This week’s Botetourt Board of Supervisors meeting presented a familiar farce. Tim Snyder’s bluster and Terry Austin’s wheedling were marshalled, against almost universal citizen opposition, to shove another project down Botetourt’s throat. This time, it’s what purports to be a history museum. I call it the “zigzag shack”:

The design is attributed to AECOM! AECOM, the global infrastructure consulting firm with 16 billion in annual revenue, condescended to do a little architectural vandalism in Botetourt! What are the odds? Much better than I thought it turns out. 

First let’s note that Botetourt remains an easy mark. The following are the payments to AECOM authorized by the Board of Supervisors: 

My wife, an architect, notes that the cost of the feasibility study alone would probably cover 100% of the design work for most local architectural firms. So it’s a really bad deal, but let’s not get hung up on that. AECOM’s connections to the Roanoke Valley and elsewhere are suggestive: 

Steve Clinton, 23 years on Botetourt’s Board of Supervisors, was also Senior Vice President and Regional Director for AECOM’s Architecture, Engineering & Planning Group.

GO Virginia, you will recall, provided funding for AI Ready Roanoke (ARR). On the council for our Region 2 sits AECOM’s Daniel DiMarco, who specializes in the same spooky science stuff contemplated by ARR. DiMarco worked on the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute (named after Heywood Fralin who launched GO Virginia itself) which stands to benefit from ARR: 

RVARC regularly makes use of AECOM’s services, the latter authoring, for example, the “Western Virginia Intermodal Facility: Economic and Transportation Impacts Study.” 

AECOM is something of an AI promoter, recommending application of this technology to governance: 

It has also formed a “strategic partnership” with Google across multiple domains: 

And with that connection to Google noted, let’s look back at the fee authorizations with which we began. In our Project Raspberry timeline, early 2023 and fall 2024 were critical periods, during which, respectively, Botetourt officials began signing Google’s NDAs and the “speculative” rezoning was carried out. Here we have AECOM’s museum project being funded at the same times. Given these connections, it hardly seems coincidental. 

One of the concerns about AI is that it will be used for surveillance in “sustainably developed” cities, i.e. “15-minute cities,” i.e. planet prison. Wouldn’t you know? That’s a specialty of AECOM: 

Is Project Raspberry just a single component of a larger “sustainable development” plan that will thoroughly urbanize the region? This is the kind of thing a journalist might pursue. Do we have those anymore?

Also in this series:

Vampire Pimps: The Virginia Energy Plan’s Green Vandalism

Vampire Pimps: Hull, Cobb, & Corporate Voodoo

Vampire Pimps: Roanoke and the Western Virginia Regional Industrial Facilities Authority

Vampire Pimps: AI Ready Roanoke

Vampire Pimps: Going Regional, Going Global

Delegate Terry Austin: A Primer on Evasive Political Flatulence

Vampire Pimps: In Their Own Words

Private Betrayal, Public Defiance: Botetourt’s Board of Supervisors

Vomitous Prattle & Statutory Conspiracy: The 2026 Comprehensive Plan

The 2026 Comprehensive Plan: Bend Over

The Botetourt Data Center, The Planning Commission, and Broken Promises

The Botetourt Data Center: Vampire Pimps

The Botetourt Data Center: The Legacy of Fascism

The Botetourt Data Center & the Lie of Freedom

If It’s Not Love, Then It’s the Data Center That Will Bring Us Together

The Botetourt Data Center: A Bad Deal with a Scammy Cherry on Top

The Botetourt Data Center, The Water Authority, and an Invitation to Corruption 

The Botetourt Data Center: Bilious Corporate Prerogative

The Botetourt Data Center: Don’t Fear the Hamster Kaiju

Follow these groups for more information:

Southwest Virginia Data Center Transparency Alliance

Botetourt Conservatives and Independent Thinkers