The city of Richmond issued a request for interest on Dec. 28, 2021, seeking developers for the 66.7-acre Diamond baseball stadium property it has dubbed the Diamond District.
The city plans to demolish the stadium and construct a new multipurpose one that the Richmond Flying Squirrels will share with Virginia Commonwealth University’s baseball team near the old stadium site that the Squirrels say needs to be ballgame-ready by 2025. A 2016 study from Pennsylvania-based consulting firm Tripp Umbach estimated that it would cost at minimum $2.75 million to raze the baseball stadium.
VCU has been buying up properties on the other side of Hermitage Road from the Diamond District, with plans to build a 40-acre “athletic village” that will include indoor and outdoor tennis courts accessible to the public as part of a major sports practice facility.
Based on the city’s master plan, Richmond 300, the city’s vision for the property includes a more pedestrian-friendly street grid, parking garages, multiple public parks and new buildings providing employment, retail and mixed-income housing. The Science Museum of Virginia has begun a $21 million construction of a park, garage and greenway.
The city’s request includes data from recent ballpark construction around the country. “On average, approximately 60% of funding for recent ballparks is derived from public funding sources, while 40% is derived from private sources, and the average cost of recent Minor League Baseball ballparks has totaled approximately $72 million.”
In the site’s listed project goals, the city says it wants a new stadium “provided that the development of said baseball stadium does not require city financing” or that it “minimizes any city financing to the greatest extent possible.”
Requests are due Feb. 15. The evaluation panel anticipates announcing a shortlist in March. Developers on the shortlist will be eligible to apply to a request for offers, for which the application deadline will be in April or May. The city anticipates announcing its selection in the spring or summer and getting the approval of City Council.
The city’s evaluation criteria includes the years and breadth of the development team’s experience, its urban mixed-use experience, equitable development benefits like affordable housing units, and an understanding for the project as well as evaluation of the team’s financing approach.
Michael Rao, president of Virginia Commonwealth University, has been elected chair of the American Council on Education Board of Directors, the council announced Tuesday.
Rao, VCU’s fifth president, has been at the helm of the university — and VCU Health System — since 2009. He was selected as ACE’s chair Tuesday during ACE’s business meeting and his term will begin in March. Rao, who currently serves as ACE vice chair, is being passed the baton by a fellow Richmonder, Ronald A. Crutcher, the University of Richmond’s president emeritus. Rao’s term as chair will last a year.
“In these turbulent and challenging times, ACE’s work to convene, organize, mobilize and lead advocacy efforts that shape effective public policy and help colleges and universities best serve their students, their communities and the wider public good has never been more important,” ACE President Ted Mitchell said in a statement. “I deeply appreciate Michael’s … commitment, leadership and willingness to serve … and I want to express my utmost gratitude to Ron for all he has done over the past year for ACE and the entire higher education community.”
ACE convenes, organizes, mobilizes and leads advocacy efforts that shape public policy and assist colleges and universities. It represents more than 1,700 colleges and universities.
Just over a year after becoming CEO of VCU Health System and senior vice president for health sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, Dr. Arthur Kellermann says the institution’s commitment to providing high-quality medical care while also addressing issues of health equity was a big part of what drew him to take the job.
“Most medical centers over time have moved more towards just highly paying patients,” he says. “The fact that we had a place here that was both highly innovative as an academic health center and deeply committed to the safety net mission … was irresistible.”
The Wonder Tower at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU is slated to open in spring 2023, offering inpatient, emergency, trauma and outpatient services for children. Rendering by HKS Inc.
VCU’s downtown Richmond medical campus, which dates to 1838, is in the midst of a building boom that will give some of its most notable treatment centers larger, more modern facilities that are better aligned with the way 21st-century health care is delivered.
While these projects are intended to smooth some of the rough edges of seeking health care in a tight urban setting — like the endless search for parking — these are not the only measures VCU Health and VCU’s health sciences schools are taking to reimagine the way they deliver health services and train future health care workers.
Through greater cooperation with other academic departments at the university and within the wider community, Kellermann wants to see VCU build a reputation as a medical system that works as hard to keep people from all backgrounds healthy as it does to treat them once they are admitted for care.
“Our focus going forward is to improve our efficiency and throughput in the facility, but at the same time, if we can do a better job of helping people stay healthy and out of the hospital, then that opens up capacity that we can use to care for more people,” he says.
Building boom
Opening in December at the corner of North 10th and East Leigh streets in downtown Richmond, VCU Health’s $384 million Adult Outpatient Pavilion combines 615,000 square feet of clinical space with more than 1,000 parking spaces in a garage that will allow patients to valet park and enter a building where they can access many different medical specialists.
The building houses outpatient services for VCU Massey Cancer Center, women’s services, infusions, an on-site laboratory, and pharmaceutical and medical imaging services, as well as other outpatient clinics.
Kellermann says the new outpatient building will help VCU Health adopt a model of care akin to what has made the Mayo Clinic such a destination for patients seeking advanced care — that of making a wide array of specialists available in one central location.
“Historically, academic medical centers have tended to be doctor-focused,” he says. “The model we are building is bringing the expertise to the patient.”
VCU Massey Cancer Center Director Dr. Robert Winn says the Adult Outpatient Pavilion will also drive new collaboration among doctors. “I really think we’ll be having more conversations about how to solve the big problem of reducing disparities for everyone,” he says.
The outpatient facility — which will increase the amount of outpatient care space on the downtown campus by seven times — is one of several VCU Health projects that will add a total of more than 1 million square feet of new clinical space in downtown Richmond.
Two blocks down 10th Street from the Adult Outpatient Pavilion, construction is underway on the 16-story Wonder Tower at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU. This 72-bed, 500,000-square-foot facility, expected to open in spring 2023, completes an entire city block dedicated to serving children and their families, Kellermann says. It will increase the amount of pediatric care space within the health system’s downtown campus by 10 times.
The tower will bring inpatient, emergency, trauma and outpatient services for children under one roof, with a bridge connecting to the VCU Medical Center Gateway Building.
Kellermann expects the Wonder Tower to boost VCU’s profile as a destination for advanced care for children.
“I think it will be a magnet, not just for kids across Virginia, but for kids with complex and life-threatening problems across the country, and probably, in time, internationally, who will be coming to Richmond,” he says. “These are not short stays — this will help the local economy.”
Leaders at some of VCU’s other health sciences schools see the new facilities as valuable additions to the clinical education opportunities they can offer their students.
“Pediatric care, both inpatient and outpatient, is one of the hardest clinical areas to get direct experience with,” says Jean Giddens, dean of the VCU School of Nursing. “Our students are going to have much more robust pediatric experiences because that facility is right there for us. You can’t get those experiences in a lot of other nursing schools, because they don’t have access to that kind of clinical education so easily.”
VCU Health is also part of a $325 million mixed-used development on the former site of the Public Safety Building at 510 N. 10th St. Developer Capital City Partners purchased the building from the city of Richmond in July for $3.5 million. VCU Health System will have 150,000 square feet of office space in the development, which will also include a 35,000-square-foot child-care center to be operated by VCU Health. The project will also feature a 145-room extended-stay hotel operated by Richmond-based hospital hospitality house The Doorways for families of hospital patients, as well as a new 60-room Ronald McDonald House for families of children receiving care at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU. Construction is expected to begin in spring 2022 and be complete in early 2025.
Jennifer Wakefield, president and CEO of the Greater Richmond Partnership, a regional economic development nonprofit organization, says VCU Health’s expansion is a boost to the Richmond area’s profile.
“When companies are looking to expand or relocate, they want to ensure that there are great universities and great health care for themselves and their team members,” she says. “Additional facilities being built at VCU will definitely add to the cachet of Richmond as companies look at this market.”
Reimagining the safety net
As it builds new facilities to care for the sick, VCU is also looking for new ways to help people stay well, Kellermann says. “We need to rewrite the social contract between academic health systems and their communities,” he says.
Increasingly, this means working with partners outside of the traditional halls of medicine. That approach has helped the school and health system in the race for sponsored research funding, which has grown by more than 8% at the university over the past year.
VCU Massey Cancer Center learned in September that it had won Virginia’s first-ever Special Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant from the National Cancer Institute. The $3.3 million grant will establish a research center at Massey that will partner with community groups both regionally and nationally to examine why lung cancer disproportionately affects Black Americans.
Winn says a big part of the work will be compiling data that can help researchers get a better picture of the cancer health of all areas of the commonwealth, down to the neighborhood level.
“If you were to look at the nine districts of Richmond, the ideal for us is to be able to provide enough cancer data so that each of the [City] Council [members] could know the cancer health of their district,” he says of his long-term hopes for what will be known as the Translational Research Center in Lung Cancer Disparities based
at VCU.
By collaborating with community groups such as hospitals and health centers, social workers and even churches and other organizations, researchers hope to gain a clearer picture of how environmental and societal disparities may be contributing to cancer rates.
Partnering with Massey on the project are the Medical University of South Carolina Hollings Cancer Center and the City of Hope National Medical Center in California.
While both South Carolina and Virginia have histories tied to tobacco production that may explain some lung cancer prevalence, California has some rural populations with similar cancer rates, but without the ties to tobacco.
“This is where we can start teasing out the causes. Are there other environmental issues that are contributing to the cancer in California that we can learn something from?” Winn says. “Bringing on these partners expands our reach from just impacting Virginia to having potential national implications.”
Thinking beyond medicine
Kellermann says some of the public health challenges highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate how VCU’s health sciences schools can benefit from collaboration with other academic areas of the university.
As an example, he cites the Media+Health Lab at VCU’s Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture. Access to accurate health information “is probably one of the greatest public health threats our country and our world face. And no school of public health is really getting after that,” Kellerman says. “We are looking at transforming our public health program into a school where one of the major focuses would be communication and community empowerment.”
In September, VCU launched its Office of Health Equity, the product of a five-year process examining how the university could work more closely with the community to address disparities in health outcomes.
As part of that effort, VCU awarded $100,000 in grants in spring 2021 to seven groups led by faculty from across the university, from the School of Medicine to the Center for Environmental Studies, to work on an identified issue in the community.
“The caveat was that they had to partner with a community organization that was focused on that issue,” says Sheryl Garland, chief of health impact at VCU Health.
The grantees tackled problems as varied as affordable housing, food insecurity and oral health for refugee populations.
“Many of the health outcomes we are seeing are driven by social and economic factors,” Garland says. “We have a lot of faculty and programs that think about those things on a daily basis. … It was a no-brainer we needed different perspectives at the table beyond those of our clinical partners.”
VCU at a glance
Founded
VCU was founded in 1838 as the Medical College of Hampden-Sydney and was later renamed the Medical College of Virginia. In 1968, MCV merged with Richmond Professional Institute to form Virginia Commonwealth University.
Campus
VCU has two campuses in downtown Richmond covering a total of 168 acres. The Monroe Park Campus houses most undergraduate students and classes. VCU’s five health sciences schools and VCU Medical Center are located on the MCV campus.
Enrollment1
Undergraduate: 22,183
Graduate: 5,648
In-state: 25,510 (87%)
International: 1,256 (4.2%)
Students of color: 13,818 (47%)
Employees
One of the largest employers in the Richmond area, VCU employs nearly 23,400 workers, including 2,501 full-time faculty and 2,909 full-time university and academic professionals.
Tuition and fees2
In-state tuition and fees: $15,118
Tuition and fees (out of state): $36,456
Room and board and other fees: $11,615
Average financial aid awarded to full-time freshmen seeking assistance2: $18,887
Reston-based Stanley Martin Homes broke ground on a new downtown Richmond neighborhood, Carver Square, last month.
Located in the city’s Carver neighborhood near Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center and across from Maggie Walker Governor’s School, Carver Square will feature 90 two-over-two-style garage condominiums on two acres at the corner of Moore and Lombary streets.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held on Oct. 6. The condos will be 1,500 to 2,500 square feet and each will have an open-concept floor plan and outdoor space, including rooftop terraces. Residents are expected to move in by the end of 2022.
In September, Stanley Martin Homes acquired the operations and assets of Florida-based Avex Homes.
One week out from Election Day, the Virginia governor’s race remains very close, according to two polls released this week. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee, has small leads over Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin that are within the surveys’ margins of error.
Released Wednesday morning, Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Civic Leadership’s poll has McAuliffe with 49% of support among likely voters, compared with Youngkin’s 48%, meaning that third-party progressive candidate Princess Blanding’s 1% polling among voters could potentially impact the race. The CNU poll’s margin of error is 3.5%. According to Tuesday’s poll from Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government, McAuliffe has a 41% lead against Youngkin’s 38%, within the poll’s 5.03% margin of error.
Down-ticket Democrats — Attorney General Mark Herring and lieutenant governor candidate Del. Hala Ayala — also have one-point leads over their Republican counterparts, Del. Jason Miyares and Winsome Sears, reports the CNU poll, which has 5% of respondents undecided between Miyares and Herring, and 4% undecided between Ayala and Sears. Similarly, VCU reports only a one point difference between Ayala and Sears, with the Democrat carrying 36% of support. VCU shows Herring with a four-point lead over Miyares, at 39% to 35%.
VCU’s survey shows more voters who are unhappy with either candidate in all three races, as well as a lowering of support for Gov. Ralph Northam. Only 46% approve of the job he is doing, a five-point drop.
“The poll reflects a tightening of the race for the three top offices. The number of voters unhappy with either candidate for governor and the decrease in Northam’s approval rating is noteworthy,” former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder said in a statement.
“McAuliffe is facing strong headwinds in a state that has historically selected governors from the party not in the White House and with a Democratic president whose approval rating is underwater,” Wason Center Research Director Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo said in a statement. “Republican voters also appear hungrier for a win and increasingly see a chance to take a statewide race for the first time since 2009.”
CNU’s poll shows that 80% of Republican likely voters are “very enthusiastic” about the election, compared with 65% of Democratic likely voters. That enthusiasm gap is a GOP advantage that has surged nine points since the Wason Center’s Oct. 8 survey.
VCU’s poll surveyed 808 adults in Virginia from Oct. 9 to Oct. 21, and when considering likely voters only, the margin of error was 6.44%. CNU polled 944 likely Virginia voters from Oct. 17 through Oct. 25.
This year’s gubernatorial race far exceeded previous campaign spending. According to the latest campaign finance reports, Youngkin and McAuliffe collectively raised $117 million through Oct. 21, compared to $64.7 million raised by Northam and Republican Ed Gillespie at this stage four years ago, the Virginia Public Access Project reported. A former CEO of The Carlyle Group, Youngkin has spent $20 million so far on his campaign, including $3.5 million in October, bringing his total fundraising to $58.8 million. McAuliffe, a prodigious Democratic Party fundraiser, raised $28 million in campaign contributions this month and has brought in a total of $58.2 million.
McAuliffe has also pulled in several marquee names to support his campaign in recent days, including President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, first lady Jill Biden and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Music superstar Pharrell Williams, a Virginia Beach native, and Vice President Kamala Harris are scheduled to appear at a campaign event for McAuliffe on Friday in Norfolk.
The Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center won a $3.3 million Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant to establish a research center on lung cancer disparities from the National Cancer Institute last week.
The Translational Research Center in Lung Cancer Disparities (TRACER) will study the disproportionate effects of lung cancer on the Black community. The center will be based at the VCU Massey Cancer Center and led by Massey, collaborating with the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Hollings Cancer Center and City of Hope in California. After the three-year funding period of this initial award, the center can apply for a larger, five-year SPORE award.
TRACER will speak with local health departments, community health centers, civic activists, education institutions and others in Virginia, South Carolina and California.
“It’s important that the community has a seat at the table. We’re optimistic that this dream team of researchers and community stakeholders will translate our basic science into clinical impact in reducing lung cancer disparities,” TRACER principal investigator Dr. Robert Winn, director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at Massey and senior associate dean for cancer innovation and professor of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at the VCU School of Medicine, said in a statement.
TRACER will investigate how stress and smoking interact with gene expression to raise lung cancer risk for Black men. Although the racial gap in lung cancer cases appears to be closing, likely due to the success of anti-smoking campaigns, Black men still have a higher risk of developing lung cancer compared to white men, even though they tend to smoke less – an effect referred to as the “Black smoking paradox,” according to an article published by the Cancer Network. Black patients are also more likely than white patients to be diagnosed at later stages and to receive no treatment at all for their cancer, according to a data analysis from the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries running from 2013 to 2017.
Winn will co-lead the project with Dr. S. Patrick Nana-Sinkam, who is a member of Massey’s Cancer Prevention and Control research program, the Linda Grandis Blatt Endowed Chair in Cancer Research and the chair of the pulmonary disease and critical care medicine division of the VCU School of Medicine.
“It’s no secret that the Black community faces higher levels of stress, compared with more socioeconomically advantaged groups,” Nana-Sinkam said in a statement. “We want to understand how environmental stress, smoking and biology intersect to increase lung cancer risk.”
The center’s second project will investigate how the stress hormone cortisol relates to racial differences in smoking behaviors and overall lung cancer risk. The project will be led by Chanita Hughes-Halbert, an adjunct at MUSC and a vice chair for research at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and the associate director for cancer equity at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.
A new statewide poll from Virginia Commonwealth University shows Democratic former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe with a nine-point lead over Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, a far different take than the much tighter race indicated by a Washington Post-George Mason University poll released Saturday.
VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs released its second Virginia gubernatorial poll results Monday, indicating that while McAuliffe has 43% of likely voters’ support and Youngkin only 34%, the attorney general and lieutenant governor races have gotten closer in the past month.
VCU’s August poll showed the two gubernatorial candidates in practically a dead heat, while Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring and lieutenant governor candidate Del. Hala Ayala held 10-point leads over their respective GOP opponents, Del. Jason Miyares and Winsome Sears.
“Our recent poll relative to the governor’s race and statewide elections showed interesting results,” former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder said in a statement Monday. “Neither McAuliffe nor Youngkin had 50% support. The increase in the undecided and those unable to commit for either is noteworthy. The poll was taken prior to any debates. How the candidates show the people what they propose dealing with the pandemic and its effects are obvious concerns. The narrowing of the lead by the Democratic candidates in the lieutenant governor and attorney general races and increased ‘undecided’ shows ‘the jury’ may be out awhile longer.”
The poll of 811 adults in Virginia was conducted Sept. 7-15 with a margin of error of 5.35%, which increases to 6.93% when considering likely voters only. In the attorney general race, incumbent Herring has a six-point lead over Republican Miyares, 39% to 33%, and Ayala appears to have lost ground against Sears, with a 33% to 30% lead that falls within the margin of error. However, 20% of voters said they remain undecided or unwilling to vote for either lieutenant governor candidate.
It’s a similar story for the two major-party governor contenders; 23% of those polled said they are still undecided or are unwilling to vote for either candidate. A third-party candidate, Princess Blanding, is considered a possible spoiler for McAuliffe among progressive Democratic voters. Blanding — the sister of Virginia teacher Marcus-David Peters, who was killed by a Richmond police officer in 2018 — was not included in Thursday’s first gubernatorial debate, but according to a Youngkin campaign internal poll cited by FiveThirtyEight, her presence could help Youngkin beat McAuliffe.
A poll of 907 likely voters conducted Sept. 7-13 by The Washington Post and GMU’s Schar School of Policy and Government showed McAuliffe with a much narrower lead, 50% over Youngkin’s 47% — within the margin of statistical error. Mark Rozell, the Schar School’s dean, called the race a “toss-up” in the Post.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden’s falling approval numbers may also hamper McAuliffe’s campaign for a second, nonconsecutive term. The Wilder School poll shows 46% of Virginians approving of the job the Democratic Biden is doing, down five points from August — likely influenced by factors such as the U.S. military’s turbulent exit from Afghanistan and increasing disagreements over the Biden administration’s coronavirus responses, including vaccine-or-testing mandates for companies employing 100 or more workers.
In state delegates’ races, Democrats maintained a slight edge over Republicans in the VCU poll, with 43% of respondents saying they’d like the party to retain control next year. Five percent were undecided, and 39% wanted Republicans to regain power in the House. Democrats hold a 55-seat majority in the House of Delegates, and all 100 seats are up for grabs.
Virginia’s early voting period started Sept. 17, and Election Day is Nov. 2.
The Republican and Democratic candidates for Virginia governor are in a virtual tie, a new poll by the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University reported Friday.
Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe is polling ahead at 40%, while Republican Glenn Youngkin, former co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, polled at 37% among likely voters. McAuliffe’s 3% lead falls within the poll’s 5.23% margin of error, according to the Wilder School. Another 23% of voters polled said they are undecided or unwilling to vote for one of the two major party candidates. Conducted during Aug. 4-15, the poll questioned 823 Virginia adults about their voting plans.
Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Del. Hala Ayala leads with 39%, compared with 31% for Republican nominee Winsome Sears. Incumbent Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat running for his third term, holds the largest lead among the statewide candidates, with 41%, compared with 31% for Republican candidate Del. Jason Miyares.
“As of this survey, there have been no debates between the candidates for governor or lieutenant governor. The gubernatorial candidates are in a virtual dead heat,” former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder said in a statement. “That could change once positions are taken on the issues. The lieutenant governor’s race showing the largest difference could also be affected. The attorney general race has 19% of the voters unwilling to vote for either candidate. Added to the 10% undecided, [that] leaves one-third of the voters who could tighten that contest. How the pandemic affects turnout and enthusiasm energizes voters should be of utmost concern.”
With all 100 state delegate seats up in the air this fall, poll respondents were split when asked which party they would rather see in control of the General Assembly. Democrats received 44% to maintain control, while 40% of those surveyed said they’d rather see Republicans regain power of the state legislature.
The regional breakdown held no big surprises, with McAuliffe holding a large lead in Northern Virginia (51% to Youngkin’s 24%) and Youngkin dominating in the northwestern and Southwest regions of the state with 52% to McAuliffe’s 32%. In Southern and Central Virginia, including the Richmond and Petersburg areas, Youngkin has a slight lead of 34% to McAuliffe’s 32% share, although 33% of voters polled in those regions said they are undecided. In the Hampton Roads region, 42% of voters said they support McAuliffe, and 37% are for Youngkin.
Gov. Ralph Northam, entering the final months of his four-year term, received strong approval numbers for his handling of COVID-19, with 57% of those polled saying he did a good job, although only 47% said he handled health care and racial inequities well.
So far, the two gubernatorial candidates have accepted only two debate invites on the same stage, although Youngkin turned down three opportunities that McAuliffe agreed to, and McAuliffe rejected an invite at Liberty University that Youngkin accepted. The two scheduled debates are set for Sept. 16 at the Appalachian State School of Law and Sep.t 28 for the NOVA Chamber of Commerce/NBC4 debate in Northern Virginia.
Virginia Commonwealth University and ChamberRVA hope to expand paid internship opportunities in the Richmond region with the help of a $250,000 grant from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the chamber announced Thursday.
In October, the Virginia Chamber Foundation and SCHEV started a public-private partnership, the Virginia Talent and Opportunity Partnership (VTOP), to make internships and other work-based learning more accessible to students who can’t afford to take unpaid opportunities. This week’s award will support a new initiative, the RVA-VTOP Collaborative, which will include staffers from VCU and ChamberRVA and fund creation of two project coordinator positions.
Among the Richmond-based initiative’s goals are assessing currently available internship and experiential learning opportunities in GO Virginia Region 4 (which includes Richmond and Petersburg regions), connecting students with employers that are offering paid internships, determining internship and work programs that could grow, and creating reliable success measurements.
Erin Webster Garrett, assistant vice provost for VCU REAL, the university’s experiential learning center, said in a statement that the partnership has already been productive. “We’re thrilled to receive this grant, and eager to put our work plan into action. It’s been exciting to see our partnership with ChamberRVA grow and to find opportunities to combine everyone’s expertise and skills to benefit the region.”
Beth Weisbrod, director of the chamber’s RVA NOW program, which provides student internship opportunities, added that the initiative could also help Richmond keep more recent graduates in town.
“Creating a pathway for students to start forming relationships in the local business community is a powerful tool for improving talent retention,” Weisbrod said in a statement. “We have a lot of companies in the region with robust internship programs; however, we need more if we’re going to keep college graduates here.”
AMPAC Fine Chemicals plans to grow its Petersburg manufacturing facility, investing $25 million and creating 156 jobs, Gov. Ralph Northam announced Tuesday.
AMPAC manufactures active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and is a partner with Richmond-based Phlow Corp., Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medicines for All Institute and nonprofit drugmaker Civica Inc., on a federally funded, $354 million contract to reduce America’s dependence on foreign supply chains and produce domestic production sources for medications and pharmaceutical ingredients at risk of shortages, including treatments for COVID-19.
Phlow was awarded the four-year contract by the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in May 2020. This January, Utah-based Civica Inc. announced it would establish its North American manufacturing operation in Petersburg, investing $124.5 million to establish a new facility next to Phlow’s future operation and AMPAC’s existing facility. With Tuesday’s announcement, AMPAC will expand its current plant, where it moved in 2019. Civica’s plant will convert active pharmaceutical ingredients produced by AMPAC and Phlow into vials and syringes to be used in hospitals.
“AMPAC’s investment will further advance the pharmaceutical cluster that has emerged in Petersburg and solidify our commonwealth as a significant player in domestic drug manufacturing,” Northam said in a statement. “This critical partnership between Phlow Corp., Medicines for All Institute, Civica Inc. and AMPAC will have a positive and far-reaching impact, ensuring greater access to high-quality, lifesaving medications while also creating much-needed jobs to support our economic recovery in Virginia.”
AMPAC was founded in 1945 and currently employs 109 people in Virginia, which competed for the project against California and Texas, where AMPAC has two other operations.
“Of our three AMPAC locations, Virginia offers an enabling environment for developing and sustaining the growth in capacity and infrastructure demanded for the pharmaceutical industry,” William DuBay, AMPAC global vice president of research and development, said in a statement. “Our growing relationship with the commonwealth, [the Virginia Economic Development Partnership], the city of Petersburg and others, including VCU, Phlow and Civica, is a cornerstone of our vision for American-based manufacturing of critical pharmaceutical ingredients.”
VEDP worked with the city of Petersburg, Virginia’s Gateway Region, the Community College Workforce Alliance and Dominion Energy Inc. to secure the project, and Northam approved a $640,000 opportunity fund grant and a $250,000 Virginia Investment Performance grant. VEDP’s Virginia Talent Accelerator Program will provide training and recruitment to AMPAC at no cost to the company.
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The poll of 811 adults in Virginia was conducted Sept. 7-15 with a margin of error of 5.35%, which increases to 6.93% when considering likely voters only. In the attorney general race, incumbent Herring has a six-point lead over Republican Miyares, 39% to 33%, and Ayala appears to have lost ground against Sears, with a 33% to 30% lead that falls within the margin of error. However, 20% of voters said they remain undecided or unwilling to vote for either lieutenant governor candidate.
“As of this survey, there have been no debates between the candidates for governor or lieutenant governor. The gubernatorial candidates are in a virtual dead heat,” former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder said in a statement. “That could change once positions are taken on the issues. The lieutenant governor’s race showing the largest difference could also be affected. The attorney general race has 19% of the voters unwilling to vote for either candidate. Added to the 10% undecided, [that] leaves one-third of the voters who could tighten that contest. How the pandemic affects turnout and enthusiasm energizes voters should be of utmost concern.”