The ability of Virginia localities to govern themselves is always tenuous in the General Assembly, but on at least two important issues, the 2025 legislative session looks promising.

First, an ill-advised effort by the state to meddle in local decisions to allow or disallow solar farms failed to survive the so-called “crossover,” the deadline for one chamber to pass a bill and send it to the other.

Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, abandoned his efforts on the bill after at least two fellow Democrats, including Sen. Lashrecse D. Aird, who represents Surry County, made it clear they would not go along. With all Republicans united in a narrowly divided Senate, Democratic advocates of the bill simply didn’t have the votes to push it through, and no one understands legislative math like the veteran lawmaker Deeds.

A year after failed legislation that would have given the state complete authority to regulate industrial-scale solar farms, the scaled-back 2025 effort was designed to be a foot in the door: setting up a mechanism for the state to “advise” localities on solar developers’ applications.

The issue is especially relevant for Isle of Wight and Surry, where elected officials have imposed reasonable caps on acreage that can be devoted to large solar farms.

Such caps are at odds with the state’s meeting the mandates of the 2020-approved Virginia Clean Economy Act, specifically that:

• At least 16,100 megawatts, or just under two-thirds of the state’s electricity, must come from solar or offshore wind farms by the end of 2035.
• Dominion Energy, the state’s dominant utility, must transition to 100% carbon-free energy sources by 2045. 

The proliferation of power-hogging data centers has made the ideal of completely clean energy production even more elusive than supporters of the Clean Economy Act could have envisioned five years ago.

But rural Virginia can’t alone bear the burden of solving the energy crisis. Southside Virginia’s beautiful countryside would have to be blanketed in solar panels for the state to come anywhere close to achieving the requirements of the Clean Economy Act. We’re thankful that Aird stood her ground. 

Meantime, a creative new approach might finally allow localities to add a 1% sales tax to help fund school construction, an expensive endeavor that currently relies almost entirely on real and personal property taxes.  

The state Senate this year inserted in its two-year budget an option for any localities’ voters to adopt the 1% sales tax by majority vote in a referendum. In prior years, the optional local sales tax has been stand-alone legislation, vetoed last year by Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Lots of negotiations — first between the Senate and House, then with the governor — remain before a budget is adopted, but school construction financing likely stands a better chance of adoption as part of the budget than as separate legislation.

High-growth areas like Isle of Wight need all of the tools they can get to keep up with demand for classroom space.