Healthy Communities

From the Shenandoah Valley to the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia boasts an abundance of unparalleled natural beauty, scenic vistas, wild places, and historic sites. It’s vitally important for future generations of Virginians to enjoy these precious resources, because open space lost today is open space lost forever, and sadly, many forests, farms, and undeveloped lands are disappearing at an alarming rate.  

Virginia LCV advocates for policies and funding at the General Assembly to protect land in perpetuity, giving landowners and farmers the tools they need to safeguard their working farms and forests, while also protecting our cultural and historic resources for future generations. 

By preserving our land resources, we help ensure healthy communities and quality of life throughout the Commonwealth – today and into the future.

Our state park system showcases the best that Virginia’s natural environment has to offer and, on a daily basis, unites Virginia citizens and tourists with nature at 44 pristine sites across the Commonwealth.

However, we still lack a permanent, dedicated funding source to keep our parks clean, functional, and accessible, or to bring new parks facilities into our system, making it difficult to meet today’s pressing needs, plan for the future, and ensure equal access to the outdoors across the Commonwealth.

Whether it’s hiking, canoeing, camping, or fishing, Virginians get to experience nature firsthand every time they visit one of our state parks. These experiences can last a lifetime and it’s crucial for lawmakers to deliver funding solutions to maintain and expand a strong park system and ensure all Virginians have access to green space near them.

Pollution from the cars, trucks and SUVs we drive every day is our largest source of carbon emissions in Virginia, and poses a real threat to public health. 

This is why we work to elect lawmakers who will deliver better alternatives. 

Virginia LCV advocates for solutions that put cleaner, electric vehicles on the road alongside the charging infrastructure that EV drivers need to get from place to place. 

We also push for policies that advance multi-model solutions and mass transit, getting more cars off the road, easing congestion and pollution, and advancing more equity in our transportation system. 

We oppose policies that seek to undermine or bypass Virginia’s “Smart Scale” system, which takes politics out of the transportation funding process by ranking projects based on a variety of factors including environmental impact, moving forward only those projects that meet the highest public benefit with the lowest environmental cost. 

Local land use decisions overwhelmingly shape the character of communities as well as quality of life. Localities should be armed with the tools they need to advance land-use decisions that center sustainability and protect their communities from irresponsible development.

Affordable housing, density, sprawl, infill, economic development deals – these are all local issues with very big impact. 

Virginia LCV works with the legislature to advance policies enabling localities to push local, sustainable land-use solutions forward and we oppose efforts that tie localities’ hands when it comes to holding developers accountable or securing good, local environmental outcomes. 

Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, and more than any other state in the nation. With these facilities come a litany of environmental challenges, everything from water quality and local siting, noise, pollution, and land use issues, to the fate of our clean energy future, inflated energy bills, and transmission lines criss-crossing our landscape. Addressing these issues, and taking on some of the wealthiest companies in the world, will require ongoing political willpower and Virginia LCV’s committed to electing leaders who will hold Big Tech accountable and secure a more sustainable data center industry.