West Virginia just had its best tourism year on record: 78 million visitors, $6.8 billion spent, $643 million in state and local taxes, one in every fifteen jobs in the state. Hardy County’s share of that story is bigger than most people here realize.
In the last year the state measured it county by county, visitors spent $41.6 million in Hardy County, up more than half from the year before, the fastest growth of any county in West Virginia.
From my end of the valley, I see why. Folks come up for a weekend ride or a friend’s cabin, or pull off Corridor H at Baker on the way to somewhere else, and something in them wakes up. They stand on a ridge, look out over the valley, and realize the life they thought was impossible is two hours from their job. By Sunday they’re putting an offer on a house with five acres that costs less than a townhouse in Fairfax County.
We don’t market that. We market scenery. What Hardy County actually offers is the feeling that your life could be different. That’s worth more than any single industrial project, and it only works as long as the land stays the land.
Which brings me to where we’ve been hurtling. MN8 Energy, spun out of Goldman Sachs, wants upwards of 2,400 acres of productive farmland in historic Old Fields for industrial solar. Valley Link’s 765-kilovolt transmission line, the largest kind there is, with a new substation planned for Hardy County to carry power somewhere else. Data centers wherever a company from somewhere else, with no stake in the people here, wants one. And last year’s HB 2014, which invites all of it and takes away the county’s say.
I understand our county needs revenue and our leaders are under real pressure to find it. But look at where the money goes. Under that law, half the property tax from a certified data center is shipped to Charleston to fund income tax cuts. Thirty percent stays in the host county. In exchange, we give up our say over where and how it gets built. When the construction crews leave, we’re left with a handful of jobs, farmland that grows less, dirtier air, constant noise, less water and higher power bills for the rest of us, property that’s worth less, and a lot of broken hearts.
Now look at what visitors and new residents do. Every cabin and every house bought on a Sunday needs a builder, a plumber, an electrician, a roofer, someone to mow the field.
County building permits show an average of $15.5 million a year in new home construction outside our towns over the last five years, and the planning office will tell you that’s low, because people report the smallest number they can.
Every dollar a local contractor earns gets spent again at the grocery store, the restaurant, the hardware store. Tourism money and home-building money are spent twice in Hardy County. Data center and industrial energy money is spent once, mostly somewhere else.
Put the three economies that industrialization threatens side by side: farming, at $269 million a year in sales, first in the state; tourism, at $41 million a year and climbing; and home building, at $15 million a year that we know of. Then ask what an industrial solar field or a data center would pay the county each year, after Charleston takes its half, for a handful of jobs. It isn’t close.
And right now we can’t keep up with the demand for services. Ask anyone how long it takes to get a plumber or electrician here. Often we end up calling a company from Virginia.
That’s our real economic gap, and no data center fills it. We are desperate for people who can build, plumb, wire, and landscape, and who know how to turn that skill into a business of their own. There’s almost nothing in place to teach them either half.
If the county and the state want to spend money on economic development, that’s where it belongs: more trade training that starts in high school, and real support for people, especially young people, who dream of owning their own business.
We don’t have to choose between standing still and being industrialized. There’s a third choice, and it’s already here. It works. It pays. All it asks of us is more skilled hands, and not to have our land paved over.
That’s my dream for Hardy County and West Virginia: young people who can build a life here, on land so beautiful it awakens dreams. Yes, the county needs its say restored, and I hope the people we send to Charleston will work on that. But we also need to change our idea of what we’re worth. We can be fiercely proud of this place, fiercely protective of it, and choose our own dreams and our children’s over somebody else’s profits.
One path treats Hardy County as a site. The other treats it as a community. Let’s be a community.
Annabel Park
Lost River
