The Lyceum: Virginia Daily — Mar 24, 2026

Three clocks are running in Virginia today and none of them are synchronized. Governor Spanberger's 30-day window to sign or veto hundreds of bills hits its most consequential stretch this week — with gun legislation, immigration enforcement, and cannabis retail all waiting — while budget negotiators have exactly 30 days to bridge a $1.6 billion data center tax gap before the April 23 special session, and the redistricting referendum vote is 28 days out with the Virginia Supreme Court still deciding whether the whole thing is legal. The common thread: a Democratic trifecta discovering that having all the power means owning all the fights simultaneously.

If you live in Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, or Stafford — or employ people who do — the bills that arrived on the governor's desk Sunday are not abstract policy.

VPM reported yesterday that 26 local law enforcement agencies and two regional jail authorities still hold active 287(g) agreements with ICE, allowing local officers to perform federal immigration enforcement functions. HB 1441 and SB 783, which arrived on the governor's desk Sunday after passing both chambers, would restrict those agreements by barring informal cooperation without a valid judicial warrant — effectively forcing sheriffs to choose between compliance and termination of longstanding federal partnerships.

Spanberger already ordered state agencies to end their 287(g) agreements in February, but that executive action doesn't reach local sheriffs, who are independent under Virginia's Dillon Rule framework. If she signs these bills, the 26 agencies face a legal clock to comply. Several are in counties where large immigrant workforce communities overlap with federal contractor employees and defense industry workers — meaning the operational ripple effects hit both public safety offices and the labor market that keeps Northern Virginia's economy running.

If she vetoes or amends, it signals she's willing to break with her party's progressive wing on enforcement — a move that would echo through the April 23 budget session. If she signs, expect litigation from at least one locality that wants to keep its agreement. Watch the Governor's Office this week for the first batch of actions.

The argument over who pays for data center electricity just got its sharpest public airing — and the timing is not accidental.

WHRO published a detailed piece Sunday in which Dominion Energy maintains that data centers pay their fair share and that residential rates reflect generation and transmission costs unrelated to large-load customers. Outside researchers and energy-policy groups counter that residential customers are absorbing costs from new generation and transmission upgrades driven overwhelmingly by data center demand — including a rider tied to Dominion's roughly $1.47 billion Chesterfield gas plant that went into effect March 1.

This matters amid the same dispute that has contributed to Virginia having no budget. Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas wants to end the data center sales tax exemption — worth roughly $1.6 billion annually in foregone revenue — before sending a budget to Spanberger. House Appropriations Chair Luke Torian says breaking existing contracts would be reckless. The WHRO reporting adds a second front: even if the tax exemption fight gets resolved, the rate-design question — who pays for the wires, turbines, and transformers that data centers require — is a separate, equally expensive problem that the State Corporation Commission will be adjudicating for years.

The observable signal: watch SCC dockets for SB 253, the bill on Spanberger's desk that would let the commission allocate transmission and distribution upgrade costs directly to large users. If she signs it, Dominion's cost-allocation model gets rewritten. If she doesn't, residential ratepayers remain the default shock absorber.

Dominion Energy's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project has started producing electricity, with the first turbine generating just under 15 megawatts and feeding it onto the regional grid. That's a concrete milestone — hardware delivering electrons, not a press release about future plans.

The significance isn't the 15 MW itself (Virginia's data centers alone consume orders of magnitude more). It's that early megawatts immediately become a bargaining chip. Dominion and clean-energy advocates will cite them as proof the project works; critics will note that the full 2.6-gigawatt buildout is years away and that ratepayers are already covering construction costs through approved riders. The more interesting question is allocation: where those first megawatts are being directed, and whether they show up in SCC proceedings as new "headroom" for large industrial loads rather than retail bill relief.

Federal money is reinforcing the supply chain behind this. Senators Warner and Kaine announced a $20 million grant for the Virginia Port Authority to ready the Portsmouth Marine Terminal for offshore-wind staging and assembly — positioning Hampton Roads as a hub, not just a project site. If the turbines keep spinning and the port investment converts into actual assembly jobs, Virginia's clean-energy economy moves from PowerPoint to payroll. If construction delays or cost overruns mount, the political backlash will land squarely on Spanberger's desk alongside everything else.

The governor's desk is one of the most consequential pieces of real estate in Virginia government right now, and this is the week the first major decisions start dropping.

Hundreds of bills are waiting. Under Virginia law, Spanberger has 30 days to sign, veto, or recommend amendments; anything she doesn't touch becomes law automatically on April 13. The stack includes legislation creating a recreational cannabis retail market starting January 2027, raising the minimum wage to $13.75 in January and $15 by 2028, and requiring employers to provide paid sick leave by July 2027. Those three items alone touch virtually every employer and worker in the Commonwealth.

The gun bills are the flashpoint. At least ten firearms measures are waiting, including SB 749/HB 217, which bans certain semiautomatic firearms, prohibits magazines exceeding 15 rounds, and bars possession by adults under 21. Spanberger has signaled she'd sign storage requirements, large-capacity magazine restrictions, and ghost gun crackdowns — but the assault weapons ban is a different animal. The National Shooting Sports Foundation has already signaled litigation, and if Spanberger signs, the Eastern District of Virginia's rocket docket will process the inevitable challenge faster than almost any court in the country.

University of Lynchburg political scientist David Richards noted Spanberger will need to avoid appearing to fight directly against her own party — but with bills spanning guns, immigration, cannabis, solar siting, and tenant protections, drawing lines is unavoidable. The first batch of signatures and vetoes will be the clearest signal yet of where this governor governs from.

Virginia has a functioning state government but no budget for the next two years, and the data center tax exemption is the reason.

Spanberger called a special session for April 23 after negotiators failed to reach agreement by the March 14 adjournment. The core disagreement: Senator Louise Lucas, as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, will not advance a budget without a clause ending data center tax exemptions by 2027. Delegate Luke Torian, as chair of the House Appropriations Committee, says Virginia cannot break contracts it signed with data centers that include those exemptions — and Spanberger has echoed that position. Torian cites Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission research showing the industry provides 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income, and more than $2 billion in local tax revenue annually. Lucas counters that the exemption has grown from a rounding error into a structural budget hole.

This is combustible amid federal funding pressures, including changes to reconciliation prospects in Congress and adjustments to ACA subsidies, which have contributed to Virginia's scramble for replacement revenue. The $1.6 billion data center exemption is part of that picture.

If a compromise framework — a partial phase-out, a consumption tax, grandfathering — surfaces before April 23, the special session could be quick. If Lucas and Torian arrive still deadlocked, Virginia faces a public standoff with a July 1 government funding deadline behind it. Watch for any trial balloon in the next two weeks.

NextEra Energy Transmission has filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for the Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link (MARL) — a 107.5-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line, part of which would run through the Northern Shenandoah Valley corridor. Five hundred kilovolts is as big as transmission infrastructure gets. This is the voltage class that carries power across state lines and feeds entire metro areas.

The filing sits in the SCC's queue with virtually no statewide press attention. But the timing is significant: Virginia is already straining its grid to serve the world's largest concentration of data centers, Dominion is under SCC scrutiny over cost allocation, and a new 500-kV line would reshape the transmission map for decades. Dominion's own filings have referenced demand scenarios on the order of 70,000 megawatts over time — a number that makes projects like MARL not just plausible but necessary.

SCC proceedings are long, but the filing triggers public comment windows and local government notice requirements that start almost immediately. If you're in any county along the proposed route, your planning staff received paperwork this week that most elected officials haven't read yet. This is exactly when public input matters most — and exactly when it's easiest to miss.

A governor staring at a desk stacked with assault weapons bans and immigration rewrites, a 107-mile power line filing that nobody in the Shenandoah Valley has read yet, and Ashburn homeowners weighing $4 million per acre against the sound of a server farm that never sleeps.

Virginia: where the quiet hum of democracy sounds exactly like a Tier II diesel generator at 3 a.m.

See you tomorrow. —The Lyceum

If someone you know is trying to make sense of Virginia right now, forward this — they'll thank you by Wednesday.