Commentary: Building on What We Have – A Proposed Economic Development Agenda for Warren County

Note: This is the fifth and final article in a series that expands on the April 22, 2025, presentation on Economic Development to the Board of Supervisors and the subsequent Town Talk interview with Mike McCool.

Throughout this series, I have made the case that Warren County’s economic future must be built on a clear-eyed understanding of our assets, our constraints, and our still-rural culture. This final article moves from vision to action — with specific steps the Board of Supervisors and county leadership can take now.

The Story So Far: A Brief Recap

For readers joining this series late, here is a brief summary of what the first four articles established:

Article 1 — The Economics of Place: Warren County possesses a rare and irreplaceable economic asset: we are the northern gateway to Shenandoah National Park, drawing 1.4 million visitors annually who spend $104 million in surrounding communities. The key principle established here is that all economic development decisions must be measured against whether they enhance or detract from this defining advantage. Some voices have characterized data centers as the path to serious revenue and tourism as a mere “trickle” — both characterizations were found to be fundamentally mistaken.

Article 2 — Gateway to Prosperity: National Park gateway communities — Jackson, Wyoming; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Moab, Utah — have built thriving, resilient economies by embracing their identity and deliberately developing complementary businesses and amenities. Warren County has the same opportunity but has not yet captured it. The data center alternative was examined and found to deliver few permanent jobs, limited secondary economic activity, and infrastructure demands that far exceed what the tax revenue claims justify.

Article 3 — Building a Sustainable Tourism Economy: Successful tourism development is not about festivals — it is an intentional economic ecosystem built around three levers: extending length of stay, increasing spending per visitor, and improving the capture rate of tourist dollars within the county. Damascus, Virginia, and Lewisburg, West Virginia, were offered as proof-of-concept examples of rural communities that thrive through strategic tourism development.

Article 4 — Economic Development by Design: The proper measure of economic development is not tax revenue to county government but prosperity and quality of life for residents. Evaluated by employment density, data centers perform poorly — a 50-acre data center site employing 25 people could alternatively host a light manufacturer employing 250. Warren County’s finite industrial land must be allocated wisely. The article also addressed the urgency created by a decade-plus of lost time due to the EDA scandal, and the risk that budget pressure leads to shortsighted decisions that compound rather than solve our underlying economic challenges.

Expand and Diversify: Beyond the National Park

A mature tourism strategy will expand and diversify across multiple additional sub-industries.

National Park and outdoor recreation tourism is the primary foundation we already possess — 1.4 million annual visitors passing through our gateway — and we are leaving economic value uncaptured when there are not enough compelling reasons to stop, stay, and spend. But layered on top of that foundation are three additional categories with their own distinct visitor demographics, spending patterns, and year-round potential:

Agritourism — Virginia’s agritourism sector — one of the largest in the nation — generated $2.2 billion in total economic activity in 2015, supporting 22,000 full-time jobs and attracting 7.5 million visitors, according to a Virginia Tech study commissioned by the Commonwealth. That study remains the only comprehensive statewide benchmark; given the sector’s documented growth trajectory, the current figures are almost certainly larger. Warren County’s active farming and homesteading community is an underutilized asset that can be connected directly to this proven market through farmstands, agritourism experiences, pick-your-own operations, and agricultural heritage programming.

Heritage Tourism — Warren County sits within the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District, one of the most historically significant Civil War landscapes in America. The District generates $293.2 million in annual economic impact across eight Shenandoah Valley counties and supports 3,930 jobs. Heritage tourists — those who travel specifically for historical, cultural, and educational experiences — consistently spend more per trip and stay longer than general tourists; research has found they spend roughly 38 percent more per day on average. Our county’s own earliest settlement history at McKay Springs, combined with Civil War battlefield significance, provides authentic heritage assets that are not currently active as economic drivers.

Sports Tourism — Youth and amateur competitive sports tourism generated $39.7 billion in direct spending nationally in 2021, supporting 635,000 jobs and $12.9 billion in local tax revenue, according to the Sports Events and Tourism Association’s State of the Industry Report. Families with children in competitive travel sports spend an average of $700–$1,000 per month on youth sports overall, with travel to out-of-town tournaments representing the largest single cost driver — and that spending flows directly into the hotels, restaurants, and retail businesses of host communities. Unlike leaf-viewing season, sports tourism drives overnight stays and restaurant spending in every month of the year. Warren County’s location at the I-66/I-81 interchange positions us to serve teams traveling from the DC metropolitan area, Maryland, and western Virginia — a catchment area of millions.

The strategic goal is not to choose among these four categories but to develop all of them in an integrated, mutually reinforcing way. Outdoor recreation visitors become heritage tourism visitors when there is something compelling to discover. Heritage tourists become agritourism customers when local farmstands and agricultural experiences are accessible. Sports tourism visitors fill hotels, golf courses, and restaurants that sustain the infrastructure the other categories depend on. Each investment in one category strengthens the others.

Recommendations Now: Specific Actions for Warren County

The following are concrete, actionable steps — not abstractions — that Warren County should take now.

1. Consolidate Tourism Staffing and Launch a Modern Marketing Campaign

Warren County and the Town of Front Royal currently have separate tourism departments, resulting in redundancy and diffused accountability. This needs to end. The county should eliminate its redundant tourism staff position (unfilled for the past ~2 years) and instead make a structured cash contribution to support the marketing budget of a unified Town-County tourism team — one team, one strategy, one brand, under the oversight of the joint tourism committee under an MOA.

That unified team’s mandate must be explicit: execute a digital-first marketing strategy built around social media, search engine optimization, targeted paid advertising, video content, and influencer partnerships. Print advertising and glossy brochures should be a negligible line item, not a default. Digital marketing is measurable in ways that traditional media never was — every campaign can be tracked from first impression to booking conversion. Warren County residents deserve to know whether their tourism marketing dollars are working. That means public reporting: website traffic from targeted campaigns, booking conversions, average length of stay trends, and direct revenue attribution to specific marketing investments. Funding for marketing needs to be performance-based, dispensed quarterly based on results, and subject to oversight per the MOA. If the money is being spent, the results should be visible to anyone who wants to know.

2. Restore the County’s Economic Development Director Position

Following the EDA scandal, the county created an Economic Development Director position within county government — a sensible response to the loss of institutional capacity and credibility. That position has remained unfilled for almost two years.

The economic development agenda proposed is heavily weighted toward tourism capital projects in its early stages — the sportsplex feasibility study, the McKay Springs opportunity, the unified tourism marketing campaign. What the county needs is an Economic Development Director with the broader mandate to advance capital project development, manage intergovernmental relationships, coordinate with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, and lead the resumption of industrial recruitment — while also providing strategic oversight of the tourism program.

Restoring this position also eliminates the redundancy problem directly. Rather than maintaining a separate county tourism staff position, the county’s investment goes toward a director with the scope to serve the full economic development agenda. One position, properly scoped, accomplishes more than two narrowly defined ones.

Remaining conditions within the EDA make it impractical for that organization to hire the staff at this moment in time. The county should not wait. This position should be filled on an interim basis now, with a permanent appointment to follow once the broader organizational picture becomes clearer.

3. Direct Tourism Tax Revenue to Capital Projects That Build the Tourism Economy

Virginia law mandates that transient occupancy tax revenue — the tourism tax collected on hotel stays and short-term rentals — be used for tourism-related purposes. After funding the unified marketing campaign described above, the remaining tourism tax revenue should be allocated to capital projects specifically designed to grow tourism capacity and visitor spending.

One capital project opportunity worth highlighting here — subject to resolution of important preconditions — is the McKay Springs property. Warren County and the Town of Front Royal jointly own this historically significant site near the I-66 / Route 340 intersection, the precise location where our region makes its first impression on millions of Shenandoah Valley–bound travelers from the DC metropolitan area. The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields National Historic District has expressed serious interest in acquiring the property for heritage preservation and interpretation. This creates a potential convergence of outcomes: revenue from the land sale for both jurisdictions, permanent professional management of Warren County’s most historically significant site, and the foundation for an authentic heritage and agritourism gateway that captures I-66 traffic for the benefit of the entire region. However, this opportunity depends entirely on the county and town reaching an agreement on joint property disposition — a prerequisite that requires deliberate cooperation between both jurisdictions. That conversation should begin now, before the opportunity passes.

4. Commission a Serious Study of the Rockland Park Sports Tourism Opportunity

Sports tourism is one of the fastest-growing and most economically durable segments of the travel industry. Competitive youth and amateur sports events generate overnight stays, multiple meals, retail spending, and repeat visits in every season — exactly the economic profile Warren County needs to reduce its dependence on the peak fall tourism period.

Warren County should fund a credible, independent feasibility study to assess the opportunity to develop a large indoor and outdoor sportsplex at Rockland Park capable of serving as a regional year-round destination for competitive sports. The study should examine the regional market for competitive youth sports, economic multiplier effects of tournament hosting, comparable facilities in similar-sized communities, capital and operating cost projections, and public-private partnership financing models. County ownership of a 70-acre site with access enhanced by the new bridge creates favorable conditions that should not go unexplored.

This is not a commitment to build — it is a commitment to know. A credible study conducted by specialists with no stake in the outcome is the necessary prerequisite to any responsible decision. The cost of the study is trivial compared to the cost of either building the wrong thing or permanently missing a transformative opportunity.

5. Resume Serious Industrial Recruitment — for High Employment Density Prospects

The tourism-first strategy outlined in this series has never been an argument against industrial development. It is an argument about sequence and criteria. Tourism can produce economic results on a faster timeline than industrial recruitment, and Warren County has an urgent need. But the industrial pipeline must be restarted now, precisely because the lead times are long.

The criteria must be explicit: we are recruiting for high employment density. A prospect that would employ 200 people on a 20-acre site is worth far more to Warren County than one that employs 20 people on 200 acres — regardless of the tax bill. Light manufacturing, logistics operations, food processing, advanced fabrication, and similar industries align with our transportation advantages at the I-66/I-81 interchange and proximity to the Virginia Inland Port. These are the sectors we should be actively marketing to, with dedicated economic development capacity, specific targets, and public accountability for results.

6. Resist the Data Center Rush — and Prepare Now to Do So Effectively

The data center industry is spreading rapidly from its Northern Virginia epicenter into rural Virginia, driven by land availability, lower costs, and a deliberate strategy of securing more sites than developers intend to build. Speculative developers encumber land and file utility interconnection requests at overestimated demand levels — with no end user customer committed — knowing that many proposals will never reach completion. The communities that approve those applications invest real planning, legal, and staff resources in that process, whether or not a facility is ever built.

The data center industry is coming to Warren County with impressive tax revenue projections, promises of jobs, and arguments that we cannot afford to say no. This series has touched on why those arguments deserve deep skepticism. The jobs figures are dominated by construction-phase employment that evaporates when the building is finished. The tax revenue won’t appear for three to five years at best — because the electric power grid cannot accommodate new large industrial users on any shorter timeline. And the AI investment cycle driving this buildout is, by the assessment of credible financial analysts from across the political and financial spectrum, a bubble.

This topic deserves its own dedicated series. In the coming weeks, I will write a multi-part examination of the data center question, specifically: what the industry is actually offering rural Virginia counties, what the AI bubble means for communities that bet their land and resources on facilities that may never become operational, and what proactive protective standards Warren County should adopt. Preparation is everything. The communities that protected themselves were the ones that established their standards before the pressure arrived.

Time to Get Moving

Warren County has been sitting in economic development neutral for too long — responding to whatever proposals arrive rather than defining what we want and going after it. The EDA scandal cost us more than money; it cost us a decade of strategic momentum that compounded into a lost industrial pipeline. We cannot recover what was lost, but we can stop the drift.

The path forward requires more than discipline — it requires the political will to commit funds to economic development at a moment when fiscal pressure makes that commitment feel impossible. Warren County is caught in a trap: the business revenue increase we need to relieve both inflationary and growth budget pressure requires investment we feel we cannot afford, so it has been deferred, which has ratcheted the pressure up. That cycle does not break itself. It breaks when the Board of Supervisors decides that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action — and commits accordingly: invest in the resumption of a comprehensive economic development strategy beginning with the tourism economy we already have. Expand it deliberately across four categories of national park recreation, agritourism, heritage tourism, and sports tourism; prioritize tourism tax revenue for tourism capital investment; commission honest independent analysis of the sportsplex opportunity; restart industrial recruitment with clear criteria that prioritize employment density; and refuse to let budget pressure push us into approving development that looks like revenue but functions as a permanent loss of irreplaceable land, water, and community character.

We are the northern gateway to one of America’s great national parks — and the northern anchor of a Civil War heritage district generating nearly $300 million in annual regional economic impact. We sit at the I-66 gateway to Shenandoah Valley agritourism, with an active farming and homesteading community that is barely tapped as an economic asset, and a geographic position and infrastructure to become a regional sports tourism destination. That is not a consolation prize for failing to attract big industry. It is one of the most enviable economic positions a rural Virginia county can occupy. I believe it is the job of this Board of Supervisors to build on those advantages deliberately, within an overall strategy that eventually encompasses recruitment of additional high-density industrial employment.