Mined land is the county's real estate

What AMLER has already paid for here

• Route 460 / Corridor Q four-laning ($1.6M, Aug 2026). The Buchanan County IDA won money to design and build Phase II of the Route 460 Connector, taking it from two lanes with truck-climbing lanes to four lanes. It was one of only five awards statewide in a round that drew 16 applications asking for $39.3 million against $7.9 million available[29].
• Southern Gap office building ($1.95M, 2022 round). A two-story commercial office building at the Southern Gap park, designed so a residential floor can be added later[28][30].
• Wastewater flood repairs ($1.15M, 2024 round). Repairs to flood-damaged sewer lines along the Levisa Fork and Slate Creek in the Grundy area[28].
• Cell towers across a 20-mile dead zone ($1.12M, 2019 round). A series of towers in the Buchanan and Tazewell jobs corridor, through the Virginia Coalfield Coalition[28].
• Airport Road utilities ($1.22M, 2019 round). About 1.5 miles of waterline and 4,000 feet of fiber conduit along Route 718 toward the planned airport[28].
• Elk habitat ($2.25M). Turning 300 acres of an old surface mine into elk range, with Virginia's first public hunting land reachable by UTV[31].

The pattern. Buchanan has been good at winning this money, but most of it builds roads, pipes, towers, and pads rather than employers. That's a build-it-and-they-will-come bet. It only pays off if something arrives to use the infrastructure, which is why the Twin Valley energy pitch and the data-center conversation matter so much to local officials.

Elk: the mine-land success story nobody argues about

Elk came back to these mountains in 2012 for the first time in over a century, and the state's elk project leader credits the open habitat created by mining as a big reason the herd took hold. Rep. Griffith calls Grundy "the elk capital of Virginia." When the habitat grant was announced, Southwest Virginia Sportsmen said its fall viewing tours had sold out and that more than 1,000 visitors, some from other countries, had come on tours the year before[31]. That figure is from the 2024 announcement, so treat it as a baseline, not a current count. It's a good example in conversation: reclaimed mine land bringing in visitors and small-business income without a big outside company.

The Breaks Regional Airport: wait years for federal money, or build it locally?

The old Grundy Municipal Airport closed, and years of mining and site prep have been shaping ground for a bigger regional airport off Route 718. The FAA put the project back in the national airport system in 2023, making it eligible for federal grants, but eligible doesn't mean funded[33]. The FAA recently approved the airport's traffic forecast, which lets the master plan move ahead[32].

The numbers: a preliminary $27 million first stage would buy a 4,000-foot runway, a taxiway, aircraft parking, lighting, and a 12-unit hangar building. With federal money (95% federal, 4% state, 1% local), the first stage would finish around December 2032. With state and local money only, around October 2030[32]. Consultants called the odds of federal support for the authority's hoped-for 5,100-foot runway "very low." Authority member Elswick put it plainly: "If we wait the six years or the eight- to 10-year plan, we don't even need the airport"[33].

Richmond puts Buchanan on the data-center map

On Sept. 18, Gov. Abigail Spanberger issued Executive Order 22, which she called the most aggressive data-center accountability framework in the country. It bans nondisclosure agreements for state agencies and employees on data-center projects, speeds up noise rules, orders a review of diesel backup generators, creates a community-engagement toolkit for localities, and sets up Virginia's first task force on SI risks such as privacy, cybersecurity, and job displacement. It stops short of a moratorium and doesn't end data-center tax exemptions[34].

It also orders a study, due around mid-March 2027, of brownfields and previously developed sites where data centers could go with less strain on power, water, and land. When Cardinal News looked at the state's brownfield map, former coal sites in Buchanan, Dickenson, and Wise showed up in large numbers, though many have no transmission lines nearby[35]. Cardinal put the two-sided question bluntly: is this an idea whose time has come, or could it become "just another case of Southwest Virginia being used as a 'sacrifice zone'"[35]?

Public comfort is falling. A consultant writing in Cardinal News cited Washington Post–Schar School polling: 69% of Virginia voters were comfortable with a data center in their community in 2023, but only 35% this spring. His advice to whoever controls a site, such as a county IDA, is to write the terms first, lease the land instead of selling it so promises become enforceable lease covenants, make developers pay for grid upgrades, set water and noise limits with public reporting, refuse NDAs, and run an open competition instead of giving one familiar developer a first look[36]. That maps directly onto the Twin Valley property transfer to the Buchanan IDA coming up this month.

The neighbors' playbook: Wise County's big bets

Wise County is further down this road and shows what Buchanan may get pitched next. The private Energy DELTA Lab is marketing a 450-acre "Data Center Ridge" on former mine land that it says could host 10 to 12 hyperscale data centers using up to 1 gigawatt, cooled by nearly 10 billion gallons of cold water sitting in old mine workings[37]. Those are the developer's own projections, not commitments. In January, a federal spending law gave the lab about $1.4 million to study whether mine-cavity water could cool advanced nuclear reactors[38]. A separate $197,500 study is drafting criteria for judging a possible nuclear microreactor, and Wise County has said no reactor is proposed and it won't be a test site. A 2023 regional study did list the Red Onion industrial property in neighboring Dickenson County among seven possible small-nuclear sites[39].