or resolutions addressing “the impacts upon the Commonwealth, its budget, and its services due to layoffs, firings, or reductions in force by the federal government, changes to federal government programs, actions of the Department of Government Efficiency, and other actions affecting the Commonwealth relating to the federal budget.” This is a substantive scope expansion federal cuts/DOGE response is not “considering Budget Bills” as HJR 428 originally specified.

2. The Resolved Finally clause says HJR 6001’s procedural framework “shall not be applicable beginning on February 22, 2025.”

3. Preserves only the 48-hour Budget Bill consideration rule (which can be waived by 2/3 vote of those voting).

The vote tallies are important: Senate 40-0, House 59-38.

All 40 Senators voted Yes and thirty eight House Republicans voted No on HJR 6004 but they didn’t sue. They didn’t claim it violated HJR 6001’s unanimous consent rule. They didn’t claim it violated Article IV SubSection 6’s 2/3 requirement. The General Assembly proceeded to operate under HJR 6004’s framework for eight months without challenge.

April 2025 — November 2025

After HJR 6004 passes, the 2024 Special Session continues operating under its expanded framework. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s term winds down. Democrats win more seats in the November 2025 elections including Virginia’s current Governor, Abigail Spanberger.

October 27, 2025 — HJR 6006

Four days before the November 4, 2025 House of Delegates election and after early voting has already begun, the outgoing Democratic majority passes HJR 6006 by a 50-42 vote. The resolution added a new authorized subject: “any joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of Virginia related to reapportionment or redistricting.”

The procedural posture is essentially identical to HJR 6004. Both are simple majority joint resolutions that expanded the scope of the 2024 Special Session beyond what HJR 428 originally authorized. The only differences is that HJR 6004 added federal cuts response, HJR 6006 added redistricting. HJR 6004 was 59-38 in the House, HJR 6006 was 50-42; and HJR 6004 was bipartisan in the Senate (40-0), while HJR 6006 was party line.

On the Senate floor on October 29th. Former Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears attempted to rule that HJR 6006 required a 2/3 vote. The majority overruled her ruling. That parliamentary was determined by the chamber itself, that simple majority is exactly the kind of internal procedure judgment Article IV SubSection 7 commits to each house under traditional separation of powers doctrine.

The Republican rules violation argument is hard to argue with HJR 6004. Their theory requires HJR 6001’s unanimous consent rule to bind later majorities. But HJR 6001’s rules were already suspended by HJR 6004 on February 22, 2025, eight months before HJR 6006. There was no unanimous consent rule still in effect for HJR 6006 to violate. The Republicans real argument has to be a constitutional one under Article IV SubSection 6, not a rules violation.

October 29-31, 2025 — HJR 6007

The General Assembly passes HJR 6007, the actual redistricting amendment along party lines. The House votes 51-42 on October 29. The Senate votes 21-16 on October 31, four days before Election Day.

This is the “first passage” required by Article XII, SubSection 1, which says that constitutional amendments pass two consecutive General Assemblies separated by an intervening House of Delegates election.

October 28, 2025 — Attorney General Opinion 25-029

Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares issues an official opinion stating that the maneuver violates Article IV, SubSection 6 and Article V, SubSection 5 of the Virginia Constitution. The opinion is on record before HJR 6007 passes.

November 4, 2025 — General Election

Democrats gain more seats in both chambers. A new General Assembly is elected. This is the “intervening election” Article XII requires, except Republicans argue it cannot count because the first passage occurred during the election period (early voting had been underway since September), not before it.

January 14-16, 2026 —HJR 6007

The new 2026 General Assembly convenes. The House passes the amendment in a near identical form on January 14. The Senate follows on January 16. This would be considered the “second passage” under Article XII.

January 27, 2026 — Hurley I

Tazewell County Circuit Court Judge Jack C. Hurley rules that the special session lacked authority to pass the amendment and that the election was scheduled too early to satisfy the 90 day publication requirement. He blocks the amendment from going to voters.

February 13, 2026 - SCOVA stay

The Supreme Court of Virginia stays Hurley's injunction and allows the referendum to proceed.

February 18-19,2026 — RNC v. Koski

The Republican National Committee files a separate suit. Hurley grants another emergency injunction. SCOVA stays it again, sending the case back to the trial court.

March 6, 2026 — Early voting begins

April 21, 2026 — Election Day

Voters approve the amendment 51.61% to 48.39%. About 3 million ballots cast. The difference is roughly 99,000 votes. For context, Gov. Youngkin won in 2021 with 51% of the vote.

One day after the vote, Judge Hurley issues a 22 page final order. The amendment is “void ab initio” void from the beginning. He sites 3 different things.

1. The scope expansion violated HJR 428 and HJR 6001.

2. The intervening election requirement of Article XII, SubSection 1 was not satisfied.

3. The ballot language was “flagrantly misleading.”

Judge Hurley rules that and all votes for or against the proposed constitutional amendment are ineffective.

Now we get to the eight provisions that have been questioned

Va. Const. Art. IV, SubSection 6 — Special Sessions. The Governor may convene one; or 2/3 of each house may petition for one. This is the constitutional anchor of the entire case, it governs how a special session is started, but says nothing about subject matter limits.

Va. Const. Art. IV, SubSection 7 — Internal Procedure. “Each house shall select its officers and settle its rules of procedure.” The Democrats’ constitutional anchor.

Va. Const. Art. V, SubSection 5 — Governor’s Power to Convene. Hurley tied his “void ab initio” ruling to this provision and Art. IV SubSection 6, arguing that simple majority scope expansions self call a new session in violation of separation of powers.

Va. Const. Art. XII, SubSection 1 — Amendment Process. First passage then intervening House election then second passage at the first regular session after that election then 90 days then ballot. The Republicans argue first passage on October 31 came mid election (early voting had been underway since September). The Democrats argue “general election” means Election Day on November 4.

HJR 428 (April 17, 2024) — The Call. The 2/3 supermajority petition under Art. IV Section 6 that summoned the special session “for the purpose of considering Budget Bills.” The constitutional trigger.

HJR 6001 (May 13, 2024) — The Procedural Rulebook. Simple-majority resolution under Art. IV SubSection 7 establishing five permissible categories of business with unanimous consent for anything else. Bipartisan votes (99-0 / 39-1) but only majority required.

HJR 6004 (Feb 22 / Apr 2, 2025) — The Forgotten Resolution. Senate 40-0, House 59-38. Suspended HJR 6001’s procedural rules and added federal cuts/DOGE response as a substantive new category clearly outside HJR 428’s “Budget Bills” purpose. Republicans claim now is that this needed 2/3 of the vote to pass.

HJR 6006 (October 27, 2025) —House 50-42 along party lines. Procedurally identical to HJR 6004 in mechanism, politically explosive in subject matter. Added redistricting as a permissible category.

HJR 6007 (Oct 29-31, 2025) — First passage of the redistricting amendment itself. House 51-42, Senate 21-16.

Va. Code 24.2-304.04 — Subsection 8 prohibits maps that “unduly favor or disfavor any political party.” Still on the books. The new map favors Democrats 10-1.

Strip away the noise and this case comes down to a single question. Does the Virginia Constitution mean what it says, or what people wish it said?

The Republican coverage wants you to believe the Democrats broke a clear rule. They didn’t. There is no provision in the Virginia Constitution that limits what a special session can do. There is no House Rule that required a 2/3 vote on HJR 6006. There was no unanimous consent rule for HJR 6006 to violate. HJR 6001 had been suspended eight months earlier by HJR 6004, with Republican participation and zero legal challenge.

The Democrats want you to believe the procedure was clean and the voters have spoken. That’s also not quite true. The constitutional structure of Article IV Subjection 6, that special sessions exist only by Governor’s call or 2/3 petition, does carry implications. If a simple majority can add to a session’s subject matter to anything it wants, then the 2/3 call requirement is functionally meaningless. That’s a real problem, even if the text doesn’t spell it out.

Both sides have an argument. Neither side has a slam dunk.

I think the court should respect what the constitution actually says, respect the legislature’s institutional practice, and let the voters’ decision stand. The structural concerns are real, but the remedy isn’t to invalidate a referendum 35,000 votes shy of a tie on the basis of a constitutional rule that no one, not Republicans, not Democrats, not the Attorney General, not the courts, was enforcing in February 2025.

And there’s a reason no one was enforcing it. They were too busy voting for it.

On April 2, 2025, the Virginia Senate adopted HJR 6004 by a 40-0 unanimous vote under a “Suspend the Rules” motion, the formal procedural mechanism that requires a 2/3 supermajority. HJR 6004 expanded the 2024 Special Session’s substantive scope to include federal cuts and DOGE response, a topic plainly outside HJR 428’s “considering Budget Bills” purpose. Every Republican senator voted yes. Stanley voted yes. Obenshain voted yes. Stuart, Sturtevant, Suetterlein, DeSteph, Pillion, Peake, Reeves, all yes.

And Sen. Ryan McDougle voted yes.

The same Sen. McDougle who is now the lead plaintiff in McDougle v. Nardo, currently before the Virginia Supreme Court, arguing that this exact procedural mechanism is unconstitutional.

He used it in April. He sued over it in October. The only thing that changed was the substantive content, federal cuts response was politically tolerable, redistricting was not.

This is what lawyers call judicial estoppel. You don’t get to take one position when it suits you and the opposite position six months later when the political winds shift. McDougle voted to suspend the rules and expand the special session’s scope. He used the procedure. And now he wants the Virginia Supreme Court to declare that procedure was constitutionally unavailable all along.

If the structural argument is right, the place to fix it is the constitution itself. Amend Article IV Subsection 6 to say what people now wish it said, that special sessions are limited to subjects in the call, and scope can only be expanded by 2/3 vote. That’s a reasonable reform. I’d vote for it. But it’s not the law today. And courts shouldn’t invent it now, mid fight, to overturn 2.5 million votes, especially when the people leading the charge against the procedure are the same people who voted to use it eight months ago.

The voters made a decision. The procedure was the same procedure the legislature has been using all year, the same procedure Republicans participated in, voted for, and operated under without complaint. The constitution doesn’t say what the plaintiffs need it to say.

And if you want different rules going forward, the way to get them is the same way the redistricting amendment got to the ballot. Pass them through the General Assembly, send them to the voters, and let democracy do its work.

Kincaid wasn’t a government official. He ran the National Republican Redistricting Trust, an organization hired by Republicans to draw favorable congressional maps. According to testimony later given in federal court, he discussed the draft letter with White House aides, DOJ officials, and Governor Greg Abbott’s office before it went out. Then he used it to draw five new Republican leaning districts in Texas districts that, a federal court would eventually rule, were the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.

I learned about that meeting because I was trying to understand why Virginia voters were asked to amend Article II, Section 6 of the state constitution.

The amendment which passed 51 to 48 gives the General Assembly the power to redraw Virginia’s congressional districts without going through the bipartisan redistricting commission voters approved in 2021. Supporters called it a necessary response to what’s happening in other states. Opponents called it a power grab. I wanted to know who was right, and the answer took me to that room in the West Wing.

On social media there were talks of Texas redistricting in the summer of 2025. I came to learn that the President of the United States directly pressured Texas Republican Leadership to redraw congressional districts mid-decade. According to reporting from Politico, the President said Republicans were “Entitled to five more seats.” Now, when I read this, I paused and thought, “There is no way all of these politicians in Texas are going to agree to that.” As it turns out, I was correct, not everyone was on board for this nonsense. Until, an official associated with the President warned these Republicans that the President was keeping track of who is in support and who is not. That was enough to convince a group of lawmakers to let political pressure override their oath of office.

It is here where it all becomes clear…

In July of 2025, the DOJ sent a letter to Texas regarding the racial makeup of the districts. The letter, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, claimed four existing Texas districts were unconstitutional 'coalition districts' because they were drawn to combine minority voters, and demanded Texas redraw them.

The governor of Texas called a special session to address this letter, ordering lawmakers to redraw the maps to satisfy the DOJ’s concerns. When lawmakers showed up, the Republican majority in Texas gave Democrats limited options to contest any aspect of the DOJ letter or the redistricting. In response to being shut out of the process, Democrats walked out of session preventing a quorum. That news I remember. Texas lawmakers left the state and went to Chicago. That worked for that session, but another session was called on August 18, 2025 and a new map with 5 new Republican leaning districts was passed.

Here is how Texas redrew the maps. Adam Kincaid, the president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust (NRRT) was the architect. Kincaid testified that although his software could display racial demographic data, he did not consult it when drawing the map, testimony the court later called not credible.

After Texas passed their new map with 5 new potential Republican seats, then the lawsuits came. With some glimpses of hope, civil rights groups sued the state and a three-judge federal panel in El Paso blocked the map on November 18, 2025. The judges pointed directly to the DOJ letter, ruling that because Texas redrew the maps specifically to satisfy the DOJ’s racial issues, the state had effectively admitted to sorting voters by race, which is unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.

But it gets worse. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately stepped in a few weeks later, putting the lower court’s ruling on hold while the full Court considers the appeal. Thus allowing Texas to use the new maps in the 2026 election anyway.

After researching all of that, I wanted to know why the DOJ just randomly sent a letter to Texas concerning its maps. The last time Texas redrew their maps was in 2021 based on the 2020 Census. Those districts were voted on for the 2022 midterms. Did the DOJ do a routine check and find some racial district problems in Texas.. NO.

When the civil rights groups sued Texas over the new maps it went to court. It’s in that trial we find out that everything tied to this was a coordinated strategy.

In court, the judge found that Adam Kincaid the mapmaker had seen the preliminary draft of the DOJ letter in the West Wing of the White House a week before it was officially sent. Kincaid discussed the letter with White House aids, DOJ officials and Governor Abbott before it was sent.

At this trial lawyers who work for Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, rejected the legal reasoning of the DOJ letter. Some were quoted stating that the DOJ letter was "baseless," "legally unsound," "ham-fisted," and "a mess."

What really shocked the judges was that Kincaid didn’t just happen to draw districts that perfectly matched the DOJ’s demands, he already had the instructions in hand from the White House. The court essentially called the DOJ letter a smoking gun that proved the administration was injecting race into the redistricting process on purpose to achieve a partisan goal.

Texas is now plus 5, but that is not where this ends.

Missouri Republican Governor Mike Kehoe called a special session in August of 2025, the state legislature voted to redraw congressional districts to cut up Kansas City area, making Democratic incumbent's seat much more conservative. That new map passed and was signed into law in September of 2025.

North Carolina followed suit and redrew their first congressional district to make it more favorable to conservatives.

Indiana tried, but it did not pass the State Senate.

Florida is pursuing the same path.

On the other side, California legislature put Proposition 50 on a special election ballot in November of 2025. The people voted and the measure was approved 64.4% to 35.6%. This created 5 potential blue seats.

Now to Virginia. The Virginia legislature had to bypass existing redistricting rules in its constitution. To do this, they placed a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot for the April 2026 Special Election. This passed 51.45% to 48.55%.

To conclude. Many are excited that this measure passed There will no doubt be a battle in court. The conservatives believe that the General Assembly did not follow the rules to put this to a vote and tried to stop it before it ever hit the ballot. The Supreme Court of Virginia allowed it to be voted on. The liberals argue this is a necessary response to stop the federal government from obtaining more power.

There is a difference in these states worth mentioning. In the red states Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and the states still trying, the decision to redraw congressional districts was made by lawmakers. Legislatures voted, governors signed, and the maps became law without ever being put directly to the people. In the blue states California and Virginia the decision was placed on a ballot, and the people themselves casted their vote to approve it.

That distinction matters, and it matters most in court. Any judge looking to reverse a certified vote by the people would have to do something no court enjoys doing: argue the will of the law against the will of the people. A statute passed by a legislature can be struck down on any number of procedural or constitutional grounds without much political fallout. A constitutional amendment ratified by millions of citizens is a different kind of target. Striking it down is legally possible, but politically it asks a court to tell a majority of voters that their vote did not count.

That is why the challenges to Virginia’s amendment were filed before the ballot, not after. The opponents understood that once the people voted, the ground would shift under any legal argument against it.

What worries me is that a President of the United States has never been documented using the DOJ to fabricate a letter to a state in an attempt to gain more power in the legislative branch. And the DOJ did it. And the state went with it. This will produce immediate political victories in November, but the damage to our checks and balances is lasting. No matter who holds office, raw and unchecked power erodes the structure of government and with it, the rights of the citizens.

Emma Compton was a smart, independent woman, who earned her way to adoration and success. But when she didn’t show up to visit her mom in the hospital…her family knew…something was wrong.

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