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By Henry Culvyhouse, Mountain State Spotlight
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In the late 1980s, the Rev. Jeff Allen was appointed to serve as pastor over a United Methodist Church congregation in rural McDowell County.
A few years into tending to his ministry, Philadelphia developers came offering a landfill for the county. The idea was simple.
McDowell County shipped out coal on a daily basis back then, on the railroads. So instead of sending the train cars back empty, they’d fill them with trash and dump them in an old mine.
When completed, developers hoped it would be able to accept up to 10,000 tons of garbage from the East Coast a day. It was one of a number of proposals to build landfills around the state for out-of-state garbage.
Allen became part of a grassroots movement that spurred legislation to give counties in the state the ability to determine if they wanted large-scale, commercial landfills and to keep the state from becoming a destination for the East Coast’s trash.
From landfills to data centers
Today, West Virginians are fighting a similar battle. At least six out-of-state developers have proposed massive data center complexes across the state, but so far, the state’s legislators have taken authority away from communities, making sure data centers could be exempt from zoning and other ordinances.
In the ’80s, Allen said the landfill proposal in McDowell provided hope of jobs for young people wanting to stay in the county, but an environmental threat to families who had lived there for decades.
“There was a divide in the community,” Allen said, recalling the proposal.
And there were some folks, employed by either the county or the powerful coal companies, who were too afraid to speak up. That’s where Allen, a clergyman, stepped in.
“I was more insulated, I think, from that hyper pressure than a lot of people were,” he said.
Allen quickly found out his community wasn’t alone. Through the West Virginia Citizens Action Group, established in the 1970s, he learned that counties across the state were facing similar proposals.
Citizen groups organized, often using phone trees — where people relay a message through a series of telephone calls — to rally people to Charleston to make lawmakers do something.
As one Calhoun County organizer, Tom Degen, recalled, even without the tools of the internet, they could get the word out quickly.
“On any given day in the early ’90s, there’d be like 100 people wandering around the Legislature raising hell, so to speak, and they couldn’t be ignored,” Degen said.
And in 1990 and 1991, the West Virginia Legislature passed a series of comprehensive landfill bills, which has been tweaked in the years since. The legislation established county waste authorities to help identify sites, capped the amount of trash a landfill could receive, imposed a tax on dumping and, for landfills accepting 10,000 or more tons per month, allowed residents in a county to hold a public vote on accepting one in their area.
Legislators remove local control
In Tucker County earlier this month, members of Tucker United hosted a picnic and gathered along the road outside of Canaan Valley State Resort to protest a data center proposed in their community. But the community won’t be voting on whether or not to accept the complex, which will store 10 million gallons of diesel fuel and deploy two natural gas-powered electric plants and a nuclear plant once up and running.
In 2025, legislators passed House Bill 2014, which exempts state-designated hyperscale data centers both connected to the grid or relying on their own power generation from city and county ordinances.
Those would include ordinances governing lighting, noise and zoning. The legislation also gives a majority of tax revenue from the projects to the state instead of the local communities.
Tucker United protesters held their gathering less than a mile away from where members of the West Virginia Legislature met at Canaan Valley Resort State Park for legislative interim committees, where they heard reports from agencies and organizations to better educate themselves for future legislation.
Cris Parque, an organizer with Tucker United, said if the state handled data centers like it did landfills, there probably wouldn’t be data centers.
“If it came to vote, nobody in Tucker County, or very few people in Tucker County, would vote for this,” she said.
Parque said while she doubts current lawmakers would seriously consider putting data centers up to a referendum, she sees other avenues for communities to be able to control their destiny, such as zoning or agreements with county and city governments requiring repair of roads and other resources damaged during construction.
But lawmakers would need to overturn HB 2014 for any of that to happen.
Cathy Fleischman, a member of the Davis Town Council, said local governments would normally have plenty of options, even without zoning, for projects in their jurisdiction. They can pass ordinances curbing the amount of light pollution, noise generated from the data center or the tonnage of trucks traveling through town.
“We can pass an ordinance that says no data centers if we wanted to,” she said.
But if the development is designated as a “high-impact data center,” then all local ordinances would be usurped.
Tucker County isn’t alone. A woman and her daughter traveled from Martinsburg to attend the rally, in response to the major data center announced in Berkeley County. Communities have organized in Mingo, Putnam and Mason counties as well.
And just this week, another developer announced their proposal for a data center in Ohio County.
“I think the system worked”
At the time the garbage wars kicked off, the state similarly saw multiple landfills proposed. Along with McDowell County, residents pushed back against proposals in Barbour, Berkeley and Wetzel counties.
Today, outside of a public vote, landfill proposals have multiple other local government hurdles to jump over. The same landfill law passed in the early 1990s requires large, commercial landfills to receive approval from a local solid waste authority and the county commission before state agencies even get involved.
One proposal for a landfill is currently pending before the Webster County Solid Waste Authority. During March and April this year, citizens organized against the potential landfill, which would’ve been sited on a former mine.
Shane McCourt, a local resident who got involved in the organizing, said the state’s landfill laws helped slow down and potentially block the project.
The County Commission had voted to grant a certificate of need to allow the landfill to go forward but rescinded that decision when they realized the county’s solid waste authority hadn’t been part of the decision.
Joshua Ringer, the project’s developer, presented his proposal to the county’s solid waste authority, but no action has been taken.
“We haven’t issued any decision on it,” said Jeff Anderson, a member of the authority. “We needed more information, and we haven’t heard anything.”
While the project is still pending, McCourt is satisfied with the result.
“My main goal was to stop this. For the most part, I think the system worked,” McCourt said.
When the current data center law was passed during the 2025 session, members of the House of Delegates raised concerns about the lack of local control under the bill. At the time, Republican lawmakers argued that data center projects promised too much economic boom for the state as a whole to leave it up to local communities.
Landfills held those possibilities too, with promises of jobs that didn’t replace coal mine wages but paid more than unemployment.
While some communities, most notably Barbour County, blocked landfills via a vote, others did not. About one-third of West Virginia’s landfills take between 10,000 and 30,000 tons a month, although none accept the 10,000 tons a day proposed for McDowell years ago.
In 1992, McDowell County voters approved the landfill Allen and others fought to keep out. But outside developers backed out due to the cap placed on how much garbage landfills can take, and today, it mainly serves the surrounding area and accepts only a fraction of what was proposed back then.
“Getting the legislation passed was hard,” Allen said. “You don’t win everything you want. But what you do win, you win for others in the state and for those in the future.”
Reach reporter Henry Culvyhouse at henry@mountainstatespotlight.org
