Something truly is rotten in Louisa. Recently there have been two eyebrow raising land deals involving current or former board of supervisors or their family members. Below are two examples of intersection of local politics, land deals, and private profit.
The County Landfill:
The expansion of the county’s landfill involved the purchase of additional land adjacent to the current landfill. The land, valued from $2000 to $3000 per acre sold for $9000 an acre, according to local reporting.
One of the land owners who benefited from this purchase was a son of one of the county’s Board of Supervisors. The Central Virginian reported in May 2025 that Jackson District Supervisor Williams recused himself from landfill expansion votes because his son Torrey Williams owned some of the adjacent land.
AWS Datacenters and the Fisher Chewing Tract Sale:
A little background, a few years ago the county board of supervisors created a number of technical overlay districts. Basically, a preferred location for technology investment, such as datacenters. The Fisher Chewing tract is located in one of these TODs as folks colloquially call them. Like any gold rush, the board of supervisors had tax revenue gold dust in their eyes and were chasing a pot of gold that does not exist.
As you may recall, the Fisher Chewing tract was going to be the site of a third Amazon datacenter in Louisa. However, because of a local pushback movement and opposition from some board of supervisors, in particular the Mineral District Supervisor Duane Adams, AWS withdrew its’ application for a conditional use permit to build the third datacenter.
I think most folks thought that, ‘well that is that’ a victory for the people. Not so fast. To many a startled resident of Louisa, Amazon Web Services recently purchased 9000 acres for an eye popping $72.45 million. Wait, wait… Part of the land AWS purchased was the 1400 acre Fisher Chewing property. And it gets better. According to the Central Virginian, The Fisher Chewing tract was owned by Fisher Chewing L.C. Now the kicker. Fishers Chewing L.C. is owned by Charles and Eric Purcell. Charles Purcell is a lawyer and developer in Louisa and Eric is a former Louisa District member of the county’s Board of Supervisors.
Now, a curious mind would be asking questions about these land deals. For the latter example, why would AWS buy the Chewing Fisher tract (and other adjacent tracts) for top dollar given that it would basically never be developed as a datacenter site? Doesn’t make sense to me.
The Planning Commission: Pulling back TODs
This week the Louisa Planning Commission meets Thursday at 7 PM at the Louisa Country Office Building, 1 Woolfolk Avenue. On the agenda is an amendment to amend ORD2023 in order to remove the technology overlay district designation encompassing the Fisher Chewing and Cooke Rail tracts of land.
The meeting is open to the public but I don’t know whether there will be a question and answer opportunity.
If you want to follow these developments and others in Louisa County Tammy Purcell’s great substack site called “Engage Louisa” is a super resource: https://tammypurcell.substack.com/
