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Residents urge board to revisit solar ordinances and complain of data-center truck traffic
Summary
Multiple speakers at the public forum urged the Board to review Culpeper’s solar policy and to add protections for waterways, buffers and traffic impacts; speakers also complained that Amazon-related truck traffic is damaging narrow rural roads and causing safety concerns.
Several Culpeper residents used the public forum at the May 6 Board of Supervisors meeting to call for a review of the county’s solar policy and to highlight truck traffic and safety impacts from data-center construction.
Susan Ralston of Stevensburg said she supports solar in principle but argued that utility-scale solar should be sited on industrially zoned, marginal or contaminated land rather than on farm and timber land. She urged the board to revisit the county’s solar ordinance, raise buffers, tighten land-disturbance limits and require better protections for waterways and downstream residents. Ralston cited a lawsuit in Louisa County over water pollution as an example and suggested Culpeper learn from neighboring counties’ policy changes.
Multiple speakers — including Ralston and Don Hay Jr. — raised concerns about heavy trucks using narrow rural roads such as Algonquin Trail and Raccoon Ford Road as shortcuts to access the Amazon data center and quarry operations. Don Hay Jr. said trucks have overturned and run stop signs on narrow roads, and he thanked the sheriff and county staff for monitoring and outreach to the Amazon site manager and local quarry owner.
Other speakers, including David Van Lewin, urged the board to reject or strictly limit utility-scale solar in agricultural areas and to define “small scale” projects. Several callers asked the board to schedule a public discussion of the solar policy and ordinance so that county supervisors and the planning commission could draft stronger rules for small, medium and utility-scale projects.
The board did not take action on solar policy at the May 6 meeting; speakers requested that the board place solar-policy updates and related ordinance revisions on a future meeting agenda so the county can address siting, buffers, financial assurances and road-traffic mitigation before additional applications arrive.
