Critics of the racial impact of Dominion’s actions under Farrell’s leadership hope that, together with the financial loss from the pipeline project, the current political ferment could finally end his 14-year reign. Under Farrell, Dominion has become a national symbol of how political corruption and monopoly power can undercut efforts to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels.
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was planned to go right through Buckingham County, a rural, mountainous area roughly 90 minutes west of Richmond. Dominion also planned to erect a compressor station in Union Hill, a historically Black community in Northern Virginia that freed slaves founded in the 1800s before the Civil War. Compressor stations, which use fuel from the pipeline to run a series of gas-compressing engines that keep fuel flowing through the pipeline, emit air pollutants that cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. The permit obtained by Dominion still allowed for the release of a cocktail of pollutants, including nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter. For years, Union Hill residents protested and organized groups against the project.
The company responded by trying to bribe the community with $5.1 million of investment, vowing to build a community center and fund an expansion of emergency services. The money proved divisive, which some there said was exactly the point. “Dominion is an expert at the divide-and-conquer tactic,” Rev. Paul Wilson, the preacher at one of Union Hill’s two historically Black churches and a leading opponent of the pipeline. “There’s a group of people who are even moving to get me out as pastor. Once you inject money into the conversation, it becomes a wedge.”
When anti-poverty activist Rev. William Barber II denounced the compressor station as environmental racism in 2019, Dominion started running Facebook ads featuring video from a high school essay contest on civil rights that it had sponsored. Meanwhile, the company plowed ahead with plans to build the compressor station ― until a federal court intervened in early 2020, overturning the permit because Dominion had failed to resolve questions about how emissions would affect Union Hill.
Redevelopment schemes that Farrell supported as a real estate investor, independent of his work at Dominion, have shown a similar disregard for Black history and communities.
In 2017, Farrell led a group of developers pushing a $1.5 billion project to rebuild a 10-block swath of downtown Richmond into a new arena, hotel, offices and luxury apartments. It was dubbed "Navy Hill" after a Black neighborhood that was razed in the 1960s to make way for highways. Farrell was careful to ensure the support of Richmond's African American Mayor Levar Stoney in exchange for a $10,000 campaign donation from Dominion during his first year in office.
The project’s wealthy backers promised very little of their own funding, instead planning to largely finance the redevelopment through bond market debt. In order to gain public support, the backers swore off tax hikes. But the need to pay off that bond debt without an increase in taxes threatened to divert funding from other city services for decades to come-- risking more budget cuts at a moment when municipal deficits were already triggering increased austerity.
Many also feared the project would gentrify a historically Black area of the city and make the neighborhood unaffordable for its longtime residents. A November 2019 editorial in the Richmond Free Press, a weekly newspaper serving the city’s Black community, savaged the project. The editorial board called the plan “a travesty” that risked “leaving the taxpayers … stuck with the bill for the rising costs of city services.” Any new municipal revenue from the project would end up going toward paying off the new arena, the newspaper concluded. “With this latest scheme, our community once again winds up as losers,” the editorial stated. “Only Mr. Farrell and friends are benefiting from this project and the charade being perpetrated to pull it off.”
In February, the Richmond City Council voted for a resolution that effectively killed the project. African American community members supporting the project at the council meeting later admitted that they were paid $25 to hold up pro-project signs. The Richmond Free Press said the paltry rate at which Farrell’s group compensated picketers was an insult unto itself. “Sadly, it shows how deep poverty and depression is within Richmond’s African-American community that $25 can get people to show up and hold signs at a City Council meeting,” the editorial read.
Electricity rates are another area where the public interest in Virginia has been increasingly at odds with Farrell’s. In 2007, Virginia lawmakers who received donations from Dominion introduced and rushed through a law that restricted the State Corporation Commission’s ability to police Dominion's utility rates. Between 2009 and 2018, the company overcharged Virginians by an average of $234 million per year, according to analysis by the advocacy group Clean Virginia.
Dominion also asked to raise the percentage of its revenues it could keep as profit ― a request that regulators rejected last November. Now the company wants to raise rates by as much as $50 a month to help cover the cost of complying with Virginia’s new renewable energy targets. That would come on top of the financial tsunami ratepayers already face in the months ahead as unemployment in Virginia sits at roughly 10% and workers struggle to make rent amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“If you look at what’s actually affordable, paying the current bill plus catching up on arrearage that may have been accumulated during COVID, that may be hard to accommodate,” said Dana Wiggins, director of the Center for Community Outreach and Affordable Clean Energy at the Virginia Poverty Law Center. “When you take into account that they have been overcharged over a long period of time, it makes it very difficult.”
Dominion, meanwhile, increased its dividend to shareholders in February and then paid them an equivalent sum in June. Had the nearly $3 billion Dominion spent on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline gone instead toward solar and wind projects, it would have likely lowered the cost of Virginia’s effort to transition to 100% clean energy by 2045.
Farrell’s efforts as an incompetent historian and amateur movie producer may offer the most damning indication that the executive is out of step with the current moment. Farrell was the driving force behind a poorly-reviewed Civil War drama which depicted the story of Confederate cadets at the Battle of New Market. Farrell co-wrote, produced and financed the film (which received a $1 million in public funding) and it was uniformly derided for its historical revisionism.
The script for “Field of Lost Shoes” depicts its Confederate heroes at the Virginia Military Institute as deeply conflicted over slavery. At one point, a main character suggests as a given that the newly independent Confederacy must abolish slavery after winning the war. Another insists: “This war is not about slavery. It’s about money. It always is.”
For a white person in the Civil War era to express skepticism about slavery, much less outright support for abolition, would “have been an untenable position in Virginia,” said historian Rev. Benjamin Campbell. “A white person would have been thrown out of the state,” Campbell said. “A newspaper editor who simply questioned slavery was challenged to a duel in 1848 and killed in Virginia.”
Farrell’s role at Dominion Energy should “certainly be questioned” in the wake of the pipeline project, said William Barber, a towering figure of the current civil rights movement. “A company that would attempt to do all this to communities and put its customers through this kind of fight should be challenged in so many ways,” he said. “Racism is not just about symbolism, it’s about substance.”
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