Surry County’s Planning Commission expects to soon begin a five-year review of its comprehensive plan.

The Board of Supervisors adopted the current 160-page plan in 2020. It’s intended to guide land use decisions through 2040. State law requires that the plan be reviewed at least every five years.

Already, “a significant amount of things have changed in that five-year period,” said Community Development and Planning Director Horace Wade at the commission’s Feb. 24 meeting.

The 2020 plan had referenced a then-pending wastewater treatment capacity expansion “in the near future” via the regional Hampton Roads Sanitation District’s plans to connect Surry County’s system to HRSD’s sewage treatment plant in Suffolk. That project, which spanned 24 miles of piping across Surry and neighboring Isle of Wight County along the Route 10 corridor, is now largely complete. It allowed the town of Surry to decommission its wastewater plant in 2022 and the county to decommission its own in 2023, according to Leila Rice, a spokeswoman for HRSD.

“The Surry school complex pump station is awaiting power by Prince George Electric Cooperative and is expected to go into service this summer,” Rice told the Times.

That, she said, will allow the school complex’s existing pump station to be decommissioned. No new connections, other than Hardy Elementary in Isle of Wight County, have been made to the Surry transmission force main since it became active, Rice said. However, Dominion Energy’s nuclear power plant will be connected once the Hog Island pump station and sewer installation is complete.

“We’re actively working on a water and sewer master plan for Surry County,” Wade said.

The county, in 2023, also added an “energy policy” amendment to the comprehensive plan capping utility-scale projects, including but not limited to solar farms, at 10% of the county’s developable land, or 15,278 acres. Surry supervisors have since voted in February this year to enact a 7% cap on countywide developable acreage devoted to solar, further restricting solar farms to 10,695 acres.

The plan also predates Middleburg-based Green Energy Partners’ 2023 announcement of plans to invest $6.4 billion to build a first-in-the-nation combination hydrogen fuel hub and data center campus on roughly 600 acres adjacent to Dominion Energy’s nuclear power plant. A lawyer for the company says the project may still move forward despite Green Energy’s reorganizing under bankruptcy protections.

The updated comprehensive plan, Wade said, could include areas where the county hopes to attract residential growth that had not been identified in the 2020 plan.

“We’re at a deficit for housing; housing is a definite need here in Surry County,” Wade said.

According to the 2020 plan, only 3% of the county is in residential use and most residences are on large lots averaging almost two acres.

With a recent change to the commission’s bylaws, up to five members of the Planning Commission can serve on a committee, which would potentially allow one person from each voting district to serve on the committee that will begin the five-year review process.

Isle of Wight County is working on its own five-year review of its 2020 comprehensive plan.