It's Friday, September 19, 2025 and in this morning's issue we're covering: These rural Californians want to secede. Newsom’s maps would pair them with Bay Area liberals, Tennessee GOP lawmakers vote to end equal opportunity employment rules in state government, Rural Illinois’ food economy depends on immigrants, One stop at a time, mobile reentry center helps people get back on their feet after incarceration, Backed by Phish frontman, new recovery scholarship fund aims to help women, Probe into child’s death prompts 2nd state takeover of Bertie County DSS, Artist-in-residence program highlights Danville’s growing public art scene — and the city’s continuing revitalization, Dominion’s Proposed Peaker Plant Flouts Environmental Justice, Community Says.

Media outlets and others featured: CalMatters, Tennessee Lookout, Investigate Midwest, North Carolina Health News, VTDigger, Carolina Public Press, Cardinal News, Inside Climate News.

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These rural Californians want to secede. Newsom’s maps would pair them with Bay Area liberals

By Jeanne Kuang, CalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Over several rivers and through even more woods, flags advocating secession from California flutter above hills dotted with cattle, which outnumber people at least sixfold.

This ranching region with a libertarian streak might have more in common with Texas than the San Francisco Bay Area. 

But it’s not Texas. Five hours northeast of Sacramento on an easy day, Modoc County and its roughly 8,500 residents are still — begrudgingly — in California. 

And California is dominated by Democrats, who are embroiled in a tit-for-tat redistricting war with the Lone Star State that will likely force conservative Modoc County residents to share a representative in Congress with parts of the Bay Area. 

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to split up the solidly Republican 1st Congressional District covering 10 rural, inland counties in the North State as part of his plan to create five more Democratic seats to offset a GOP-led effort to gain five red seats in Texas. 

That would mean Republican Doug LaMalfa, the Richvale rice farmer who represents the district, would likely lose his seat. 

Modoc County and two neighboring red counties would be shifted into a redrawn district that stretches 200 miles west to the Pacific Coast and then south, through redwoods and weed farms, to include some of the state’s wealthiest communities, current Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman’s home in San Rafael and the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, all in uber-liberal Marin County. 

“It’s like a smack in the face,” said local rancher Amie Martinez. “How could you put Marin County with Modoc County? It’s just a different perspective.”

The proposal would even likely force Modoc residents to share a district with the governor, who moved back to Marin County last year and splits his time between there and Sacramento. Modoc County voted 78% in favor of recalling him, and voters asked about redistricting there view it as a publicity stunt for Newsom’s presidential ambitions.

The ballot measure known as Proposition 50, on voters’ ballots Nov. 4, has sparked outrage in the North State. Yet for a region known for its rebellious spirit, residents are also resigned: they know they’re collateral damage in a partisan numbers game.

The map would dilute conservative voting power in one of the state’s traditional Republican strongholds. It would cut short the career growth of politicians from the state’s minority party and make room for the growing cadre of Democrats rising up from state and county seats, jockeying for bigger platforms.

But locals say they’re most concerned it’s a death-knell for rural representation. They worry their agricultural interests and their views on water, wildlife and forest management would be overshadowed in a district that includes Bay Area communities that have long championed environmental protection.

“They’ve taken every rural district and made it an urban district,” said Nadine Bailey, a former staffer for a Republican state senator who now advocates for agricultural water users and the rural North State. “It just feels like an assault on rural California.”

Though Modoc County supervisors have declared their opposition to Prop. 50, there’s little else locals can do. Registered Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats statewide nearly two-to-one. Rural residents represent an even smaller share of the state’s electorate. 

“It’ll be very hard to fight back,” said Tim Babcock, owner of a general store in Lassen County, a similar and neighboring community that’s proposed to be drawn into a different liberal-leaning congressional district. “Unless we split the state. And that’s never going to happen.”

An isolated county

Far-flung but tight-knit, the high desert of Modoc County has been an agricultural community for generations. 

In the west, cattle graze through a series of meadows and valleys into the hills of the Warner Mountains. Hundreds of them are sold weekly at an auction yard Martinez’s family runs on the outskirts of Alturas. The 3,000-person county seat consists of a cluster of government buildings, a high school and empty storefronts. In the east, migratory birds soar over vegetable farms on the drained Tule Lake bed that the U.S. granted to World War II veteran homesteaders by picking names out of a pickle jar. Not far away sit the remains of an internment camp where the government imprisoned nearly 19,000 Japanese Americans. 

The sheer remoteness and harsh natural beauty are a point of pride and a source of difficulty. Residents live with the regular threat of wildfires. A fifth of the county’s residents live below the poverty line. There’s no WalMart and no maternity ward, and there are few jobs outside of agriculture. Like other forested counties, local schools are facing a fiscal cliff after Congress failed to renew a source of federal funding reserved for areas with declining timber revenues.

It’s so sparsely populated that local Republican Assemblymember Heather Hadwick, who lives in Modoc County, represents 10 neighboring counties besides her own. She puts in hundreds of miles on the road holding town halls between Sacramento and home, and struggles to imagine a congressmember reaching her county, with winding roads and the Klamath Mountains between Modoc and the coast.

“It’s just not good governance,” she said.

Modoc County went for Trump by over 70% last fall. Its sheriff, Tex Dowdy, proudly refuses to fly the California flag over his station out of grievance with the state’s liberal governance. In 2013, Modoc made headlines for declaring its intent to secede from California and form the “State of Jefferson” with neighboring counties in the North State and southwest Oregon.

County Supervisor Geri Byrne said she knew it was a longshot — but thought, “when’s the last time The New York Times called someone in Modoc County?”

Byrne, who is also chair of the Rural County Representatives of California and of the upcoming National Sheepdog Finals, said the secession resolution was about sending a message.

“It wasn’t conservative-liberal,” she said. “It was the urban-rural divide, and that’s what this whole Prop. 50 is about.”

Even a Democratic resident running a produce pickup center in Alturas observed that her neighbors are “not that Trumpy.” Instead, there’s a pervasive general distrust of politics on any side of the aisle.

In particular, residents who live by swaths of national forests bemoan how successive federal administrations of both parties have flip-flopped on how to manage public lands, which they say have worsened the risk of wildfire and prioritized conservation over their livelihoods.

Flourishing wolves are a problem

At the moment, all anyone can talk about is the wolves. 

The apex predator returned to California more than a decade ago, a celebrated conservation success story after they were hunted to near-extinction in the western U.S. Now they’re flourishing in the North State — and feeding on cattle, throwing ranching communities on edge. Federally, they’re still listed as an endangered species under the landmark conservation law signed by President Richard Nixon. 

Under California rules, ranchers can only use nonlethal methods to deter the wolves, like electrifying fencing or hiring ranch hands to guard their herds at night. 

“That whole issue is softened by the organizations that mean well for the animals, but this is our absolute existence here,” said Teri Brown, owner of a local feed store, who said she’s had cows go missing that she suspects were killed by wolves. 

It’s one of the rural issues Brown, a registered Republican, said voters closer to the Bay Area wouldn’t understand. She said she doesn’t support gerrymandering anywhere — in Texas or California. 

In town to visit his bookkeeper, rancher Ray Anklin scrolled through his phone to show videos of wolves trotting through his property and grisly photos of calf kills. He said last year, wildlife killed 19 of his cattle — a loss of over $3,000 per head. He’s set up a booth at a nearby fair, hoping to get public support for delisting wolves as an endangered species, and wants any representative in Congress to take the issue seriously.

As California’s battlegrounds increasingly take shape in exurban and suburban districts, rural North State conservatives at times feel almost as out of touch with their fellow Republicans as they do with Democrats. 

Few Republicans in the state and nation understand “public lands districts,” said Modoc County Supervisor Shane Starr, a Republican who used to work in LaMalfa’s office. “Doug’s the closest thing we’ve got.”

“This whole thing with DEI and ‘woke culture’ and stuff,” he said, referring to the diversity and inclusion efforts under attack from the right, “it’s like, yeah, we had a kid who goes to the high school who dyed his hair a certain color. Cool, we don’t care. All of these things going on at the national stage are not based in our reality whatsoever.”

At a cattlemen’s dinner in Alturas one recent evening, Martinez said she once ran into LaMalfa at a local barbecue fundraiser for firefighters and approached him about a proposal to designate parts of northwestern Nevada as protected federal wilderness. Her 700-person town of Cedarville in east Modoc County is 10 minutes from the state line.

Martinez worried about rules that prohibit driving motorized vehicles in wilderness, which she said would discourage the hunters who pass through during deer season and book lodging in town. Even though the proposal was in Nevada, LaMalfa sent staff, including Starr, to meetings to raise objections on behalf of the small town, she said. 

“I know we won’t get that kind of representation from Marin County,” she said.

Reached by phone, Huffman defended his qualifications to represent the region. 

Adding Siskiyou, Shasta and Modoc counties would mean many more hours of travel to meet constituents, but Huffman pointed out his district is already huge, covering 350 miles of the North Coast. And it includes many conservative-leaning, forested areas in Trinity and Del Norte counties. A former attorney for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, he’s the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, where LaMalfa also sits.

Huffman said he would run for re-election in the district if voters approve its redrawing, and “would work my tail off to give them great representation.”

As for the wolves, he doesn’t support delisting their endangered status and said he only supports nonlethal methods of managing the population. 

“There are plenty of win-win solutions,” he said of conflict between ranchers and environmentalists. “I'm not an absolutist. I'm a problem solver.”

For Democrats, 'I don’t think there’s any option'

On the other side of the aisle, North State Democrats are gearing up to support Prop. 50, even as parts of it make them uneasy. 

Nancy Richardson, an office manager at the free weekly paper in Modoc County (coverage of high school sports remains steady, along with a police blotter announcing a woman’s booking for eavesdropping), said she doesn’t like that it will cost the state as much as $280 million to run the statewide election on redistricting. 

But she thinks it has to be done. 

“I don’t like that Texas is causing this problem,” she said.

In Siskiyou County’s liberal enclave of Mt. Shasta, Greg Dinger said he supports the redistricting plan because he wants to fight back against the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants, erosion of democratic norms and a federal budget that is estimated to cut $28 billion from health care in California over the next 10 years. 

The effects are expected to be particularly acute in struggling rural hospitals, which disproportionately rely on Medicare and Medicaid funding. LaMalfa voted for the budget bill.

Dinger, who owns a web development company, said normally he would only support bipartisan redistricting. But he was swayed by the fact that Trump had called for Republicans to draw more GOP seats in Texas. 

“Under the circumstances, I don’t think there’s any option,” he said. “There’s the phrase that came from Michelle Obama, ‘When they go low, we go high.’ Well, that doesn’t work anymore.”

In an interview, LaMalfa said the impacts to rural hospitals were exaggerated. He blamed impending Medicaid cuts instead on California’s health care system being billions of dollars over budget this year, in part because of rising pharmaceutical costs and higher-than-expected enrollment of undocumented immigrants who recently became eligible. (California doesn’t use federal dollars to pay for undocumented immigrants’ coverage.)

“Basically what it boils down to is they want illegal immigrants to be getting these benefits,” he said in response to criticism of the spending bill. “Are the other 49 states supposed to pay for that?”

LaMalfa has criticized Prop. 50 and said no state should engage in partisan redistricting in the middle of the decade. But he stopped short of endorsing his Republican colleague Rep. Kevin Kiley’s bill in Congress to ban it nationwide, saying states should still retain their rights to run their own elections systems. 

The proposed new maps would make Kiley’s Republican-leaning district blue. They would turn LaMalfa’s 1st District into a dramatically more liberal one that stretches into Santa Rosa. 

But LaMalfa said he’s leaning toward running for re-election even if the maps pass, though he’s focused for now on campaigning against the proposition. 

“I intend to give it my all no matter what the district is,” he said. 

He would likely face Audrey Denney, a Chico State professor and two-time prior Democratic challenger who has already said she’d run again if the maps pass. Outgoing state Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, a Healdsburg Democrat who was instrumental in coming up with the proposed new maps, is also reportedly interested in the seat; McGuire’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In her renovated Queen Anne cottage in downtown Chico, Denney buzzed with excitement describing how the proposition has galvanized rural Democrats. 

She emphasized her own family’s roots as ranchers in the Central Coast region, and said she has bipartisan relationships across the North State.

“I have credibility in those spaces, growing up in rural America and spending my career advocating for rural America and real, actual, practical solutions for people,” she said. 

Denney’s former campaign staffer Rylee Pedotti, a Democrat in Modoc County, shares her optimism — to an extent. A communications professional whose family also owns a ranch, she said she’s not worried Huffman couldn’t represent Modoc. 

“More often than not we actually do experience some of the same issues,” Pedotti said: water and irrigation concerns, the loss of home insurance, the rising costs of health care.

Yet she’s deeply conflicted about the proposal: on the one hand cheering Democrats for being “finally ready to play hardball as the Republicans have done so well for decades in consolidating power;” on the other fearful of the escalating partisan rancor and the disenfranchisement of her neighbors. She’s considering sitting out the election.

“We’ll still be heard,” she said, if the new maps pass. “But I understand the concerns of folks who are on the other side of the aisle. It feels like their voice is being taken away.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Tennessee GOP lawmakers vote to end equal opportunity employment rules in state government  

by Anita Wadhwani, Tennessee Lookout
September 18, 2025

A legislative committee voted Wednesday to remove references to women, minorities, people with disabilities and veterans from Tennessee’s equal employment opportunity plan, which has long guided the state in tracking its own employment practices and rectifying discriminatory practices.

Beginning October 7, Tennessee will no longer formally track or publicly report on the demographics of individuals interviewed, hired or promoted to jobs in the executive branch of state government. 

Also eliminated is a requirement that state agencies take steps to recruit, promote and hire women and minorities if they are underrepresented in the state government workforce.

The rule change drew pushback from Democrats, a minority on the Republican-dominated Joint Government Operations Committee.

Republican supermajority passes bills to “dismantle” DEI in state, local government

“We won’t have the data to know if there’s a problem or not,” said Rep. G.A. Hardaway, a Memphis Democrat.

The rule redefines Tennessee’s so-called equal employment opportunity plan, which spells out data-gathering requirements for the executive branch.

The data has been used for decades to guide government hiring managers into proactively taking steps to find, recruit and hire qualified individuals from demographic groups that are underrepresented in the government workforce.

The plan was formerly described as “a statistical document that identifies patterns in the participation and utilization of women, minorities, individuals with disabilities and veterans in the workforce.”

The new definition describes the plan as a “statistical document which identifies and analyzes patterns in the participation and utilization of certain groups in the workforce, based on federal and/or state law requirements.”

The rule change was necessary to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order ending affirmative action in government employment for women and minorities and recent state laws that bar Tennessee from taking race, ethnicity, sex or age into account in employment decisions, according to Melanie Koewler, deputy general counsel for the state’s Department of Human Resources. 

Koewler said the state of Tennessee will still be required to track its employment of veterans and people with disabilities under separate federal laws. 

“If you recognize there are deficiencies with women or other socioeconomic groups, will you be able to address those with affirmative steps or not?” Hardaway asked.

If lawmakers or members of the public want to learn how many women or minorities occupy state jobs, they will have to ask, Koewler said.

“Any information that is a public record any citizen can request a report,” she said. “We would receive it and process it just like any other public records request.”

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

Rural Illinois’ food economy depends on immigrants

by Jennifer Bamberg, Investigate Midwest
September 17, 2025

Rural Illinois is shrinking. 

Over the past decade, all of Illinois’ 21 farm-dependent counties – places where farming makes up a large share of jobs and income – have lost population. 

Meanwhile, the state’s rural areas tied to meatpacking and food manufacturing have seen immigration slow population losses and, in some cases, keep local economies afloat. 

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Nationwide, 84% of population growth in the last year came from people born outside of the U.S. In rural areas, that share was even higher at 87%,  according to analysis from Daily Yonder using U.S. Census Data. (The U.S. Census Bureau counts both legal and unauthorized migrants in its data.) 

JBS in Beardstown has long relied on foreign-born workers. However, hundreds of those workers were laid off after President Trump revoked the legal status for over 500,000 migrants living in the U.S. Without work, many of the former JBS workers are wondering what is next, as does a town and a county that continues to see its population decline. 

In Macon County, anchored by Decatur and the global headquarters of Archer Daniels Midland, nearly 1,000 immigrants have arrived in the last four years – but the county has still lost more than 3,000 residents in that time, showing how immigration can slow but not always reverse population loss. 

While two-thirds of Illinois’ land is devoted to farmland, the state’s hundreds of food processing plants also drive its nonmetropolitan economies — and they rely heavily on immigrant workers, both legal and unauthorized. Food manufacturing is concentrated in the Chicagoland region, including Kane, DuPage, Lake, and suburban Cook County. Between 2023 and 2024, over 50,000 migrants arrived from the southern border to Chicago. 

The reliance on immigrant workers makes Trump’s pledge of mass deportations especially significant for communities tied to agriculture and food processing. 

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At a meeting with Illinois pork producers in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 12, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., expressed the importance of immigrant labor, as reported by Riverbender.com.  

“Illinois pork production relies heavily on foreign workers, working on the farm, in meat packing plants, in restaurants, and in grocery stores. These are the toughest jobs in the country, it is difficult work, and we need them. These workers are an essential part of pork production,” Durbin said. 

Note: High farming-concentration counties are defined by the USDA as counties where 20% or more of average annual earnings were derived from farming, or 17% or more of jobs were in farming.

This article first appeared on Investigate Midwest and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

One stop at a time, mobile reentry center helps people get back on their feet after incarceration

by Rachel Crumpler, North Carolina Health News
September 11, 2025

By Rachel Crumpler

On a recent Friday in Greenville, a black bus parked outside the Joy Community Center and Soup Kitchen, drawing attention from those arriving for a hot meal. White lettering on the side of the vehicle read “Recidivism Reduction Center” — a name that sparked curiosity, questions and, for some, cautious hope.

A team of reentry specialists — each with their own experiences of incarceration — greeted those who approached, ready to listen as visitors recounted their challenges in rebuilding their lives after prison or jail. 

Their goal: to provide the support people need for a successful transition from incarceration to the community — by meeting them where they are and connecting them to vital resources like Medicaid, Social Security, mental health and substance use treatment, housing, education and more.

In North Carolina, roughly 18,000 people are released from state prisons each year, with thousands more leaving county jails. Many struggle to stay out.

An April 2024 report from the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission found that among nearly 13,000 people released from North Carolina state prisons in fiscal year 2021, 44 percent were re-arrested within two years of their release, and 33 percent were sent back to prison. These returns to North Carolina’s carceral system come with a high price tag — it costs about $54,000 a year to house someone in a state prison.

The mobile reentry center is part of a grassroots effort to change that recidivism statistic. 

From skepticism to hope

Some potential clients eyed the Mobile Recidivism Reduction Center — operated by the nonprofit Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services — with skepticism at first, hesitant to share their struggles. But when the reentry specialists shared their own lived experience — or explained that the center was founded by someone who spent more than 11 years behind bars — it often helped break the ice.

Others came with immediate openness, desperate for help with navigating the many barriers that can make it difficult to land — and stay — on their feet after incarceration. 

“You’ve got to listen and decipher, what is the most immediate need?” reentry specialist Shahonda Pittman said. “What can I help them with to put them in a better position today? What’s going to make them walk away feeling like they got something accomplished?” 

When someone voiced a need, the team sprang into action, drawing from the organization’s statewide database of more than 1,200 resources to help address people’s most pressing challenges.

One such moment unfolded around lunchtime, when a man and woman — both recently released from being incarcerated — stopped by the mobile reentry center with their two young children. Looking tired, they described to Pittman the obstacles they’ve faced trying to find stable housing, employment and health care since arriving in Greenville.

The man shared that he had a broken tooth and needed his dental bridge repaired, but he lacked dental coverage and couldn’t afford the cost. Pittman immediately opened her laptop, searched the database and found a nearby clinic that she thought would work with him. She provided the name and phone number — a starting point for care.

The woman, who said she lives with depression, explained she had been without health insurance for some time. Pittman invited her aboard the bus — which has been converted into a welcoming space with two seating areas and walls decorated with positive affirmations — where they completed her Medicaid application online.

“That is so crazy how you did that,” the woman said, breaking into a smile, explaining that she had tried multiple times before without success.

As they continued talking, another challenge came up: work. The woman had secured a food service job but needed a black collared shirt for her first shift the next day — something she didn’t have. Pittman told her not to worry; she would pick one up at Walmart. NC Health News tagged along when Pittman delivered the shirt to the woman’s hotel room just hours later.

Some challenges are harder to solve than others, Pittman acknowledged. But she said she and the other reentry specialists work hard to ensure that everyone they meet feels supported and on a path to making progress on their reentry goals.

Pittman gave the woman a pep talk before she stepped out of the mobile center: “Where you are right now does not define where you are going.”

“I know,” the woman replied, and her voice seemed to carry a bit more hope than it had when she first arrived. 

Mobile approach

Kerwin Pittman, executive director of the nonprofit Recidivism Reduction Educational Program Services, launched North Carolina’s first Mobile Recidivism Reduction Center in January. 

Drawing from his own reentry experience after his release from prison in 2018, Kerwin Pittman (who is also Shahonda Pittman’s brother-in-law) said he knew how lack of transportation can put critical support services and resources out of reach. That awareness informed his decision to transform what he described as “an old and dusty” bus into a mobile support center designed to take reentry services directly to people in need. 

It was a new approach to delivering reentry support — one Pittman believed would work. The response has exceeded his expectations.

“We’re meeting people at their lowest point,” Pittman said. “To go into their communities and provide them this resource has been a big hit.”

The first mobile center made its first stop at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh on Jan. 17. Since then, it has served more than 5,000 people, Pittman said. A second mobile center launched in eastern North Carolina on Aug. 11, with its first stop in Rocky Mount. Already, it has served more than 1,100 people, Pittman said.

Cities visited so far include Durham, Greensboro, Smithfield, Clayton, Selma, Chapel Hill, High Point, Princeville and Tarboro. 

Most of the organization’s support comes from philanthropic foundations, but Pittman said long-term sustainability would ideally include some consistent state funding. That, however, is a long shot, especially given current tightening of state pursestrings.

Pittman said he anticipates that the mobile centers will serve more than 10,000 people by the end of the year.

“I always knew that this state lacked a lot of reentry resources, but now, being on the ground, we see that there is a dire need for more people to get into the fight of reentry and more services to be offered to individuals,” Pittman said. “Communities have welcomed these mobile centers with open arms.”

Pittman plans to have at least four mobile centers operating, with each circulating in a specific region of the state.

A third mobile center is being outfitted, with plans for it to be operational in the coming months and serve areas in south-central North Carolina, including Fayetteville and Lumberton.

“​​We’re striving to have as many centers as we can because what we realized is that the need is great, but the help is few,” Pittman said.

However, growth hinges on funding. Pittman’s team includes eight paid staff and a handful of volunteers. Adding more mobile centers will require more money to renovate the buses and to pay additional staff to operate them, he said.

To help make his case to funders, Pittman said he is working to collect recidivism data on people served by the mobile centers. Even without hard numbers, he said, the impact is already visible. 

“We bump into these individuals … or they may see the mobile center around and just flag it down and say, like, ‘Thank you. I got into that housing that you pointed me in the direction of or you helped me apply for. I got that job.’”

One stop at a time

When the mobile center arrives in a new city, it stays at least a week — if not longer, Pittman said. That’s because it can take a day or so for some people to move past their skepticism or grow open to receiving help. And as the reentry specialists begin connecting people to services, word tends to spread, drawing more people to the center.

The team initially targets high-traffic areas to park the mobile unit — often homeless shelters are a first stop, given the high rates of housing insecurity among formerly incarcerated people. Other locations are chosen based on input from community members who know where the need is the greatest. 

The advantage of being mobile, Pittman said, is the center can pivot to places with high demand for support or leave areas where it isn’t having the desired reach.

When the bus moves to a different city, Pittman said the support doesn’t stop. 

Reentry specialists hand everyone they meet a business card with the number for the Recidivism Reduction Call Center, a statewide reentry hotline launched by Pittman’s nonprofit in April 2024. The hotline provides on-demand assistance to callers who are struggling to reenter the community. More than 3,300 calls have been answered to date, Pittman said.

Call the Recidivism Reduction Hotline at 1-888-852-0004 for information about reentry resources. The line operates from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday-Friday.

The hotline works in tandem with the mobile centers. Staff also follow up with people they’ve served to check if the resources provided were useful and to see if additional support is needed. 

Several state leaders have voiced support for Pittman’s mobile reentry model, including Department of Adult Correction Secretary Leslie Cooley Dismukes, Gov. Josh Stein and first lady Anna Stein, who has identified reentry as one of three priority issues she’d like to tackle during her husband’s administration.

“This mobile unit is an innovative way to get necessary resources directly to justice-involved individuals, like birth certificates, job training, and healthcare,” Anna Stein wrote in a Facebook post after attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the second mobile center.

State focused on improving reentry support

The growing reach of the mobile reentry centers comes as North Carolina is increasingly focused on boosting support for people returning from incarceration as part of the national Reentry 2030 initiative. 

Since January 2024, state leaders have been taking action to lessen obstacles that could derail a successful transition into the community. The effort is guided by a detailed strategic plan developed by the state’s Joint Reentry Council.

The plan’s four overarching goals are:

• Improve the economic mobility of formerly incarcerated people.
• Improve access to mental and physical health care. 
• Expand housing opportunities for formerly incarcerated people.
• Remove barriers to successful community reintegration, especially for those returning to historically underserved communities.

Pittman serves on the Joint Reentry Council to represent the perspective of people who have been incarcerated. He said the experiences and needs voiced by the thousands of people served by the mobile reentry centers offer critical insight into statewide reentry challenges.

“Not only are we helping individuals,” Pittman said. “We’re actually able now to map the direct needs of individuals who are justice-impacted across the state.”

How I reported the story: I’ve been writing about reentry efforts across the state since January 2024, when former Gov. Roy Cooper signed Executive Order No. 303, which called for a “whole-of-government” approach to boosting reentry support for formerly incarcerated people in North Carolina. I reported on the launch of the first mobile recidivism reduction center by attending a ribbon-cutting event in January. After learning about the second mobile reentry center getting up and running, I requested to spend a day on board, where I shadowed the reentry specialists and their interactions with community members in Greenville. I also interviewed Kerwin Pittman, the founder of the nonprofit operating the mobile reentry centers. 

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Backed by Phish frontman, new recovery scholarship fund aims to help women

The Vermont-formed band’s Trey Anastasio and his Divided Sky Foundation are raising money to support women dealing with substance use disorder at his nonprofit retreat center in Ludlow.

by Kevin O'Connor September 10, 2025, 1:51 pm

LUDLOW — Addiction specialist Melanie Gulde helped Phish frontman and guitarist Trey Anastasio after his 2006 arrest for driving under the influence and drug possession. More recently, she teamed with him to open this town’s 46-bed Divided Sky Residential Recovery Program.

Gulde knows the frontman for the Vermont-formed band isn’t the only person who needs some backup.

“Women recover from addictions differently and face more barriers to treatment, often leaving them feeling overwhelmed and discouraged,” she said.

That’s why the nonprofit retreat center is launching a new women’s scholarship fund to assist those dealing with substance use disorder.

“It is more than just financial aid,” Gulde said of a fund that’s already raised $300,000 toward its $500,000 goal. “It’s a statement that every woman is worthy of a sober life, and we are here to support them.”

Women are more likely than men to face traumatic life experiences that can lead to substance use disorder, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reports. Yet because of a lack of money and support, they account for only one-third of admissions to recovery facilities.

Enter Divided Sky. Anastasio had become dependent on opioids after dental surgery before he began a court-mandated recovery program under Gulde, a licensed counselor who specializes in abstinence-based, 12-step work.

The musician went on to create a nonprofit foundation, collect more than $1 million through a 2020 series of online “Beacon Jams” concerts, and purchase Ludlow’s 18-acre Fox Run at Okemo property, which features a 20-room lodge with a commercial kitchen, meeting space and exercise facility.

“I started Divided Sky Foundation to offer people the same help that I was fortunate enough to receive,” Anastasio told Ludlow leaders during a 2021 review hearing. “I’ve talked to a lot of people in the incredible, progressive, forward-thinking Vermont recovery community and there’s one place that they all agree, and that’s that we don’t have enough beds.”

After some neighbors voiced concerns, Divided Sky dropped its plans to offer medical services and medication-assisted treatment to help with withdrawal (Vermont has three such providers: Recovery House in Wallingford, Sana at Stowe and Valley Vista in Bradford). Instead, it opened in 2023 as a “nonclinical program grounded in compassion, mindfulness and the 12 steps” for long-term wellness, according to its website.

The cost of a 30-day stay is listed at $7,500. Because Divided Sky isn’t a detox or rehab center but a next-step recovery retreat, it can’t bill Medicaid, Medicare or private insurance and instead relies on scholarships.

“We don’t turn people away for lack of funds,” said Gulde, who has welcomed 265 attendees in the past two years. “Our mentality is what do you have and let’s work together to get you in the door.”

Divided Sky is establishing the scholarship fund with the help of Tamara Holder, a women’s rights attorney and advocate who covered the cost of the program’s first female participant in 2023.

“I know it’s already working,” Holder said of the center’s efforts.

Several Phish fan groups are planning to collect money for the cause in advance of Anastasio performing a sold-out set of fifth-anniversary Beacon Jams concerts in November. The frontman has good words for the new fund.

“This program,” he said in a statement, “can give more women the chance to heal and start fresh.”

Probe into child’s death prompts 2nd state takeover of Bertie County DSS

by Lucas Thomae, Carolina Public Press
September 12, 2025

State officials have intervened yet again at Bertie County’s Department of Social Services, making a dramatic gesture by removing power from the current DSS director and assuming direct control of the county’s child welfare services.

Despite being stripped of her authority, Bertie County DSS Director Daphine Little is still employed by the county, officials told Carolina Public Press on Thursday.

Bertie DSS has been under strict state supervision for much of the last three years.

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The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services took control of the county's child welfare once before in 2022 after discovering that the county had unlawfully removed children from homes using custody orders that hadn’t been signed by a judge.

Little was hired by the county later that year to replace the previous director. The state returned control of child welfare services back to the county in May 2023, but required that Bertie continue to be supervised through a corrective action plan which lasted until September of last year, according to reporting by the Bertie Ledger-Advance.

It wasn’t long before Bertie DSS was back in hot water. In December, the death of a child previously involved with child welfare services prompted the state to return and put the county back on a corrective action plan.

On Aug. 14, DHHS officials notified the county that the embattled department had failed to sufficiently improve its services in the wake of the child fatality.

The child whose death prompted the takeover, as reported by several local media outlets, is 2-year-old Jamie Drain, who died on Dec. 2. The timeline laid out in the DHHS letter and a copy of a child protective services assessment viewed by CPP confirm that the county was involved with Drain’s family shortly before the state’s intervention.

Local law enforcement haven’t yet filed any charges related to Drain’s death, but Bertie County Sheriff Tyrone Ruffin said in a Facebook statement on Aug. 26 that his office had received a copy of the autopsy report and considers the investigation a homicide case.

A letter from DHHS addressed to Little, County Manager Juan Vaughan, social services board chair James Lee and County Commissioner Corey Balance gave a scathing assessment of Bertie DSS.

“The mismanagement of this case and failure of (Bertie DSS) to adhere to the directives of NCDHHS has magnified our concerns about (Bertie DSS’) ability to adequately assess child safety and risk that is vital to the protection of all children in Bertie County,” the letter read.

“NCDHHS also has serious concerns about the accuracy, integrity and transparency of information provided by the child welfare staff of Bertie County DSS at all levels of the organization.”

Neither Little nor the county commissioners responded to requests for comment on the state’s takeover. Vaughan said in a statement that the county is “fully cooperating with state oversight.”

The incident marks only the fifth time that DHHS has divested power from a county DSS director. Bertie is the only county to have had its social services department be taken over twice.

State statute lays out the legal requirements for such an intervention.

First, if a county’s social services is found not to be in compliance with federal and state requirements, it must enter into a corrective action plan that may last up to 18 months.

If DHHS determines that the county has failed to complete its corrective action plan, the state must temporarily assume all or part of the department's social services administration.

The first time that the state took this step was in 2018 with Cherokee County, which also unlawfully removed children from their homes. State takeovers also happened in Nash County in 2023 and Vance County in May of this year, both of which had to do with the administration of child welfare services.

Even though the state may impose corrective measures and potentially withhold funding from counties, there’s little they can do in terms of the removal of problematic child welfare staff. That goes back to the inherent separation of powers in North Carolina’s state-supervised, county-administered child welfare system.

Only a county’s governing board for social services has authority to discipline or dismiss a county DSS director, according to UNC School of Government Professor Kristi Nickodem, who specializes in human services law.

Bertie County's social services board has yet to take that step, nearly a month after the state’s takeover.

“DHHS may temporarily divest a county DSS director of the director’s service delivery powers, but cannot terminate the director’s employment,” Nickodem said.

“However, as the state supervising agency for social services during the corrective action or divestiture process, DHHS may provide a local social services board with guidance and information regarding problems and concerns with the administration of social services in the county.

“This could include expressing concerns to the board regarding the DSS director’s noncompliance with law and policy. Failing to adequately address those concerns could potentially lead to liability or a loss in funding for a county.”

DHHS is currently assessing Bertie County’s child welfare practice and reviewing cases, the agency said in a statement to CPP.

“This assessment is the first phase of divestiture and must be completed before additional conclusions or recommendations can be shared.”

The next meeting of Bertie’s social services board is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 15. There’s been no indication yet that the board plans to discuss disciplinary action for Little.

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Artist-in-residence program highlights Danville’s growing public art scene — and the city’s continuing revitalization

Nate Hester, who spent the past year doing artistic residencies in France, Italy and Japan, now welcomes visitors into his River District studio. Such public art is important to the city’s rebirth, redevelopment officials say.

by Grace Mamon September 17, 2025

Paint, drawings, text and trash converge in a set of recognizable but incongruous images, organized in four frames inside Nate Hester’s studio space on Craghead Street in Danville. 

A bird and bird cage, a tic-tac-toe board, Harry Potter, Shrek’s head on Wonder Woman’s torso, Donald Duck, a discarded tie-down strap, an Oreo logo, the phrase “Bad Bad Boy.”

“I don’t expect you to necessarily get this,” Hester said. “But I do expect you to be able to look at it and have some foothold of understanding. … Even if they don’t love it, I want people to vibe with it and be able to find some connection point.”

Kids who come into the studio space during its open hours on Saturday mornings recognize the cartoon characters and pop culture references, Hester said. 

“It’s not like minimalism or conceptual art galleries, where you go in and you just can’t figure it out,” he said. “Here, there’s something recognizable. Middle America is not lost.”

Hester is Danville’s current artist-in-residence, part of a local program that was founded last year. 

An artist-in-residence is a professional artist who works for a set period of time with a host organization, usually a museum, gallery or university, to create art and engage with the public. 

Danville’s program, however, is privately run. It was established by Rick Barker, a local developer who is credited with transforming the 500 block of Craghead Street in the River District.

On this block, the studio space is open to the public on certain days so that the community can meet Hester, check out his art and learn how artists make a living.

That public engagement is the priority of Danville’s artist-in-residence program, Barker said. 

Barker created the program to ensure that art would be a piece of the city’s ongoing revitalization, alongside the efforts around economic development and workforce preparation. 

Hester’s work, which spans multiple media, has been shown in galleries across the country, and he has permanent collections at Harvard University and the New York Public Library.

“He creates master drawings, then embellishes them with paint, found objects and even gold leaf, with the occasional foreign language script to add layers of interest,” Barker said in a statement. “Then, these images from his framed works literally jump off the page to become reinvented as custom wall papers and fabrics, papier-mâché and small ceramic sculptures.”

Hester has participated in many artist residency programs, both domestically and abroad. Within the past 18 months, he has held residencies in France, Italy, Japan, New Orleans and New York.

But he was familiar with Danville: His father grew up in the city, and Hester was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, and spent the summers at his grandfather’s tobacco farm in nearby Roxboro, North Carolina. 

Danville’s program and studio space measure up to his international experiences, he said. 

“The facilities here, the promotion and connection for the program, it’s comparable to any of the places that I’ve been in Paris or New York or Rome,” Hester said. “It’s really world-class.”

Starting an ‘unexpected’ program in rural Virginia

A lifelong lover of art and architecture — and the preservation of both — Barker said he always imagined public art as part of the redevelopment of the 500 block of Craghead Street. 

It couldn’t come first, though. Public art was further down on the laundry list of priorities when it came to fixing up the blighted, vacant former tobacco warehouses up and down the block. 

“My goal for the 500 block was to take a row of condemned buildings in which no one saw value and look a little harder and say, ‘Actually there is value. Let’s not dismiss this too quickly,’” Barker said. “My lofty goal at the beginning was to provide museum quality restoration to these buildings, knowing that it would be challenging financially.”

That process began 10 years ago, when Craghead Street was “a slum,” Barker said.

A native of the city, Barker is the founder and CEO of Danville-based distribution service Supply Resources, which is now headquartered on Craghead Street. He describes himself as a preservationist and said he was drawn to the historic brick buildings of Danville’s former warehouse district. 

After opening his company’s headquarters on Craghead Street, Barker eventually acquired nine other buildings on the block. Rick Barker Properties, the property management company that is headquartered in the same building as Supply Resources, was created to manage these acquisitions. 

Initially, Barker planned to buy and renovate the Craghead buildings into retail spaces and then rent them out to tenants. 

“I found out quickly that being a landlord there wouldn’t pay for these projects, because I couldn’t get tenants to come to the slum with me,” he said. “So I thought, OK, maybe one way to change this perception would be to change the visual perception.”

Barker began working with the city to make aesthetic upgrades — things like facade facelifts, improved sidewalks, storm drainage, lighting and even plants.

The effort, over many years, was largely successful, and Craghead Street is now home to apartments, restaurants, a brewery and a science center. 

Barker’s wish for public art materialized later, after much of this redevelopment was already completed. In 2023, he launched Vantage Art Flats, an art-themed set of Airbnbs in a former tobacco warehouse on Craghead Street. 

“There, instead of original art only on the inside of the building for guests to enjoy, we began to put it outside,” Barker said. 

A large, red plastic elephant stands at the entrance of Vantage, facing the street, accompanied by other plastic animal sculptures created by Italian art group Cracking Art. 

Named Eldridge, the elephant stands where the Eldridge Drug Store used to be, Barker said. 

“It’s amazing the response that that elephant draws,” he said. “In the past three years since he’s been there, I don’t think there’s been a day that someone’s not taking a photograph.”

Some people just see it as a big plastic elephant, Barker said. That’s fine with him — as long as they’re interested. 

“You don’t have to call it art, that’s not important,” he said. “What I like is the engagement.”

That engagement is also the idea behind the artist-in-residence program.

One of the Airbnb suites is reserved for the current artist and is attached to a studio space with doors that open directly onto the sidewalk of Craghead Street. 

During its first year, the program hosted three artists for eight weeks each, providing an apartment at Vantage, a studio/gallery space and a $6,000 stipend for materials. Total, the package is valued at $10,000, a cost covered entirely by Rick Barker Properties. 

Hester’s residence has been longer; he started April 1 and will continue to the end of the year, Barker said. 

“We’re so impressed with Nate and his work and his message that we wanted to support that further,” Barker said. “We wanted him to continue to do more work and to provide enough space for him to do large-scale work.”

As 2026 begins, the program will begin looking for its next artist-in-residence through an online application process. Barker said the process has drawn candidates from across the globe, working in a variety of media. 

Each of the artists-in-residence in Danville so far has worked with different media and techniques, he said. One created handmade papers, one made costumes out of recycled material and another was a mosaic tile artist. 

The program doesn’t require the artist to sell art, or to leave a piece of art behind for the property — though most of them have created artwork to add to Vantage, Barker said.

The only requirements are that the artist hold gallery hours on Saturday mornings, when the public is invited to come see the art, and to engage with the community — for example, presenting master classes for area art teachers.

“The idea is, you can engage with a professional artist about their medium. They can tell you about the art, how they make a living, how they market art,” Barker said. “The contribution we’re trying to make is putting creatives in the 500 block to be a demonstration for locals and visitors to see creative people working with their minds and hands.”

‘Elevated street art’

Hester’s eclectic, frenetic art style is a far cry from his initial work as an American landscape painter — though there are through-lines, he said. 

He started drawing at an early age, while going to work with his father, a Danville native and landscape architect.

“We would go to these sites, and he would say, ‘You can’t design for a space until you understand it,’” Hester said. “So we would sit on the curb and do watercolors of a place.”

Eventually, Hester’s art diverged from traditional landscapes, because he “got more interested in the psychology landscape of America.”

His work features recognizable American images, arranged in unexpected ways across many media. In addition to framed pieces, the Craghead Street studio has sculptures, wallpaper, furniture, crocheted items, plates and tote bags featuring Hester’s work. 

The works displayed are available for sale, although the studio space does not function as a gallery with commission, Hester said. Prices for individual pieces can be found on this website. 

According to his artist statement, Hester “channels a visual language that blends black-and-white, streetstyle, pop-punk collage and delicate, figurative rendering.”

“The result is an alternate vision of the hearth — a surreal ecosystem where everything belongs to everything.”

Hester first came to Danville to be an art professor at Averett University in 2023. He taught there for one academic year before the school downsized the program and cut his position. 

While searching for a place to live in the city, he came upon Vantage Art Flats and the artist-in-residence program. 

He was impressed and surprised, because it’s unusual for small cities — and rural places in general — to have this level of commitment to the arts, he said.

Some prestigious artist-in-residence programs are in very remote areas like Roswell, New Mexico, but most are nearer to big cities. 

There are more than 400 artist-in-residence programs in the U.S. and over 1,500 worldwide, according to Americans for the Arts, a national nonprofit for advancing the arts in the U.S.

“Everything is in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago,” Hester said. “It’s unusual for a program like this to be in rural America, in a mid-sized, Main Street, USA, town. What Rick’s done here is special.”

Hester said his style isn’t place-specific, but when he participates in artist-in-residence programs in different communities, the locales influence his work. Danville particularly resonates with him, he said.

He’s used items he’s picked up around Danville — like a tie-down strap that he found while running near the Danville Regional Airport and belts from the local Goodwill — in some of his pieces. 

“I have a sort of elegant, refined but also gritty, down-home aesthetic,” he said. “It’s great for me to be in Danville for that reason. … It has this glitz but also this grime. And my work is about that sort of high-level rendering of street art.”

Even the studio space, he said, which is in an old tobacco warehouse, now has an elegance to it, with steel doorways and large glass windows.

The space is the most impressive thing about the program, Hester said. 

“The facility is just second to none,” he said. “It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, and it’s afforded me the ability to build out my vision three-dimensionally. … When I was traveling internationally, I only had room to take paper and pencil and little stuff like that.”

A larger space, two doors down from the studio, holds Hester’s sculptures. He gives tours of that space upon request.

Part of the fun of the sculptures is coming up with their names, Hester said. The full set of sculptures is called “When Magic Ruled,” with individual pieces called “I shot myself with a bottle rocket last July Fourth,” and “When I finally got around to baking her cupcakes, I didn’t have enough flour.”

The public’s reception to his work has been warm and positive, Hester said, and he plans to hold public-facing events and workshops this fall and winter. 

Public art a sign that Danville is out of ‘survival mode’

Art and artwork have a part in economic growth and revitalization, said Shane Brogden with the River District Association, a nonprofit organization that works to spur redevelopment in the city.

“Art serves as a major catalyst for community revitalization,” Brodgen said in an email statement. “Creative installations and the presence of working artists are a great way to bring people downtown, where residents and visitors can witness the creativity in action.”

The RDA has recently been involved with a mural project on North Main Street and with the Vibrant Windows program, which transforms vacant River District storefronts into galleries showcasing the work of local artists. 

These projects, as well as Hester’s work, add “vibrancy and energy to our downtown core,” Brodgen said. When outside artists like Hester make Danville their home and workspace, even temporarily, they become part of the city’s transformation, he said.

Not only is it possible to include public art in Danville’s renaissance, it’s important, Barker said. It might be unexpected in such a small market, he said, but it’s a signal that the city is truly thriving. 

Barker grew up in Danville, at a time when the city was “in survival mode, doing its very best to break even.”

Now, those times are over, he said. The city’s rebirth has been characterized not only by economic growth, but also by a renewed emphasis on things like recreation and quality of life. 

Public art can be part of that, Barker said. 

“It’s a luxury to be able to think about, after we survived the highest unemployment in the United States, what do we want to do now? Who do we want to be now?” he said. 

“Our display of public art is no attempt to be sophisticated, but I hope there’s something inspiring there, to say that we can finally think about doing more and doing better.”

It can also help educate the public about how an artist makes their living. When residents and visitors come into the studio space, Hester said he often talks about how he markets his work.

He said he’d love to become an international artist based in Danville. Since moving to the area, he has “fallen in love with a hometown girl” and welcomed a daughter. 

Social media allows artists to market their art from anywhere, he said. 

“I’d like to live in an old historic house on Main Street, have a small warehouse, and sell my work in Paris and Tokyo,” Hester said. 

Right now, most of Hester’s sales are reproduced prints of his original work, which sell on Etsy and other online stores for $250 or less. Small originals sell for $400 and large originals for $4,000, he said. 

Hester’s work is also featured in galleries in New Orleans, New York, Portland and Washington, D.C. Sales at those galleries account for about $75,000 a year, he said. 

At a time when the art market is “at a 30-year low,” Hester said he’s appreciated the flexibility of Danville’s program. 

Barker said this was always the goal — to provide a stipend for artists so that they can spend their time in Danville making what they want, not necessarily what the market is demanding. 

“I’ve always been impressed with artists,” he said. “Most of what I do is commercially driven, meaning that if I spend my time working on something that doesn’t sell, I stop doing it immediately. … Artists are often so committed to what they do, that they will do it whether it sells or not. I don’t think most people have that capacity.”

He said he hopes the program is valuable for both the public and the artist. 

“If you’ve never had the experience of meeting a live artist, it could be pretty interesting,” Barker said. “It’s very grounding.”

Artist-in-residence program highlights Danville’s growing public art scene — and the city’s continuing revitalization

Nate Hester, who spent the past year doing artistic residencies in France, Italy and Japan, now welcomes visitors into his River District studio. Such public art is important to the city’s re…

Cardinal NewsGrace Mamon

Dominion’s Proposed Peaker Plant Flouts Environmental Justice, Community Says

The utility’s environmental justice analysis lacks community health data, according to attorneys representing affected residents.

By Charles Paullin

September 18, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

CHESTER, Va.—For the first 60 years Duane Brankley lived here, about a mile and a half from a coal plant owned by Dominion Energy, coal ash coated the shingles on his roof and the insides of his lungs.

The coal plant finally closed in 2023, but soon Brankley could be facing an even more insidious air pollutant: fine particulate matter, or PM 2.5, from a new natural gas plant, the Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center, that Dominion wants to build on the site of the old coal facility. 

Given what he’s experienced, Brankley is concerned about the future air quality in his neighborhood as the utility seeks a needed air permit for its new facility, one of six future natural gas plants the utility claims are necessary to meet periods of peak demand on the electric grid that it says could soon be strained in Virginia by data center development. 

Along with an air permit review, the proposed natural gas plant needs a construction permit that includes Dominion’s environmental justice analysis that purports to evaluate the harm facing surrounding underserved community members, like Brankley. But attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the Chesterfield County Branch NAACP, Mothers Out Front and the Central American Solidarity Association, say it lacks community health information and does not adequately assess risk exposure to the plant. 

“They don’t care about the pollution harming people,” said Brankley. “It’s the cha-ching they’re worried about. Money, money, money.” 

Brankley is not alone. Aliya Farooq, another community member, lives a few miles away from the plant and is a plaintiff alongside Brankley and former Virginia Sierra Club Chapter director Glen Bessa in a lawsuit, now heading to the Virginia Court of Appeals, that challenges a local land use approval.

Farooq, who’s attended local meetings and briefings from Virginia’s regulators, is concerned about the air pollution and the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions exacerbating climate-related flooding. 

“Regardless, one gas plant or six, we are going to be harming the environment and we’re going to be adding pollution,” Farooq said in an interview earlier this month. “That bothers me because [of] the long-term impacts, not just locally but across the country and across the world. The death toll in Pakistan, last time I checked, was between 600 and 800 right now from the current flooding.”

Dominion maintains that the 1 gigawatt “peaker” plant is the best way to send electricity to the grid during periods of peak demand, which reached about 22 gigawatts in 2024 and is expected to grow by more than 10,000 MW by 2030. 

The utility’s service requirements, outside of the peak periods, are projected to grow from a demand of 17.7 gigawatts in 2023 to 33.7 gigawatts in 2048. While it is pursuing carbon free nuclear, offshore wind and solar and storage, the utility claims renewables can’t be relied on in the early morning and evenings when the sun isn’t shining, as well as when the wind isn’t blowing to meet periods of high stress. 

Asked about the utility’s environmental justice analysis of environmental impacts on nearby communities, spokesperson Aaron Ruby pointed to public comments that Cedric Green, senior vice president of generation, made before Virginia’s environmental regulators. 

The peaker plant’s air permit requires maximum reduction of emissions, Green said. “This project is located on the site of long-standing coal units, and I would emphasize that there will be less emissions from this project than from the coal units it replaces.”

Many in attendance at a Department of Environmental Quality hearing on the peaker plant earlier this month, including a Dominion Energy-backed group called the Virginia Reliability Alliance, spoke in support of the project because of what they said was its reliability promise. But opponents pointed to the project running counter to the state’s decarbonization law, the Virginia Clean Economy Act and an opportunity for battery storage to increase reliability of renewables.

Coal Plant Continuing to Give 

Although transitioning from burning coal to natural gas, the Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center would be allowed to release new pollutants into the community despite community members’ concerns.

The former coal plant began operations in 1944 and had four coal units that retired between March 2019 and 2023. Two natural gas fired turbines have remained, with a combined capacity of 420 megawatts.

The utility initially proposed the peaker plant in 2019 but shelved it as the state passed, with Democrats in control of the governor’s mansion and both legislative chambers, the Virginia Clean Economy Act. It required that Dominion transition to a 100 percent clean energy portfolio by 2045. 

When the coal plant operated two units that phased down between 2020 and 2022 before their retirement in 2023, about 43.99 tons of PM 2.5 and 221.96 tons of PM 10 were emitted on average each year, along with 165.28 tons of carbon monoxide, 19.29 tons of volatile organic compounds and 1.7 million tons of greenhouse gases.

The new facility will annually emit a maximum amount of 153.96 tons of each PM 2.5 and PM 10, 825.3 tons of carbon monoxide, 162.5 tons of volatile organic compounds, 2.215 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, 353.3 tons of nitrous oxide, 27.8 tons of sulfur dioxide, 17.92 tons of sulfuric acid and .01 tons of lead, according to Dominion’s application to DEQ.

While Dominion claims that is a decrease in emissions from when the coal units ran, the SELC contends the gas units will produce an increase in PM 2.5, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and greenhouse gases compared to 2022 levels. 

During the administration of former President Joe Biden, air quality standards for power plants were made more stringent, but now the Trump administration and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin are seeking to roll those rules back.

According to the American Lung Association, PM 2.5 exposure can lead to more asthma attacks, respiratory illnesses and more, including early deaths.

“There is no safe threshold to breathe in fine particles,” the association states.

A “Desktop Review”

Under the Virginia Environmental Justice Act, another law Virginia passed in 2020, an environmental justice community is defined as either a community of color or a low-income community that faces an increased health risk by being in close proximity to air pollution or disproportionate impacts from any “industrial, governmental, or commercial operation, program, or policy.”

Chesterfield County, with a population of about 364,548 people, has about 80,000 Black people and 40,000 Hispanic people. Biden’s environmental justice screen, a tool showing a demographic background for an area, found that 50 to 90 percent of people living in areas surrounding the plant are of color. Trump has since removed the tool.

Dominion’s EJ analysis found that 22 of the 24 census block groups within a three-mile radius of the plant qualify as an environmental justice community under Virginia’s law. While acknowledging those communities, the utility asserts the project “minimizes potential environmental impacts such that local community health and other aspects of the environment will be protected.” Dominion also adds that its analysis for the DEQ “will show no significant adverse and disproportionate impacts to EJ communities.”

DEQ officials did not respond to requests for comment. 

James, with the SELC, is critical of Dominion’s EJ analysis, calling it a “desktop review,” without further evaluating the community’s actual health conditions. When cross referencing the proposed location with a 2023 Chesterfield-Colonial Height Health Assessment, residents west of the site comprise a high social vulnerability index making them more at risk of disease. 

Loren Hopkins, a professor at Rice University in Houston who was hired by the SELC, noted a lack of community health information and only three air monitors 12, 11.5 and 7.5 miles away from the site, providing insufficient data.

“In this respect, to accurately project the plant’s health impacts, Dominion must not only complete a robust baseline study of community health (e.g., current rates of asthma attack, asthma incidence, cardiac events, stroke, diabetes, and cancer), but must also determine the existing concentrations of harmful pollutants at the site,” Hopkins wrote in a report.

Community members have conducted their own study. It involves work with Lakshmi Fjord, an environmental justice anthropologist with the University of Virginia, who helped compile data showing that a natural gas compressor station in Buckingham County had a disproportionate impact on Black people living within the surrounding area. That finding led the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the compressor’s permit. Now, those Buckingham Community members are speaking up again.

“Dominion came out with the same story, the same line, how it’s going to be productive, how its going to make a difference,” said Richard Walker, a leading activist against the Buckingham compressor station at a DEQ public hearing last week. “But the key thing that they do, they didn’t do an environmental justice impact study, and here we go again.”

Any environmental justice determination DEQ makes will be based on guidance that has remained in a draft form under the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin and had issues in the eyes of James’ group.

“Our hope is that DEQ will consider the various comments that are submitted and evaluate the concerns that people have raised about the potential disproportionate health impacts,” James said in an interview. “That they’ll truly take on the responsibility that they have to promote and ensure that environmental justice is carried out across the commonwealth.”

Dominion’s Proposed Peaker Plant Flouts Environmental Justice, Community Says - Inside Climate News

The utility’s environmental justice analysis lacks community health data, according to attorneys representing affected residents.

Inside Climate NewsCharles Paullin