Vicky Hu’s backyard is about to have a 165-foot monopole in it. Not because the State Corporation Commission wanted it there — the commission said so, in writing, calling the route “clearly inferior” to the alternative by nearly every measure. Not because Dominion Energy preferred it — the utility’s own top choice ran somewhere else. It’s happening because the one body with the legal power to steer the Golden-Mars transmission line away from her neighborhood, and away from land bordering Rock Ridge High and Rosa Lee Carter Elementary, sat on that power until it expired.
That body is the Loudoun County School Board. And it’s worth being plain about what just happened, because the School Board’s own public messaging — “informed by meaningful public engagement, thoughtful deliberation, and collaboration” — makes it sound like caution. It wasn’t caution. It was a decision by omission, and it produced the worst outcome on the table.
Here’s the timeline. In January, the Board of Supervisors backed Route 4 as its preferred path for the line, with Route 3 as a fallback, and pushed — unsuccessfully — for undergrounding anywhere the line came within 500 feet of a home or school. In March, the School Board voted to oppose any above-ground route crossing its property, effectively taking Route 3 off the table and pushing Dominion toward Route 3A, a path that avoids school land but cuts directly through the backyards of Loudoun Valley Estates. The SCC later ruled undergrounding infeasible for a project of this scale. That left Route 4 — the one that ran along existing rights-of-way past school property but spared the most homes — as the only route better than 3A, and the only one requiring the School Board’s sign-off.
The SCC gave the School Board a deadline: consent to Route 4 by July 2, or the commission would default to 3A. The School Board let the deadline pass. In its final order, the commission didn’t mince words: Route 3A is longer, more expensive, requires more new right-of-way, and puts well over a hundred more homes within 500 feet of the line than Route 4 would have. The commission said outright that it would rather have approved Route 4. It couldn’t, because the one signature it needed never came.
To be fair to the board, this was never an easy call. Signing off on Route 4 meant putting a high-voltage line closer to two schools the board is responsible for — a real, legitimate concern, not a manufactured one. But the board didn’t choose to formally weigh that tradeoff and reject Route 4 on the merits. It let a deadline lapse, then scheduled a joint public meeting with the Board of Supervisors for July 29 — three and a half weeks after the SCC’s cutoff, and well after the commission had already moved on. If the concerns were serious enough to justify losing the better route for the whole county, they were serious enough to air and vote on before July 2, not after.
That distinction matters, because it’s now the entire county’s problem. Route 3A doesn’t just move the impact from school property to a residential neighborhood — the SCC’s own numbers say it’s a worse project across the board: costlier, longer, more disruptive, more homes affected. Loudoun Valley Estates residents didn’t lobby for this outcome. They lobbied against overhead lines entirely, and when that failed, they watched the routing decision get made for them by a body that had the standing to choose the better of two bad options and instead let the clock run out.
School boards exist to run schools — curriculum, staffing, facilities, budgets tied to education. Land-use authority over school property comes with that job, and using it to protect students and campuses is well within the board’s mandate. What isn’t defensible is treating that authority as something to defer indefinitely while a state deadline passes and a worse outcome locks into place for thousands of non-school-board constituents. If the board believed Route 4 was too close to its schools, it owed the county a vote and a public rationale before July 2 — not a listening session scheduled for after the decision had already been made without it.
The July 29 meeting will still happen, and residents deserve to be heard there. But it will be a postmortem, not a deliberation. The route is set. The board that could have prevented Vicky Hu’s backyard from becoming a transmission corridor chose delay instead of a decision, and delay decided it for her.
