From Gambling to Garbage, Coal Country Mines for the Next Big Thing

New York Times

19-05-2025

When Clyde Stacy bought the Bristol Mall in 2018, both the mall and the surrounding coal country of Southwest Virginia were in trouble.
The mall, once the marquee shopping destination in the region, had become vacant, weeds punching up through its parking lot.
And the city of Bristol, the self-described birthplace of country music, was buckling under the weight of more than $100 million in debt, forcing budget cuts to its schools. Nearby, mining counties across Virginia's slice of Appalachia were reeling after decades of job loss.
Mr. Stacy and his friend Jim McGlothlin, both former coal magnates, seized on what they called a 'moonshot' solution: turning the mall into a casino, in a state where gambling was not yet legal.
Today, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Bristol has become an unlikely beacon of hope. It employs 1,400 workers and has sent tax revenue rippling through the surrounding coal country where the men made their first millions.
The casino, which formally opened in November, was arguably the biggest economic win for the region in a decade. But the project also illustrates the challenges of finding new economic engines to replace thousands of jobs lost with the collapse of the coal industry.
For all the jobs it has created, the casino doesn't pay anywhere near what people make in the remaining mines. Many casino workers earn close to the resort's minimum pay of $17 an hour, less than half what miners earn.
The collapse of coal sent Virginia leaders into overdrive, courting new employers with subsidies and phone calls from the governor. President Trump's recent efforts to revive coal production by loosening environmental rules won't change that. The people of Southwest Virginia have largely moved on from the belief that bountiful mining jobs will ever return.
State and federal officials have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to revitalize the regional economy, but have struggled with the formidable task of replacing mining jobs.
Some of the boldest projects local officials have supported involve industries that tend to be magnets for controversy: a massive landfill, a retail cannabis empire (which never advanced beyond a pitch to investors) and a network of data centers that could be powered by nuclear reactors.
People living in the region complain that the proposed businesses would create few high-paying jobs or carry environmental or social risks. Many believe the dump and the nuclear reactors would be direct threats to the region's natural beauty and growing tourism industry.
The casino has also divided the community, with religious leaders warning that it will worsen crime and gambling addiction rates.
While the projects have been pitched as part of an Appalachian reboot, some residents attacked them as more of the same — undesirable industries courted in the name of job creation, like the prisons that dot the mountains of Kentucky, or coal mining itself.
That criticism has gained traction in part because many of the highest-profile projects have involved politically connected businessmen who once controlled the local coal industry.
The leader of the effort to lure data centers is Michael J. Quillen, founder of what was once the largest metallurgical coal company in the United States. Mr. McGlothlin sold his coal business for an estimated $1 billion in 2009 and turned to philanthropy before backing the casino. Now 84, his name adorns university buildings, art collections and scholarships across the state.
Mr. McGlothlin and Mr. Stacy contributed more than $2 million to state politicians in their push to legalize casino gambling in 2020 and beat a competing casino proposal.
In interviews with The New York Times, Mr. McGlothlin and Mr. Quillen said they were motivated by giving back to a region that had made them successful. (Mr. Stacy, who sold his stake in the casino in January, declined to be interviewed.)
'Whatever I can do to help, I will,' Mr. McGlothlin said.
But many locals, like Amy Branson, remain skeptical. Ms. Branson, a 39-year-old pharmacist who organized a group to oppose the landfill, said her community had coped with coal's pollution for decades because the industry offered a path to relative prosperity.
But she felt the current projects offered a worse deal.
'This is another bastardization of Appalachia, where they take advantage of us and we are supposed to roll over and take it,' Ms. Branson said.
Looking for Answers
Southwest Virginia is the state's toe, kicking up against West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina.
Timber and coal mining began transforming the region in the late 1800s, drawing workers to ramshackle towns where the jobs were dirty and dangerous.
During boom years, miners unionized and won concessions that propelled them into the middle class. But the industry's busts were scathing and more enduring. By 2023, there were about 2,500 miners left in the state, less than 13 percent of peak employment in 1942.
The industry left sawed-off ridgelines and barren pits in its wake. Tens of thousands of acres remain in the hands of energy companies, complicating new tourism or industrial projects.
As miners moved away, the economic fallout spread across the region: Businesses shuttered, and local governments cut services.
In 1996, coal executives, including Mr. McGlothlin and Mr. Quillen, convinced state lawmakers to offer mining companies tax breaks designed to save jobs. The program, which cost taxpayers more than $390 million over the past two decades, was discontinued in 2022, after a state audit found it delivered 'negligible economic benefits.'
More recently, millions in federal funds have gone to turning old, toxic mines into business parks and recreation trails. Other programs aimed to beef up the region's broadband network and strengthen its community colleges. From 2013 to 2023, officials across the region directed at least $200 million in grants to economic development.
All that spending has yielded mixed results. Federal data show the region still lost around 6,000 jobs in that decade. And when officials trumpeted the opening of a new call center or manufacturing facility, they rarely mentioned past ventures that had quietly folded.
A manufacturing plant in Wythe County that was supposed to churn out medical gloves and provide 2,400 jobs stalled over a federal funding dispute in 2023. In Bristol, an $8 million state-funded building was supposed to house cutting-edge energy companies, but it's now rented to an orthopedic clinic.
There are some recent signs of progress. Buoyed by the growth of small manufacturers, wages have risen faster in Southwest Virginia than in the rest of the state since the Covid pandemic. Parts of the region, like Washington County near the Tennessee state line, have had a bump in new residents since 2020. The newcomers found affordable housing, easy access to mountains, and cultural draws like the Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion music festival.
But the region's coal counties face a particularly steep economic climb. In Buchanan County, for example, 30 percent of children live in poverty, nearly triple the statewide average. The county has no four-lane highways and little flat land for new industry.
Susan Coleman, a retiree who volunteers at a local pantry, said she had watched people leave in search of better opportunities.
'There's really nothing to do here, nothing for anybody young to want to live here,' Ms. Coleman said.
Trash and Transparency
In Russell County, officials tried to address a similar set of problems with an unpopular solution: a giant landfill.
In better times, cattle, coal and tobacco were mainstays of the local economy. But the county's population has been in steady decline for decades. Last year, to save money, the school district closed two elementary schools.
So when Mr. Stacy, the former coal magnate, and his longtime business partner John Matney approached county officials in 2022 about installing a private landfill in a former coal field, Steve Breeding, vice chair of the county board of supervisors, was all ears.
Estimates suggested the project could bring more than $200 million in new revenue to municipal coffers over its 40-year life span — more than any other project Mr. Breeding recalled seeing during his nine years on the board.
'It was just a game changer for the county,' he said in an interview last year.
But some of his constituents didn't see it that way.
Many were outraged, warning that the project would pollute rivers and tank property values.
And for the landfill's most strident critics, it was especially galling that two coal barons had proposed building it near the site of a seminal 1989-90 miners' strike in which locals fought off a coal company's attempts to cut health insurance for retired workers. At county board meetings, residents complained that Mr. Stacy and Mr. Matney did not live in Russell County and wouldn't have to deal with the effects of their dump, and that state and local politicians seemed to be helping them usher their project through.
'They all think that they know what's best for the people, and they think that we are too stupid to make our own decisions,' said Ms. Branson, the anti-landfill activist.
Mr. Stacy has a long history of making campaign contributions, beyond the funds specifically aimed at boosting the Bristol casino. He has personally given more than $350,000 to Gov. Glenn Youngkin's campaign over the past four years and tens of thousands more to local lawmakers. In February 2024, during the debate over the landfill, he and Russell County officials met with Governor Youngkin and showed him plans for the project.
Also at the meeting: Terry Kilgore, a Republican member of the House of Delegates who is widely seen as the region's most powerful lawmaker and its pre-eminent deal maker. Since he was first elected in 1993, Mr. Kilgore has championed state tax breaks for coal operators, sought new employers and helped fund infrastructure projects across the region.
Mr. Stacy and Mr. Matney have been major donors to his political campaigns and occasional clients of his law firm. Mr. Kilgore also described them as friends.
He was one of several co-sponsors of the legislation that paved the way for the Bristol casino, a project that stood to make Mr. Stacy many millions of dollars. When Mr. Stacy was sued over a lease dispute involving the Bristol Mall, he hired Mr. Kilgore for his legal team. But the relationship between Mr. Kilgore and the casino developers has been strained in recent years because he supported a push to bring gaming terminals to gas stations, which casinos see as a threat to their bottom line.
In 2018, a prominent state commission, with Mr. Kilgore as chair, voted to spend several million dollars on a project proposed by Mr. Stacy, Mr. Matney and former State Senator Will Wampler Jr.
The commission gave Russell County $1.6 million to buy a polluted patch of land from the businessmen after they helped clean it up and prepared it as a site for future industry. Today, the industrial pad is vacant.
Mr. Kilgore said he wasn't doing legal work for Mr. Stacy or Mr. Matney at the time of the commission vote. And he said the overlap between his law clients and his government work was not surprising in a community where 'everybody knows everybody.'
But to critics of the landfill, it suggested Mr. Kilgore was putting donors' interests ahead of constituents'.
Last year, a public records request revealed that Mr. Kilgore had called an official in a neighboring county in an attempt to stifle criticism of the project. At the time, Mr. Kilgore was county attorney for Russell County and had recused himself from the landfill negotiations because of his legal work for Mr. Stacy.
Mr. Kilgore said he had made the call as a constituent. Ms. Branson said it was proof the lawmaker was conflicted; she filed several unsuccessful bar complaints against him.
Last June, after months of pressure, the Russell County board voted to terminate negotiations with Mr. Stacy and Mr. Matney. Still, Ms. Branson said that she was concerned about what new plans might emerge in the future.
Beyond the Mines
Despite lingering distrust of the coal industry, it's hard to imagine any economic revival in Southwest Virginia that doesn't involve the people who ran the region's mines.
Some of the wealthiest people in the local business community are former coal executives, and energy companies still own thousands of acres of land.
The Bristol casino might never have gotten off the ground were it not for Mr. McGlothlin and Mr. Stacy's wealth and political savvy.
For decades, state lawmakers had shot down plans to legalize casino gambling. Then, in 2019 and 2020, Mr. McGlothlin teamed up with a Democratic state lawmaker to package the concept as a way to revitalize a handful of Virginia cities and showered lawmakers with campaign donations. One champion of the casino plan — Israel O'Quinn, a Republican member of the House of Delegates — now works part time for a charitable foundation associated with Mr. McGlothlin's company.
Coal interests are also crucial to what may be the region's most ambitious revitalization effort to date: a project to turn former coal fields into a hub for data centers. The power-hungry facilities would be fueled by on-site alternative energy sources, including solar farms and nuclear power plants.
Mr. Quillen, the former coal executive, is leading the effort through the Energy DELTA Lab, a public-private partnership that is laying the groundwork for future development on lands owned by an energy company. In his proposal, old mining shafts on the site could offer access to underground water, which is needed to cool the data centers' servers.
The project has potent symbolism: a return to Southwest Virginia's roots as an energy hub, on the ashes of the coal economy.
While Northern Virginia communities have increasingly soured on the proliferation of data centers there, Southwest Virginia governments are offering tax breaks. The coal field project's backers estimate that it could one day create 1,600 jobs and millions in tax revenues.
But local skeptics have questioned those numbers because data centers generally require few workers. And when Governor Youngkin announced the DELTA Lab project in October 2022, calling for the region to build the country's first small nuclear reactors, public backlash was swift.
Last year, the governor walked back his comments, saying the first reactor would most likely be built elsewhere in the state.
Mr. Quillen conceded that the governor's enthusiastic embrace of nuclear power had caused a setback with the public. But the bigger picture, he said, is that coal is not coming back to save the region. In fact, he said, Mr. Trump's trade wars may disrupt the state's remaining coal exports.
Will Payne, a co-founder of the DELTA Lab project and a leader in marketing the region to employers, said that although the idea of data centers on old mining sites might sound far-fetched, the region's problems demand bold solutions.
'So many people tell us it's not going to work,' he said. 'And that's kind of what drives us here, is to prove them wrong.'