Chris Runion represents a House of Delegates district that stretches from the Blue Ridge to the West Virginia state line.
Big district, wide expanse there.
How wide?
It takes an hour and forty-two minutes to get from the easternmost precinct in the 35th, in Dooms, which is east of where I am, in Waynesboro – the district wraps around both Waynesboro and Staunton, and under Harrisonburg – to the westernmost precinct, which is in Mountain Grove, out in Bath County.
That’s seven minutes longer a drive, per Google Maps, than it takes to get from Dooms to the State Capitol in Richmond.
Runion tells me he has put more than 200,000 miles on his car since his first run for the state legislature in 2019.
That’s a lot of Ruritan Club pancake breakfasts, Rotary Club lunches, Lions Club spaghetti dinners.
Lawn parties, Christmas parades.
Fire department and rescue squad fundraisers.
You get the point.
It’s odd that nobody in Richmond or DC thought to ask Runion what he heard on the ground about what should be done with the shuttered Augusta Correctional Center, which is, literally, in the middle of his supersized legislative district.
“I’d heard rumors of it over the years, and the rumors almost the day the facility closed, but ICE has never talked to me. When these things would pop up, I would reach out to various state and federal officials, and never got a response back that ICE itself was interested,” Runion, a Republican, told me via phone from Richmond, during a quick break from General Assembly business last week.
I wrote an article in 2022 about running into Runion at the Rockingham County Fair, and him telling me that he’s a regular reader of AFP, which floored me, given, you know.
ICYMI
“I don’t agree with most of what you have to say,” he told me then, “but I love to learn different perspectives.”
My liberal and progressive readers aren’t necessarily going to like me saying this, but whatever – this is the kind of person we need representing us.
Especially in that district.
We’re not going to get a Democrat elected in the 35th District as it is currently drawn.
To wit: the 35th went 70.5 percent for Donald Trump in 2024.
We could easily have a Trump clone there; Chris Runion, who got 72.4 percent of the vote in his 2025 re-election win, isn’t a Trump clone.
Just spitballin’ here, but maybe that’s why the Trump clones in charge of Republican Party matters in Richmond and DC didn’t let him in on their little secret, regarding the scheme to have the state quietly sell the former prison property to a Manhattan LLC so that the Trump regime could turn it into an ICE detention facility.
ICYMI
- Augusta County, 73 percent Trump in 2024, on proposed ICE facility: NIMBY
- Youngkin tried to rush sale of Augusta Correctional Center on his final day in office
- Trumpers looking at former Augusta Correctional Center as possible ICE detention site
“I’m definitively not in favor. It’s the wrong use in that particular piece of property,” Runion told me, stressing that people shouldn’t read into his opposition that he doesn’t support ICE doing its job, “because I do, but this is a local land use issue.”
“There is, in my opinion, little support,” said Runion, citing the 200,000 miles he’s put on his car crisscrossing the district, and what he hears over his breakfasts, lunches, dinners, the rest.
“I’ve had, consistently, opposition to any type of detention center placed back there,” Runion said, citing one issue that should be obvious.
“One of the reasons the prison closed was, they just couldn’t attract that many people out there, given what they were willing to pay,” Runion said.
No, prison jobs don’t pay well; ICE jobs, who knows, there’s supposedly billions going into recruiting agents, but I don’t have a handle on what they’re intending to pay COs.
What Runion says people in and around the Town of Craigsville would like to see done with the former prison property is that “we use the attributes of the assets that are available there now and create some long-term, sustainable economic opportunities for the local community.”
“You’ve got a number of buildings out there that are that were the support buildings, where you can put in various smaller or medium-sized businesses. And I say that because, it’s important, we don’t want to move a 2,000-employee operation out there, because we’d struggle to find the employees, right? But if you put the right-sized businesses out there, you know, there’s some nice buildings that you could do various things – equipment repair, some type of small fabrication facility. I’m just thinking of things that are around in the community,” Runion said.
“Let’s look at what we’ve got that we don’t have to add money to and utilize that. I think that’s a much more sustainable model than bringing in a government entity that has that we as local people have very little control over the future of,” Runion said.
All Glenn Youngkin, all Kristi Noem, had to do was, ask.
“The other thing that’s an overarching issue for me is, this is a local land use decision,” Runion said. “There’s lots of reasons we want local government to decide what their community looks like, because local government is us. It isn’t Alexandria, and it isn’t Martinsville, and it’s not Washington, D.C. It’s us. Let us be masters of our own destiny.”
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Chris Graham
