Note: An email was sent to all members of the Franklin County Board of Supervisors, giving them an opportunity to respond to the subject matter below. One replied.
Mike Meredith’s abrupt resignation from the Franklin County Board of Supervisors last week left many wondering what happened during the 48 hours between his announcement that Project Flash was dead and his departure from the board.
It turns out those 48 hours can be shortened to about 90 minutes.
Ninety minutes behind closed doors with his fellow supervisors.
Meredith said he entered the Aug. 18 Board of Supervisors meeting with no intention of resigning.
He also said he entered the closed session portion that evening with no intention of resigning, either.
When he emerged from the closed session, however, he was ready to go.
Two days earlier, Meredith told more than 200 people gathered at the Scruggs Volunteer Fire and Rescue that Project Flash, the proposed data center project that had generated months of controversy across Franklin County, would not be moving forward.
Inside the Aug. 18 closed session, Meredith said, his Scruggs statement became the focus of a discussion about confidentiality, trust, and whether his actions could damage Franklin County’s ability to attract businesses in the future.
Meredith said he finally asked whether the other supervisors believed his actions could hurt the county.
“Should I resign on this?” he recalled asking.
According to Meredith, one member answered: “I would, and I want you to.”
Meredith declined to identify the supervisor.
He then told the board that if its members believed his presence could prevent Franklin County from attracting businesses and jobs, he would walk back out and resign.
According to Meredith, nobody responded.
“Not a word said,” Meredith recalled. “That spoke volumes to me.”
Minutes later, he did exactly what he told them he would do.
Project Flash was already out
Meredith’s announcement at Scruggs was far from being the first time that information concerning Project Flash had been disclosed to the public.
In fact, much of what ultimately exposed the project, including information about the prospective company and negotiations surrounding it, had surfaced and been widely circulated before Meredith announced that the project would not proceed.
And by the time Meredith made that announcement, the decision not to proceed had already been made.
The timeline began months earlier.
At the time, Project Flash was being handled as a confidential economic development matter and had been the subject of closed-session discussions by the board. No one publicly knew about it.
But an April 13 email from Board Chair Lorie Smith to Supervisor Marshall Jamison, and copied to County Administrator Steve Sandy, contained the project’s name and information about negotiations involving Appalachian Power. The email was subject to disclosure under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
In part, it read:
“As of COB Friday, we still have heard nothing regarding Project Flash,” Smith wrote. “AEP and the subject company are supposedly in negotiations.”
The email became a catalyst for what followed.
Citizens began digging.
FOIA requests followed. Additional records revealed meeting invitations connected to Project Flash. The existence of nondisclosure agreements emerged. Records revealed discussions involving AEP. Crusoe, a company whose representatives appeared in meeting records, drew attention, and residents began contacting people associated with the company.
Meredith also mentioned that the citizen emails to Crusoe could also be a reason the company pulled out of the negotiations. While Crusoe did not respond to inquiries, those inquiries did show the company that Project Flash had somehow been disclosed.
And it was Smith’s email that jump-started the disclosure.
It should be noted that in situations like these, the rumor mill churns overtime. One such rumor currently circulating around the county says that Smith’s email was leaked. This is not the case.
Smith’s email was researched via a FOIA request after citizen Laura Carter attended a March 26 zoning meeting.
“I wanted to see what they were saying about the citizen push back on the ordinance,” Carter said.
Carter then submitted a FOIA request asking for supervisor emails. When the bill for the FOIA came back at $4,500, she narrowed the search to Smith’s and Supervisor Dan Quinn’s emails, as well as Public Safety Director Mike Fowler.
In Smith’s email, two words appeared rather unceremoniously: Project Flash.
That was the springboard for it all.
Then additional FOIA responses arrived. Each discovery generated more questions, more scrutiny, and in some cases, more requests for records.
What had begun with a seemingly innocuous reference to Project Flash in a FOIA-accessible email became a countywide controversy.
Residents organized. Emails circulated. Social media posts ballooned. Community meetings were held. Citizens began demanding answers about Project Flash and data centers, and the Board of Supervisors meeting room filled with residents.
Then came the Aug. 16 meeting at Scruggs.
That meeting was packed, as well.
By then, however, the prospective company had already decided not to proceed, but that had not been disclosed to the public. (It still hasn’t as of the date of this publication.)
Unlike Smith’s, Meredith’s disclosure did not reveal the existence of Project Flash. It did not identify the company or expose negotiations that had previously been unknown to the public.
He told residents the outcome: Project Flash would not proceed.
“I’m the deflection now”
Meredith makes no attempt to deny making that statement or to shift responsibility for his decision to make it.
“I’m not making excuses for what I did,” he said. “I don’t want nobody to think I’m trying to wiggle out.”
What Meredith questions, however, is the reaction to his statement compared with the larger amount of Project Flash information that had already become public before he spoke at Scruggs.
He said he made that very argument inside the closed session.
Meredith said he specifically pointed to the Smith email that mentioned Project Flash and AEP and to the multiple chain of discoveries that followed: names and email addresses, information about extension letters and deposits, and eventually direct contact between citizens and people associated with the prospective company.
“My point was, ‘Y’all don’t think any of that would cause the county to be in jeopardy?’” Meredith said. “‘But me making a simple statement of this is not proceeding is a whole lot worse than that?’”
Meredith believes the attention directed toward his announcement has served another purpose.
He described what has happened as “a smokescreen”.
“I think I’m the deflection now,” he said.
Does he believe he was being made the scapegoat for the Project Flash controversy? Meredith did not hedge in answering.
“That’s what I think they were trying to do,” he said.
He also said that he’d be willing, in the name of fairness and in giving other members an opportunity to discuss what he has said, to waive his confidentiality rights from the Aug. 18 closed-session meeting, giving other board members an opportunity to discuss the situation without penalty.
“We all know the answer”
At the heart of Meredith’s criticism is what he sees as a double standard in how board members have been treated.
Smith’s April email put the name Project Flash and the existence of negotiations involving AEP into a FOIA-accessible record while the project itself was being handled as a confidential economic development matter.
The email was followed by FOIA requests and additional discoveries that brought considerably more information about the project into public view.
That brought about several questions.
Was Smith reprimanded by anyone on the board for her disclosure?
“No,” he said.
How did that make him feel, and did he believe every member of the Board of Supervisors was being held to the same standard?
“I cannot control any actions other than mine,” Meredith said. “I think we all know the answer to the second part.”
A question arose as to why Smith had not been formally reprimanded or censured?
Tatum offered his opinion.
“Right now, the chair has got her little following and, you know, I’ll just be straight and tell you,” he said. “I’m not part of it, but she’s got a little following. I don’t know how it got formed or where it came from.”
Tatum also said he didn’t know how much longer that would be the case.
“Right now, she’s got a whole bunch of pretty much whatever she wants,” Tatum said. “She has three members eating out her hand. I’m not one of them.”
And who are those members?
“I can tell you easier the two that are not right now,” Tatum said. “It’s not me, and it’s not Dan Quinn, and it wasn’t Mike Meredith.”
Meredith said he raised the disparity behind closed doors Aug. 18.
“I did say, you know, there’s double standards going on here,” he said.
According to Meredith, however, the discussion continued returning to what he had done.
“Even when I mentioned all that, it just kept going back to, ‘Well, but you shouldn’t have said what you said,’” Meredith recalled.
He said that he was asked, “What gave you the right to say that?” and whether his statement could result in legal consequences.
Meredith said some supervisors said virtually nothing during the exchange.
He also said things might have ended differently had even one or two members urged him not to make an immediate decision.
“It would have made me feel a little better, and I may not have handled it the way I did if one or two people might have said, ‘Hey, let’s just take a moment... Let’s come out and talk about this for a moment before we make any rash decisions,’” Meredith said.
Nobody did. Crickets.
As mentioned, one member told him, “I would, and I want you to,” when Meredith raised the possibility of resigning.
At that point, Meredith said he announced to the board that he intended to go back out to the public session and resign.
Still, he said, nobody spoke up. No one.
“I just kind of felt like I’m in a no man’s world now,” he said.
Supervisor Tim Tatum responded via email to Meredith’s assertions.
“I will say that I agree with what Mr. Meredith told you,” Tatum said. “I was shocked and quite honestly caught off guard when a member told him that he should resign.”
Although Meredith declined to name the supervisor, Tatum verified talk circulating through the county. Several sources have stated that it was Marshall Jamison.
“Well, put this way I will not discredit it,” he said. “Yea that’s who it was. I guess that’s probably what really threw me. I never expected that coming.”
Tatum continued that after the closed session, he attempted to get to Meredith to try to persuade him from resigning.
“I got side tracked in the hallway by other members,” Tatum said. “I hated seeing Mike resign because I think he and I thought a lot alike on issues. Now I feel a little out-numbered.”
In a subsequent phone interview, Tatum was more pointed about the atmosphere inside the closed session.
“I don’t want to say that it looked like it was almost orchestrated,” Tatum said, “but they definitely jumped on Mike Meredith.” Tatum said he wished he had stepped in to defend Meredith and described the treatment as “brutal from where I was sitting.”
A disclosure he still owns
Despite the criticism, Meredith does not absolve himself of responsibility for his Aug. 16 announcement.
He said he believes, in hindsight, that he should have waited.
Meredith also confirmed that he never signed the Project Flash nondisclosure agreement. He said the agreement was executed in 2025, before he joined the board.
He nevertheless said he believes information discussed in closed session carries confidentiality obligations, and he has declined to disclose details of Project Flash negotiations or why the prospective company decided not to proceed.
Tatum also expressed frustration with the secrecy surrounding prospective businesses and the nondisclosure agreements that accompany economic-development negotiations.
“I’ve never had a good feeling about this dealing with prospective businesses one way or another and having to sign NDAs about it,” Tatum said. “Why are they all so damn secret?”
But Meredith sees a fundamental difference between revealing a confidential economic development prospect nobody knows about and confirming the outcome of a project that had already become the subject of intense public scrutiny and was already not moving forward.
“Everybody in this county knew talks were going on, negotiating was going on,” Meredith said.
Had Project Flash remained confidential from beginning to end, he said, there would have been no reason to announce that an unsuccessful prospect had come and gone.
But this was different.
Citizens already knew.
They had records. They had names. They had been contacting people involved. They were filling meeting rooms seeking answers.
“You got two options,” Meredith said. Residents could continue wondering whether “we just sold this land” and a project was coming, or they could finally be told, “Hey, this is not moving forward. You can relax. You don’t have to stress about this anymore. That’s the only reason I think anything ever would be said.”
“Nobody’s name...but mine”
Meredith said only one supervisor had reached out to him by the time of his second interview.
Supervisor Dan Quinn contacted him and, according to Meredith, expressed disappointment over the departure and told him he considered Meredith another voice of reason or common sense on the board.
Meredith said the other supervisors knew before they re-entered the public meeting room Aug. 18 what he intended to do. He had told them.
“They were probably like, ‘Holy cow, he actually did what he said he was going to do,’” Meredith said. “That’s why they were shocked. Not because I resigned, but because I did what I said I was going to do. I guess in politics, I guess nobody’s used to when somebody says, ‘This is what I will do’, they actually do it.”
Meredith now says any accounting of how Project Flash became public, and whether those disclosures damaged Franklin County’s relationship with the prospective company or its reputation with future prospects, should encompass far more than the statement he made at Scruggs.
He points to the email, the subsequent records, redaction problems, the public discovery of information and contacts with people associated with the project, all of which preceded his announcement.
Meredith accepts his place in that chronology.
He does not accept being the only person held responsible for it.
“If all five of us are in the same boat, OK,” Meredith said. “I’m right there with them.”
He paused. Then added:
“But nowhere up to this point has anybody’s name been mentioned but mine.”