County grapples with growth pressure
By Heather Michon
Correspondent
Tenaska’s proposal for a 1.5-gigawatt power plant wasn’t really on Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors agenda (Nov. 19), but it dominated the conversation nonetheless.
More than a dozen residents used the public comment periods that bracketed the meeting to question whether the project’s rewards were worth its risks, raising concerns about water, air quality, traffic, and long-term impacts.
“Fluvanna has beautiful schools, robust parks, great hiking areas, recreation, beautiful rivers — we don’t want Tenaska to ruin that,” one speaker said.
“Fluvanna doesn’t need Tenaska. Tenaska needs Fluvanna,” said Patty Reynard.
Later in the meeting, County Administrator Eric Dahl said Tenaska had agreed to fund an independent environmental review.
The work will likely be conducted by David K. Paylor, the former director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and now a vice president at the consulting firm Potesta & Associates. Paylor’s review would be billed at $300 an hour and capped at $5,000, according to the proposal discussed Wednesday.
Dahl also confirmed that Tenaska had agreed to pay for a traffic study. In October, supervisors had set aside up to $60,000 for the analysis, a move that drew pushback from some residents who questioned why the county should shoulder the cost for a private project.
Supervisor Tim Hodge (Palmyra) noted that all supervisors had received a binder of permitting and technical documents and hoped they would be made available to the public. The Planning Department shared the full file on their departmental website on Monday.
Kents Store
Supervisors received a detailed briefing on several options to expand ambulance service at the Kents Store firehouse, part of an ongoing effort to address rising call volumes and persistent staffing shortages across the county’s emergency response system.
Palmyra and Fork Union both operate with 24-hour ambulance crews, and the county fields a single quick-response vehicle that covers all of Fluvanna. Kents Store, by contrast, relies on 12-hour shifts and has struggled to maintain consistent coverage.
There is also a limited pool of trained and certified emergency responders, and 12-hour shifts are far less desirable than 24-hour rotations — especially for staff who commute from as far away as the Shenandoah Valley or the Virginia Beach area.
The county’s Fire and Rescue Association said its preference is to move Kents Store to 24-hour rotations, a shift they argue would help retain staff and ease pressure on the rest of the county’s emergency system.
No decisions were made on Wednesday, but supervisors signaled that the staffing issue will almost certainly resurface when budget discussions begin in early 2026.
Whatever decisions supervisors make as the community continues to age — and as the cost of staffing and equipment rises — will almost certainly require new spending. Asked whether that puts the county on a path toward raising the tax rate to cover future needs, County Administrator Eric Dahl said the choice was not his to make. “I’m saying the board has to figure out what level of service they want to provide to the community,” he said. “And if you do that, there’s a cost to that.”
