High Voltage, High Tension
In Virginia's Piedmont, Electric Company and Critics Both Draw a Line

By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 5, 2007

Once every 10 years or so, something like this happens.

In the '70s, the Marriott Corp. proposed to erect Ferris wheels and roller coasters near the spot where Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson stood against the Union "like a stone wall." In the '80s, on the Stuart's Hill portion of that same Manassas battlefield, a developer proposed to build a mall. In the '90s, the Walt Disney Co. proposed a theme park version of American history at the base of the Bull Run Mountains. This year Dominion Virginia Power sees the Virginia Piedmont as a distance between two points for a 500,000-volt power line twice as tall as the oaks and as wide as an interstate.

A drama rich in plot and character invariably ensues. Those who propose to bring "progress" to this territory reliably run into resistance of which they never dreamed. No one knows how the Dominion epic will turn out -- as in the past, hardly a week goes by without another headline-filling twist and turn. But in the previous decades, against all odds, the programs of the mighty corporates have come a cropper. And in all these tales, certain themes recur.

Full disclosure: This writer has been a student of these culture clashes for more than 30 years from the perspective of his home in the Piedmont, which has a neighborhood power distribution line crossing it, and which is in the originally proposed path of the big transmission line.

The classic mistake strangers make when they look out over the Piedmont is to think it empty. Only an hour or so west of the White House, the mountains and runs, forests and fields, byways and stone walls and black wood fences -- amid which it is still easy to spot more cattle and horses than humans -- can lure the uninitiated into presuming they have arrived at the fly-over, a place as corny as Kansas. Some are even so spooked as to fear they've landed in "Deliverance" territory.

For Dominion, the surprises started with learning this place is full of names. Some call it "Upper Virginia," for example, to distinguish it from the busyness and traffic of Northern Virginia. To others it is "Hallowed Ground," as the lush coffee-table photo book about the region is called. Also, "The Mosby Confederacy," after the Gray Ghost who legendarily contributed to the theory and practice of guerrilla resistance to far more powerful forces.

In fact, this area is crammed with ideas and images, and people who value them more than they do money. Farmers and tradesmen of modest means are relieved to find their views shared by old-money names such as Mars and duPont, not to mention more recent arrivals such as the Hollywood star Robert Duvall. As in previous conflicts, what unites this resistance is the sense that not everything of great worth is captured by monetary calculations.

Quantifying 'Progress'

John D. Smatlak, 50, has come a long way from his steel-mill home town of Johnstown, Pa., from which he escaped to the electrical engineering program at Penn State. Today, in his Richmond office with the shades drawn against the view of the James River, he is turned out in a well-cut black suit and highly polished black tasseled loafers.

The proposed Meadow Brook-Loudoun power line, as it is known, is John Smatlak's baby. He is Dominion's vice president-electric transmission, the man trying to maintain his composure as he faces all the protesters with their signs that read "Fight Dominion's Greed."

Smatlak's approach to the power line project has been a spreadsheet view of the universe. "When we decide where to route it, we plot all of the historic sites, the historic areas. How many miles through the area. How many historic sites per mile. The number of houses every so many feet. We count the number of houses within 200 feet, within 500 feet," he says.

At angry public meetings, where it was not unusual for 2,000 people to show up over three nights, Dominion distributed a survey that asked people to rank their feelings across 15 variables on a scale of one to five. How important should it be to "maximize distance from residences"? "Minimize length of line across agricultural/pasture land"? "Maintain reliable electric service"?

"We end up trying to quantify all of these issues for each segment," Smatlak says. "And then we assign a weight to those, based on what the public told us. A numeric system." And then they turn all the numbers over to their consultants.

Smatlak says he is not familiar with most of the previous Piedmont dramas, such as the "Third Battle of Manassas" over the proposed mall on the battlefield. He has heard of the Disney debacle but doesn't see any connection to the uprising over his power line.

Yet striking similarities exist. Each corporation starts with the conviction that it has achieved the kind of strategic dominance that will lead to quick victory. Resistance is futile, they believe, and for excellent reason. Every legal base that matters is covered. All economics have been analyzed. The politicians have been attended to. The utility, for example, is one of the state's most generous political contributors, donating more than $3.75 million to Virginia's politicians since 1996, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Dominion employed 18 registered lobbyists this year, and their track record is formidable even by the standards of the tobacco industry. For example, the raft of bills introduced in the current legislature to slow or stop Smatlak's baby have all been efficiently short-circuited.

This is why Smatlak doesn't see Dominion as yet another corporation caught in the threshing machine of Piedmont farmers, zillionaires, people who define themselves by what trucks and guns they own, equestrians, the cranky people whose families have been cranky in the Piedmont for centuries, and the well-funded and well-organized Piedmont Environmental Council.

In fact, he says, Dominion conducted no prior demographic or political research to assess the scope, sophistication or financial backing of any opposition it might face in the Piedmont. Dominion is not the kind of place where it would occur to them to think like that, Smatlak says. There was no place for it in their spreadsheet.

He says he had no idea the humming, buzzing wires were slated to march down the driveway and across the pond of John T. "Til" Hazel Jr., the attorney and developer who not only proposed to build that mall on the Manassas battlefield but who, in the second half of the 20th century, did more to shape the future of Northern Virginia with its office towers than any man since Robert E. Lee. He didn't know the first proposed alignment would put the enormous towers across the front yard of John B. "Jay" Adams, a former member of Dominion's board of directors.

What Numbers Don't Count

When you talk to Piedmont farmers about what's missing from a profit-and-loss view of the land, the conversation tends to wind up the same. They struggle for a while to put it into words and then say, "Get in the truck." You stop at what turns out to be the highest point on the place and the farmer says, "Look."

What you see is a spread that doesn't fit into a spreadsheet. In every direction are open, rolling, subdivision-free vistas that not only are exceptional inside the Washington metropolitan area, but are extraordinary anywhere in "megalopolis" -- that vast, Eastern, urban swath from New Hampshire to North Carolina.

If its crop were office towers and "town centers," the land below you would be worth hundreds of millions, billions -- add as many zeroes as you like -- and these landholders know it. But to prevent this from happening, quite a few have deeded away their development rights, in perpetuity, taking a conservation tax deduction or tax credit that's a tiny fraction of the kind of money they could have made by selling out.

Unlike so many farmers in Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties who, over the last six decades, were all too happy to trade their view of the wrong end of a cow for suburbanizing "progress," these people are exquisitely aware of the trade-offs. They know they represent the final chapter of one of the epic stories in world history, in which farmers are now so rare as to represent perhaps 2 percent of the U.S. population.

It is not absent-mindedly that the farmers who are left have chosen a different path.

Take, for example, Henry C. Green, of Markham.

Bright-eyed, alert and erect, and with a full head of steel-gray hair and a smile always playing around his face, at the age of 85 he's the sort of Virginia romantic that William R. Taylor described at the end of "Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character." He saw them as the direct psychological descendants of the Southern yeomen whom Thomas Jefferson saw as the foundation of the republic.

Taylor described these people as "ardent and impassioned," "strongly partisan to liberty," "vigorous and more natural than the gentleman planter," possessing "a great natural intelligence" and a "chivalric sense of honor." At the same time, they were just plumb ornery.

Green is the great-great-grandson of John Marshall, the Revolutionary War patriot who became the nation's longest-serving Supreme Court chief justice. Marshall's boyhood home -- now being restored -- is on land that Green farms. The power line as initially proposed goes straight across that land. One branch or another of Green's family has farmed here since Virginia was a colony.

Less important to Green than this past, however, is the future, and that the next three generations of his family feel about the place the same way he does. "I'm very proud of this farm and the family," Green says. "I just wouldn't want to see anything happen to them."

All six of his children -- he's the kind of Virginian who refers to them as the "chirren" -- have made successful lives for themselves in the professional world. Yet three have returned to live and work here, and a fourth is on the way back. Son John runs the cattle operation of Angus and Charolais. Bill, the orchard where city people come to pick their own sweet cherries in June, blueberries in July, peaches in August, and apples in September and October. And Hank, the Christmas trees. This is what Green sees as at risk when he thinks of the partnership between man and nature created by his clan, which now includes 20 grandchildren and a newborn great-grandchild.

It's what he's talking about when he discusses the unpretentious lives his family has had here -- successful enough that all the kids got to college, but hard enough that he remembers how glad he was in 1950 to get the farm's first tractor, so he no longer had to work behind horses. This is what he sees as mortally threatened by the industrial swath of a massive power line.

Gazing out at the mountains that ring his place, you observe that it's harder and harder to find land like this. Green is enough of a Virginia gentleman that when he responds, it is with a smile.

"Yeah, that's just the point," he says. Keeping it together -- "It's a hard thing to do. We've worked a long time to get it. I don't want to see it destroyed. The land is dear to me. Don't want to see it destroyed."

This is what the city folk come out here for, hundreds of them, some weekends, when they come to pick their own fruit. "Surprising how much that appeals to them. Bring your family out. Opportunity to get out in the country." This is what he's talking about as he tells you to "Get into the truck," and takes you to the highest knoll, and says "Look."

Right in front of Marshall's boyhood home is something new: a sign that says, "Fight Dominion's Greed. Say No! We Won't Glow!"

The Uprising

Dominion's original proposal did a remarkable job of uniting foes across lines of class, occupation, race and economic interest.

Developers like Toll Brothers joined with property-rights activists who objected to the use of government power condemning private land for corporate use, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with preservationists. On the same bus to a Richmond protest sat Prince William County folks from the Dominion Valley subdivision and Fauquier County folks with hundreds of acres. United States congressmen vied with Virginia assemblymen to crowd into anti-power-line photo ops.

"I've never been so popular in my life," says Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council. "People stop me on the street to say thank you."

"Talking about property values around here without the view is like talking about property values on Cape Cod if you take away the ocean," says Til Hazel, the legendary developer.

Moreover, while heartfelt pleas regarding the sanctity of nature are all well and good, hey, this is Washington. Some significant portion of this land was paid for the old-fashioned way -- by lobbying, consulting, advising and deal-making. Thus, the area is full of people who can fight Dominion on its own ground, with data, science and law. In January, hardly a week went by without yet another highly researched opposition report landing in the in-box from somebody like Mitchell S. Diamond, a Loudoun County resident who for years was vice president in charge of an energy group at Booz Allen Hamilton, the global strategy and technology consulting firm.

The Deep Battle

Early last month, a new computer model arrived at Dominion, reports John Smatlak. It produced startling results. "We got the latest update on the annual transmission load flow. The difference was very significant." All of a sudden, a route longer than the one initially sparking the resounding clash with the people of the Piedmont showed up as being "electrically comparable." It is shaped like a fishhook, dipping well south along the Rappahannock River, not straight across the Northern Piedmont. And the new proposal largely traces existing transmission lines. "The areas are already damaged somewhat," Smatlak notes . So it now has become Dominion's "preferred" route.

As before, Dominion has splendid reason for optimism that it will prevail. Key decisions will be made by the State Corporation Commission in Richmond or the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In the name of allowing these bodies to consider the broad greater good, both are well-insulated from popular opinion or direct voter intervention.

Yet there is no reason to think the battle has ended.

The new path goes across the dairy farm of Ken and Pam Smith of Remington, who help other working farmers join them in putting land in conservation easement. When they take you to a high point of the 2,300 acres they work, 520 acres of which they own, they talk about the time they thought about building a new house for themselves right by the cherry tree on this ridge.

He: "But we couldn't bring ourselves . . . " She: " . . . to disrupt it . . . " He: " . . . to desecrate this land with a house."

They are furious that Dominion wants to add additional power lines to this land they couldn't even see disfiguring with a new house.

They are not alone. "This is a fight to the death!," Fauquier Supervisor Ray Graham last week told a Piedmont Environmental Council informational rally.

"We still don't understand what this power line is for," says Miller of the PEC, which serves nine counties in the Piedmont and has vowed to stay the course. The PEC has long argued that Virginia land is being sacrificed to Dominion's real agenda of finding ways to route its cheap energy to lucrative markets in the Northeast. Dominion replies that it wants to prevent rolling blackouts in Northern Virginia by 2011.

That's why, if past is prologue, this clash is not going away.

As the renowned cultural analyst Leo Marx noted in "The Machine in the Garden," it is about "a strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as counterforce to the myth." We believe that "access to undefiled, bountiful, sublime Nature is what accounts for the virtue and special good fortune of Americans," he writes.

We are bound up in this conflict to this day. Our most fashionable foods and fibers are ones that are "natural." Our deepest concerns about advanced technologies such as cloning, genetic modification and stem cells revolve around what is "natural."

On top of this, how you feel about the abrupt appearance of any Machine -- like a power line -- in any Garden -- like the Piedmont -- is based on whether you believe change inevitably equals progress. Our most knock-down, drag-out, hair-pulling fights are over competing visions of a Promised Land.

The problem is the way the armies in this millennial battle fail to recognize its outline in the arguments of the opposition. This failure is why environmentalists and preservationists are stigmatized as elitists who assign no value to car-dependent young families who see their Loudoun County townhouses as a crucial step up the ladder to their own progress and promised land.

It is also why the spreadsheet warriors have historically been blindsided when the debate over their seemingly rational proposal moves out to a far larger and, they believe, grossly unfair arena -- one that takes into consideration calculations of the heart.