Norton

And me, I was honestly like very pleasantly surprised at the last one that I went to.

I went to, uh, uh, they call it the wood booger festival down in Norton, Virginia.

Yeah.

And, uh, give my talk, you know, and had my slides and all that kind of stuff.

And so we asked Ralphie to stop and let us get some hamburgers or something like that, you know.

And so we stopped at Payne's Gap, Kentucky, right going over into Norton, Virginia, and his little Dairy Queen there.

And we was talking about hot dogs, you know, and Curler.

He said, I could eat five foot longs right now.

And we were laughing so hard at it.

Well, he, he ate all 10 of those things.

And, uh, So Ralph stopped at the foot of the hill down there in Norton to get gas.

And Curly Ray was the first one off the bus.

Well, and you, you mentioned, um, the numbers in, in part of our Virginia territories, but also in southwest Virginia we've seen even s- some greater impacts in the APCO territories.

Um, and in fact, very, very early on the campaign trail, um, basically right after I launched my campaign for governor, I was in Norton, Virginia, um, at a, at a breakfast event, um, uh, a kind of listening session, and there were 30 to 40 people there, and person after person kept talking about their energy costs, and it was, it was really A kind of a little bit of a departure of what I had thus far heard in other parts of the state.

And then the, it just shifted the conversation, so it started in this where, I mean, almost every person talked about their energy costs and their bill and how much, how expensive it was and how it was impacting their choices.

And then over the course of, and, uh, as you mentioned, my election was one of the off-year elections in '25, so over the course of, of late 2024 and then, um, and then of course all through 2025, more and more as people were seeing that uptick, um, people were expressing their concerns about not just the fact that their, their bill was higher, but also is this going to continue? Is this, is this just the new normal? Um, and, and really in addition to the energy plan and our efforts to lower costs by ensuring that we're investing in clean energy, by really wanting to ensure that, that frankly, and maybe we'll get to this later, that data centers are paying their fair share and that the infrastructure investments needed, um, to, um, provide energy to larger energy utilizers, that those costs are now borne, um, by those entities.

On a smaller scale, and well, they probably don't have Sugar Ray playing a concert, Tar Heel Minis has their mini Slay the Sleeping Dragon.

They're headquartered in Norton, Virginia, far western point of Virginia out there.

And they're doing runs out there and into eastern Kentucky.

Looks like they got a little bit of rain to deal with out there.