People “deserve … to be able to live in the communities where they work.”
Del.-elect Lindsey Dougherty (D–Chesterfield) has worked in Chesterfield County as a budget analyst, and is currently a research administrator at Virginia Commonwealth University.
As a freshman member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, she’ll represent a district that includes parts of the counties of Chesterfield and Prince George, as well as the City of Hopewell.
The 2025 election was the second time Dougherty challenged outgoing Republican Del. Carrie Coyner for a seat in the House. The two first ran against each other in 2019. Coyner won that election with 55% of the vote. In the 2025 election, Dougherty won with 53% of the vote.
VPM News Chesterfield County Reporter Billy Shields recently spoke to Dougherty at VPM’s studios in Richmond, as part of a series of interviews conducted with the newest members of Virginia’s House of Delegates. (Links to interviews with the other delegates can be found at the bottom of this story.)
Dougherty discussed her top priorities for the upcoming term, the importance of affordable housing, access to healthcare, and data centers that are coming to the area.
This interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity.
Lindsey Dougherty: My name is Lindsey Dougherty, and I was recently elected to represent the 75th House of Delegates district — that’s the eastern part of Chesterfield, all of Hopewell City and the northern part of Prince George County.
What are your top priorities for the next two years?
Accessibility and affordability of health care are top of mind. It’s an issue that’s been a huge problem for my own family. It’s a huge issue for a lot of folks across my district, and finding ways that we can make it more accessible and more affordable is top of mind.
Education funding is going to be a huge piece of it. Making sure that we have special education protections for kids, given all the chaos happening at the federal level, is another huge priority for me. And housing accessibility and affordability, too. Everything kind of revolves around accessibility and affordability of a lot of things that families need.
Google recently announced Project Peanut, a data center project that’s slated to come online in Chesterfield. What’s your take on data centers?
I think that we need to have more infrastructure in place around that to protect communities, making sure that we are not putting undue burden on families and neighborhoods that have historically had these types of builds happen in and around their areas. They don’t see the benefit; they actually end up bearing a lot of the brunt of the increased costs and negative environmental impacts.
We need to be intentional. We need to have folks willing to have conversations, so that we’re able to still bring good-quality jobs to the area. We also need to protect the families and communities that live around these areas, so there isn’t that undue burden on them.
One economic driver in Chesterfield County is development. It brings a ton of money into the county. How do you thread that needle with affordable housing — where you’re encouraging the right kind of development, but also allowing people who are low income to thrive?
I think that folks who work in communities deserve the opportunity to be able to live in the communities where they work. My opponent was one of the key people that removed proffers — money that developers pay to support the infrastructure around housing development, whether that be streets, schools, parks or libraries. She lobbied to remove that opportunity for funding for localities to offset some of the issues that you see with development.
Localities have had to get creative — and sometimes, they haven’t been successful, depending on their tax base — on being able to provide those improvements.
What we’re seeing in Chesterfield, specifically, is these huge booms in residential development, whether that be apartments or single-family homes, but you’re not seeing the same investment in street infrastructure, so people are sitting in traffic longer. You’re not seeing that investment in schools. My daughter goes to an elementary school in Chester that was over capacity on day one — a brand-new school.
We really need to have folks at the state and local levels come together and come up with larger strategic planning opportunities that will handle a bunch of these key pieces. They need to figure out how to bring in housing development that fits a variety of different needs, while also keeping costs low. I’m very excited to roll up my sleeves and get to work on a lot of these problems that are facing the community.
What are three things that you plan on doing differently — or undoing — that were characteristic of your predecessor’s time in office?
This is the second time I’ve run for this seat, and I’ve been building and activating this district for the better part of a decade at this point. I will not be a different person when I’m in front of you face-to-face — whether that be at a community event or at your door — as opposed to what’s happening in the legislature.
You’re not going to have to worry about me saying one thing in the community, then voting against that thing in the legislature, whether that be gun violence prevention — which is a key issue in my district that we need to have protections in — or housing development, which is part of what my opponent’s family benefited from personally as developers.
I’m focused on making sure that we have somebody in this seat that can provide a better balance to the legislation — particularly to the budget — that can help as many folks across my district as possible, but also across the commonwealth.
This last election delivered a trifecta: Democrats are set to control the state Senate, the House of Delegates and the governorship. What are you going to accomplish in year one?
There was a lot of potential lifesaving legislation that has been approved by the legislature over the last four years that has been vetoed by a different governor. I think that we’re going to see a lot of those same bills — that had popular approval previously — come back through and hopefully make it over the finish line without vetoes.
But also, I think we’ll start to look at ways that we can tackle things like affordability and health care access. There are a lot of conversations going on. Everybody is very excited to roll up their sleeves.
We realize that we’re going to be representing everybody across the commonwealth — whether they voted for us or not — and making sure that those lines of communication are open, so that people don’t feel like they’re being left behind, and making sure that we’re creating a Virginia that works for everybody.
Read VPM News’ interviews with incoming delegates:
Del.-elect Jessica Anderson (HD-71)
Del.-elect Kacey Carnegie (HD-89)
Del.-elect Stacey Carroll (HD-64)
Del.-elect Mitchell Cornett (HD-46)
Del.-elect Lindsey Dougherty (HD-75)
Del.-elect Mark Downey (HD-69)
Del.-elect Elizabeth Guzman (HD-22)
Del.-elect John McAuliff (HD-30)
Del.-elect Leslie Mehta (HD-73)
Del.-elect May Nivar (HD-57)
Del.-elect Virgil Thornton Sr. (HD-86)
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