Dante Billington-McCoy wanted to be ready to launch a new career when he leaves the Army next fall.
So, he made a call to Tidewater Tech to get information about their automotive technician program. Or he intended to. Instead, the 24-year-old Hampton Roads resident got Virginia Beach-based private, for-profit Centura College on the line, thanks to a recent affiliation change. “It was by accident,” he says, “but I wouldn’t change it.”
A Centura admissions representative told Billington-McCoy about the school’s new yearlong wind turbine technician program. “I ended up liking what they were offering,” he says.
One of six students in the program’s inaugural class, Billington-McCoy began his coursework in February. He attends school in the evening after putting in a day of work as a logistics noncommissioned officer for the Army.
In the yearlong wind turbine technician program, students are taught the technical skills needed to install, maintain and repair wind turbines.
In March, Billington-McCoy was neck-deep in studies centering on electricity. “I’ve never done anything electrical, so that’s all foreign to me,” he says, “but I’m getting pretty good.”
Launching a new program
Michael Lanouette, vice president of administration at Centura College, kept hearing about the great need for trained wind turbine technicians. While bigger colleges formed committees to study the demand, Lanouette says, Centura decided to go for it.
“We took it serious,” he says. “We went through the accreditation process. We got the equipment. We got the instructors.”
Specializing in health sciences and skilled trades, Centura has four locations in Hampton Roads, including what formerly was known as Tidewater Tech, and is the parent institution for the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, which has 13 aviation technician training centers nationwide.
For the wind turbine technician program, Centura is collaborating with the Mid-Atlantic Maritime Academy, a private vocational center in Norfolk that offers Coast Guard-approved courses geared toward the maritime industry, to get students ready to work in the middle of the sea if they decide to go the offshore wind route.
“The two organizations had two areas of expertise that we combined to put together a very vibrant and effective program,” says Capt. Ed Nanartowich, the academy’s president.
Through the academy, wind turbine technician students take hands-on courses. The academy’s officials hope the courses will be fully certified this summer by the Global Wind Organisation, a Danish nonprofit that sets international minimum standards for safety and technical training for wind turbine workers.
In March, Nanartowich was figuring out how to raise $125,000 to purchase a mobile training tower, which will allow students to practice working safely at great heights. His first plan to obtain the funding from a stakeholder in the offshore wind industry didn’t pan out.
“We could start teaching the basic safety training part tomorrow if we had the equipment here today,” Nanartowich says. However, in Martinsville, the state-funded New College Institute does have a 25-foot tower for its wind energy program, purchased last year.
In October 2020, Gov. Ralph Northam announced the creation of the Mid-Atlantic Wind Training Alliance, a partnership between Centura, the academy and the New College Institute. In a statement, Northam called the alliance “an important first step” in a larger effort to develop a workforce for the renewable energy industries in Virginia.
NCI, which received its GWO certification this year, offered its first batch of weeklong wind turbine technician classes in January.
“We’re doing great and getting the word out,” says Karen Jackson, NCI’s interim executive director, who previously served as Virginia’s secretary of technology under Gov. Terry McAuliffe. She landed on wind energy as a “game-changing” training program for the school because in 2019 no other institution in Virginia was offering GWO-certified classes.
Employment of wind turbine service
technicians is projected to grow 61% by 2029, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and demand for trained technicians will likely be especially strong in Virginia with Richmond-based Dominion Energy Inc. planning to build the largest wind farm in North America off the coast of Virginia Beach.
Billington-McCoy is optimistic he’ll be able to get a job taking care of those turbines. “I’m so excited to climb up the windmills, get the amazing view and do my work,” he says.
Danville City Council members faced a dilemma three years ago.
Council members could pay up to $185,000 to demolish a crumbling stucco apartment building on Jefferson Avenue, or they could spend $75,000 in matching funds to augment a $125,000 grant from the Virginia Housing Development Authority to stabilize the property, which was declared unfit for occupancy a few years earlier.
Council members voted 6-3 to save the nearly 100-year-old building, which has now landed in the hands of local developers who plan to make it habitable again.
“People haven’t lived in it for 15 or 20 years,” says developer Jason Wilson, who began developing residential properties in Danville in 2018 with partner Steve Staats. “It just needs a total gut and remodel.”
Wilson, who developed the Smith Seeds Lofts residential property and Lynn Street Market, says he expects they will spend about $2 million redeveloping the property into 21 units.
With groundbreaking set this fall for the $400 million Caesars Virginia casino in the city’s Schoolfield area, there’s more development activity all over Danville. Late last year, The Bee, a boutique hotel, opened in the former home of the Danville Register & Bee newspaper after a few months’ delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “There’s quite a bit of interest and quite a bit of development underway as we speak,” says Corrie Bobe, Danville’s economic development director.
The city’s Industrial Development Authority recently received a $100,000 grant from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership to pay for the second phase of brownfield environmental assessments at the Schoolfield and White Mill sites, Bobe says.
Both locations served as textile manufacturing facilities until the 1990s, and the environmental studies will allow redevelopment to move forward.
In 2019, Danville’s IDA approved an agreement with The Alexander Co. that gave the Wisconsin operation an option to buy the White Mill site for $3 million — the price the IDA paid for the property in 2017 — although it’s not certain that the company has decided to move forward with the purchase. A spokesperson declined to comment.
Moving forward, Bobe feels optimistic the city will see more growth. “We are constantly looking for ways to entice the private sector to move forward with redevelopment efforts,” she says.
The U.S. Department of Defense in January awarded Virginia Tech a $1.5 million grant to prepare students for careers in cybersecurity — a field facing a critical shortage of skilled professionals.
The need for a pipeline of skilled cybersecurity professionals is regularly emphasized whenever a major hack is uncovered. In December 2020, news of the SolarWinds breach broke. Computer hackers believed to be working for Russia’s intelligence service compromised networks belonging to corporations and several federal agencies.
“The news very recently has pointed out how vulnerable we are,” says Laura Freeman, a research associate professor of statistics in Virginia Tech’s College of Science and principal investigator on the grant.
Students who graduate with the skills needed to protect agencies and corporations from cyberthreats are practically guaranteed to be snapped up by hiring managers. More than 58,000 cybersecurity jobs are currently open in Virginia, according to CyberSeek, a website that provides data about the industry.
At Virginia Tech, the DOD grant is funding experiential learning projects, curriculum development and research opportunities in cybersecurity. This semester, 36 students are working on five projects focused on embedded-systems security and protecting small satellites.
Faculty members designed the projects to fill gaps in critical workforce skills identified by the DOD and the National Security Agency, says Ehren Hill, associate director for education and outreach at the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology at Virginia Tech. The new program builds on Virginia Tech’s relationship with the NSA, which named the university a Center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations in 2017, a designation it will hold through 2022.
The goal of the new program, Hill says, is to “increase the students’ skills and abilities in machine learning, in data science, in both defensive and offensive cyber operations, skills and background.”
Along with Virginia Tech, the DOD awarded grants to five other universities with military programs: Virginia Military Institute, South Carolina’s The Citadel, the University of North Georgia, Texas A&M University and Vermont’s Norwich University.
Freeman is optimistic that many of the students who participate in the program will go on to serve their country as cybersecurity professionals, either in the military or the private sector.
“What we’re hoping to convince them of is that careers in the federal government — the DOD in particular — are so impactful and interesting that they want to go there,” she says.
Mark Jinks sees the unoccupied, former site of Landmark Mall as a blemish on Alexandria.
“When everybody drives by, they’re like, ‘What’s going on here? It’s closed. Why doesn’t the city do something?’” says Jinks, the city manager of Alexandria.
After working for 16 years to see the 52-acre site redeveloped, Jinks feels the city has partnered with the right team to finally tackle the expansive project.
In late December, the city announced an initial agreement with local real estate development firm Foulger-Pratt, Texas-based real estate management company The Howard Hughes Corp. (which owns the mall), real estate investment trust Seritage (which is responsible for the old Sears department store) and Inova Health System to build a 4-million-square-foot, mixed-use, walkable community anchored with a new hospital campus. “Now we’re ready to kind of work together and take that next big step,” Jinks says.
Highlights of what developers are describing as a “transformative project” for Alexandria’s West End include a $1 billion investment from Inova to relocate and expand its current Alexandria Hospital, plus residential properties and retail offerings. The development will boast a central plaza, along with parks and public spaces, as well as a transit hub and a new Alexandria Fire-EMS station.
The current Inova Alexandria Hospital located on Seminary Road opened back in 1962. “We had been seeking an opportunity to modernize that hospital,” explains Inova President and CEO Dr. J. Stephen Jones.
Growing the hospital at its current location would be next to impossible, Jinks points out. “The problem is that it’s in the middle of a residential neighborhood.”
More than a year ago, Inova began talking with the city about building a new hospital at the Landmark Mall site. The nonprofit health system plans to invest $1 billion into building a campus that will include a larger emergency room, private patient rooms, a new cancer institute and a medical office building for specialty physicians.
The hospital at Landmark Mall will be a Level II trauma center, meaning it will offer 24-hour coverage by a surgeon and an anesthesiologist. “Right now, if you are a Level II trauma patient in Alexandria, you actually get transported out of the community to another hospital,” says Stephanie Landrum, president and CEO of the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership.
For Inova executives, a key feature of the Landmark Mall site is that it offers enough room to build a facility capable of adapting as health care needs evolve.
At the new hospital campus, for instance, Jones wants it to be as simple as flipping a switch to convert rooms to negative pressure, a method of infection control that channels air that comes out of the patient’s room through filters. “This new facility should serve the community as well 30 years from now as it does when it opens,” Jones says.
The city of Alexandria plans to issue $54 million in bonds to buy the property, which will then be leased to Inova, and an additional $76 million in bonds for site preparation and infrastructure work. Jinks expects the development to generate $778 million in tax revenue over the life
of the bonds, which will easily cover the cost of principal and interest.
During a virtual community meeting about the proposed Landmark Mall redevelopment held in January, citizens mainly posted concerns about traffic and noise. “These are issues we have good answers for,” Landrum says.
Noise from ambulances and fire trucks can be mitigated using flashing lights instead of sirens when possible and with rules regarding idling, she says.
One of the advantages of the Landmark Mall site is that it sits adjacent to Interstate 395, Landrum points out. “It’s not like they’re going to be coming through residential roads to get to the hospital, which is frankly one of the complaints we get about the current [hospital on Seminary Road].”
Developers hope to begin construction by 2023, with the first retail shops opening in 2025.
It just got even more competitive to win a spot at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, which saw a 48% increase in applications last year.
By the Dec. 1, 2020, application deadline, the medical school had received 6,374 applications for the class of 2025, which has a mere 49 openings. Last year, the school received 4,299 applications.
“We’re a new school,” says Dr. Lee Learman, dean of the Roanoke medical school, which opened its doors in 2010. “To us, it means a lot that we would see such an increase.”
Dr. Melanie Prusakowski, associate dean for admissions at the medical school and a pediatric emergency medicine physician for Carilion Clinic, says the “Fauci effect” is part of the reason for the increase, a term coined by pundits for the phenomenon of young people being inspired to pursue medical careers by the country’s top infectious diseases physician, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The American Medical College Application Service, which coordinates applications for most U.S. medical schools, reported a nearly 17% increase in the number of applications received as of October.
“I think that those who are good students — and, let’s face it, applicants to medical schools tend to be successful students — have a lot of options,” Prusakowski says. “And so, when they see the importance of being part of the solution, we see a real increase.”
Some applicants, she says, also might have decided to apply after seeing family members get laid off due to the economic upheaval that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. “Medicine becomes an interesting choice,” she says. “Perhaps not glamorous, but maybe a little bit more secure.”
Gemma Porras Nielsen, a Roanoke native, was waitlisted for the cohort that began their studies in 2020. She was later invited to fill an opening, but she was already in Spain working on a master’s degree in biochemistry.
This year, Porras Nielsen applied again and made the cut. One reason she chose the school is because it offers small classes and a curriculum that’s centered around research. “That combination is really rare,” she says.
Administrators at the school are currently studying the pros and cons of increasing the number of students, says Learman. But he can’t imagine a scenario where the school admits more than 100 students per class. “The larger growth is something we’re looking very carefully at,” he says.
New College Institute wants to take the lead in building the state’s wind energy workforce.
In January, the Martinsville higher education center became the first site in Virginia to offer wind technician training courses, certified by the Global Wind Organisation, a Danish nonprofit that sets international minimum standards for safety and technical training for wind turbine workers. Following a successful audit, the school is set to receive certification, says Karen Jackson, NCI’s interim executive director.
Currently, there are 15 training centers certified to offer GWO courses in the United States, says Ralph Savage, head of communications for GWO. The organization hopes to have 32 U.S. sites certified by the end of 2021.
Nonetheless, Jackson says, growth in the wind industry will likely “outpace the number of GWO training locations that exist for some period of time.”
David White, executive director of the Virginia Maritime Association, sees considerable opportunity ahead for Virginians trained to operate on wind turbines. He points to Dominion Energy Inc.’s $7.8 billion project to erect 180 to 190 wind turbines 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach by 2026, creating the nation’s largest offshore wind farm. “We’re going to need the workers,” he says.
In October 2020, Gov. Ralph Northam announced the creation of the Mid-Atlantic Wind Training Alliance, a partnership between NCI, Virginia Beach-based Centura College and the Mid-Atlantic Maritime Academy in Norfolk to offer wind technician training.
Upon accepting NCI’s interim position in 2019, Jackson began seeking ways to bring “game-changing” training programs to Martinsville. As secretary of technology for Virginia under Gov. Terry McAuliffe, she was acquainted with the state’s burgeoning wind industry.
After making some calls and learning that no other Virginia school was yet offering GWO-certified courses, Jackson decided to go for it. Getting the program up and running cost about $350,000, which included the price of erecting a 25-foot tower for students to climb.
Initially, Jackson believes NCI’s wind technician offerings may be populated more by students traveling to Martinsville from Western states, where there’s greater current demand for wind technicians.
By early December, no students had yet enrolled in the January courses, but Jackson wasn’t worried. “We may start off slow, and that’s OK,” she says, confident the effort will pick up steam — or wind, as the case may be.
Roanoke developer Lucas Thornton hopes to break ground this summer on a multimillion-dollar renovation project that will transform what is now Campbell Court Transportation Center, the city’s rundown bus station, into an office tower and another building with apartments and retail space.
Thornton’s $35 million development, tentatively named Randolph Street, inched closer to becoming reality in mid-November 2020, when members of Roanoke’s City Council voted unanimously to amend the city’s zoning ordinance so public transit centers are allowed downtown by right.
The city’s plan to build a $9.8 million Valley Metro bus station on what is now a parking lot on the corner of Salem Avenue and Third Street met with opposition earlier in the year. Citizens spoke out against the location, saying it sits too close to a section of downtown that is enjoying success from several revitalization projects. Popular restaurants, residences and a microbrewery now punctuate a street previously lined by light industrial and warehouses.
Richmond-based developer Bill Chapman, who is responsible for many of the successful Salem Avenue projects, was an especially vocal critic of the bus station site and offered to build an apartment complex on the proposed site in exchange for moving the station four blocks west — a plan rejected by council because the site was considered too far from the center of downtown. Chapman declined to comment for this article.
Hearing the concerns, the city Board of Zoning Appeals voted in August 2020 against granting a special-use exception for the bus station to be built at the parking lot. The city could have appealed the decision in court, but instead councilors amended the zoning ordinance to allow for the new station.
Thornton, managing partner of Hist:Re Partners, is optimistic he may see construction on the mixed-use Randolph Street project begin in June, with an opening date planned for fall 2022. The project will include a 60,000-square-foot office tower, about 12,000 square feet of retail space, 90 apartments, 15 homes and a pedestrian courtyard, Thornton says. The majority of the commercial and retail spaces have tenants lined up, he said.
City Manager Bob Cowell calls the Randolph Street development “an exciting chapter in downtown’s continued renewal.” Lucas also is developing a four-story apartment building in Roanoke across from Norfolk Southern Corp’s former locomotive shops, which closed in May 2020.
In an effort to literally expand Virginia Tech’s research bandwidth, the Virginia Tech Foundation bought eight blocks of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in the Federal Communications Commission’s auction this summer.
As owner of priority access licenses (PALs) for four 10MHz blocks in Montgomery County and four blocks in Craig County, the university will likely use the spectrum to create a private 4G/LTE network and, later, a private 5G/LTE network for use on campus, according to Scott Midkiff, vice president for information technology at the university. “It’s not to make phone calls,” he explains. “It’s primarily for data.”
The FCC decided in 2015 to share the midband spectrum — widely thought to be ideal for 5G service — for commercial use, prompting the auction. Previously, the band was limited to satellite operators and federal agencies. Virginia Tech can use the spectrum for “research opportunities, things that we can do for our own operations, primarily on campus, and then opportunities for partnerships to work with local government and with commercial entities,” Midkiff says.
Although many bidders were mobile phone and cable service providers, Virginia Tech was joined in its purchases by the University of Virginia Foundation, which paid $118,200 for six licenses, and Texas A&M University, which paid $39,000 for one license. In Arlington and Alexandria, developer JBG Smith purchased seven licenses to build a 5G network in the Arlington area where Amazon.com Inc. is building its $2.5 billion East Coast HQ2 headquarters.
The CBRS band is particularly well-suited for applications related to the internet of things, a term referring to internet-connected devices capable of sending and receiving data. Virginia Tech may use the wireless LTE network to connect surveillance cameras, Midkiff says, instead of the hardwired ethernet cables currently in use.
“This will get us a way of having high-quality, fast, kind-of-guaranteed delivery connectivity for those devices,” he says.
Also, university researchers will be able to use the midband spectrum to study everything from smart farming (think cows outfitted with collars that track their diets) to health applications (such as hospital beds that can monitor a patient’s movements).
Virginia Tech electrical and computer engineering professor Jeff Reed is particularly enthused about the possibilities for studying cybersecurity and spectrum sharing for wireless communications among multiple users.
“I haven’t seen this much excitement in wireless communications for over 20 years,” says Reed.
Harrisonburg’s The Free Clinic will go out of business at the end of December after providing medical care to low-income, uninsured adults for more than 30 years.
“We’ve taken care of patients. We’ve made our community a healthier place, and we’re happy about that,” says Joshua Hale, president of the clinic’s board of directors. “Even though we’re closing, it has been a great thing.”
Board members made the unanimous decision to close the nonprofit clinic because of the one-two combo of the pandemic and a decreasing number of patients.
The decrease in patients is largely the result of Virginia’s 2019 Medicaid expansion, which includes adults ages 19 to 64 whose incomes fall within 138% of the federal poverty line. The clinic had about 600 patients before the expansion; it had about 90 patients afterward.
Board members responded by widening patient eligibility requirements so that patients who make up to 300% of the federal poverty level — regardless of their citizenship status — could be treated by the clinic, according to Summer Sage, the clinic’s executive director. Previously, patients could make no more than 200% of the federal poverty level.
By March 2020, the clinic was serving about 400 patients and had about 80 volunteers. After the pandemic hit, the clinic’s leadership suspended volunteer staffing for safety reasons, prompting the board to begin assessing whether operations could continue. “It’s not the most fun decision to make,” Hale admits.
The clinic’s last day to see patients was Nov. 20. The Free Clinic’s staff is working with patients to transfer their health records to other facilities.
Lisa Bricker, executive director of the Harrisonburg Community Health Center (HCHC), predicts her facility will absorb most of The Free Clinic’s patients.
As a federally qualified health center, HCHC provides care to everyone, regardless of whether they are insured, and offers income-based sliding-fee scales.
“We care for CEOs. We care for [James Madison University] professors and we care for the homeless,” Bricker says. “Everyone receives the same level of care.”
In 2019, the HCHC saw almost 16,000 patients, Bricker says. She doesn’t expect adding 400 additional patients will strain the center’s resources.
Four full-time staff members and 10 part-time staff members at The Free Clinic will lose their jobs with the closing. “I think they are doing what they can to reach out and look for other opportunities,” Hale says.
When 19th-century movers and shakers picked sleepy Roanoke as the site of the crossroads linking the Shenandoah Valley and Norfolk & Western railroads, the town grew with such force and speed that it earned the now-obscure nickname “Magic City.”
Over the decades that followed, thousands of Roanokers toiled for the N&W one way or another. Between 1884 and 1953, workers at Roanoke’s Locomotive Shop built a whopping 447 locomotives, according to local historian and former Norfolk Southern Railway employee Wayne McKinney.
Sadly, though, every party winds down sometime.
Norfolk Southern was created by the 1982 merger of Norfolk & Western and Southern Railway, and the new company shifted its headquarters from Roanoke to Norfolk. By 2000, a writer for The Washington Post described Roanoke as a “gritty former railroad town” (an insult that rankles Roanoke loyalists to this day).
“Clearly, it was obvious — and we probably even came to the realization a little late —that we shouldn’t have our eggs all in that basket,” says Beth Doughty, executive director of the Roanoke Regional Partnership.
These days, the Roanoke Valley — which includes the cities of Roanoke and Salem as well as Botetourt, Franklin and Roanoke counties — boasts an economy built on a wide range of industries, including robust sectors in health care, transportation manufacturing, technology and advanced manufacturing.
Nelson
“We’ve really tried to diversify the economy,” says Marc Nelson, economic development manager for the city of Roanoke. “That just makes sense for any city or any region to focus on having a broad range of different [businesses].”
A cluster of outdoor recreation businesses also call this region home. That didn’t happen by chance.
In the late aughts, the Roanoke Regional Partnership began working to brand the region as a mecca for outdoors enthusiasts, with the hope of attracting a precious commodity: top professional talent. “I always say talent is the currency of the 21st century,” remarks Doughty.
In 2009, Pete Eshelman joined the partnership as its new director of outdoor branding. Not long after being hired, Eshelman forged partnerships with businesses and local governments to launch its first annual fall outdoors festival in 2011. Since then, the festival has grown each year. More than 35,000 people turned out in 2019 for what is now called the Anthem Roanoke GO Outside Festival.
That branding effort paid dividends. The Roanoke region enjoyed a 38% growth in outdoor sector employment between 2010 and 2019, Doughty says. And in 2017, Men’s Journal magazine named Roanoke as one of the 20 best mountain towns in America, alongside places such as Park City, Utah, and Crested Butte, Colorado.
“We’re an outdoors town,” says Doughty, who will retire in December after more than two decades at the helm of the partnership. “Our outdoor assets are strong enough to brand the region.”
Strong enough, Doughty hopes, to woo remote-working professionals who can live anywhere to relocate to the Star City, as Roanoke is known these days. (The modern nickname is derived from the landmark, 88.5-foot-tall, neon Roanoke Star on Mill Mountain).
The staff at the partnership paid attention when experts began predicting the coronavirus might cause big-city dwellers to flee in large numbers for suburban or rural areas where there’s room to spread out. This spring the partnership launched a digital campaign dubbed “Live Here, Work Anywhere, Play Everywhere,” which touts Roanoke’s outdoor amenities and low cost of living.
“It’s been much more successful than I think we anticipated,” Doughty says of the campaign. “So that’s an opportunity for us as a community.”
Health care renaissance
Another benefit for the Roanoke Valley is Carilion Clinic’s rapidly expanding footprint in the region. “There’s lots going on there,” Doughty says.
The new Crystal Spring Tower at Carilion Clinic’s Roanoke Memorial Hospital will house an expanded emergency department and consolidated services for its Cardiovascular Institute.
A study released this year by the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service reported that Carilion Clinic generated more than $3.2 billion in economic impact and 24,000 jobs in the commonwealth in 2018.
In 2019, Carilion Clinic announced plans for an ambitious $500 million, five-year expansion at Roanoke Memorial Hospital, making it one of the largest hospitals in the state. Among the plans: a new tower, which will offer parking, an expanded emergency department and floors for heart and vascular services, as well as a new nearby building for the hospital’s psychiatry and behavioral medicine department.
“It’s got an opportunity to impact the city in a major way,” Nelson says. “It’s going to transform how that area of town looks. … It’s going to bolster lots of the services that are provided in the region. The cardiac center, the expanded emergency room, all those things I think are really going to be really helpful for us as we grow as a region.”
Within walking distance from Roanoke Memorial sits the Virginia Tech Carilion (VTC) School of Medicine and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, both established in 2010.
Since the inception of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, it has been awarded $195 million in cumulative grants and contracts, according to John Pastor, the institute’s spokesperson. Researchers there now have more space to spread out because the institute opened a new 140,000-square-foot addition this summer. They also have access to a Bruker BioSpec 94/20 USR MRI research scanner. Installed at the institute in June, it is more powerful than any other scanner in the region.
“High-impact advances in science and medicine often accompany innovations in technology,” said Michael Friedlander, vice president for health sciences and technology at Virginia Tech and executive director of the research institute, in a statement. “With tools like this high-powered MRI that is coupled with a unique MR-guided positron emission tomography (PET) system, our teams can interrogate rodent models of human disease conditions, such as cancer, heart disease and brain disorders, at an unprecedented level of resolution and sensitivity and inform potential treatments and preventions.”
A new truck line
Adding to the region’s economic strength, medium duty Mack Trucks began rolling off the production line at the company’s new Roanoke Valley Operations facility on Sept. 1.
A fresh addition to the Mack menu, the Mack MD Series includes the Mack MD6, a Class 6 truck with a gross vehicle weight rating of 25,995 pounds, and the MD7, a class 7 truck with a GVWR of 33,000 pounds. “The durability and the ruggedness that you’ve come to expect from Mack Trucks, you will also find at the same level within our medium duty products,” Jonathan Randall, Mack Trucks’ senior vice president of North American sales and commercial operations, said during a Sept. 22 virtual media event about the series.
Mack Trucks began production at its new Roanoke Valley Operations facility on Sept. 1.
Mack Trucks, part of the Volvo Group, invested $13 million in the 280,000-square-foot manufacturing space, located in the Glenvar area of Roanoke County. The company also committed to creating 250 jobs in Roanoke by February 2021. By the end of September, about 140 workers were already employed at the facility, says Mack Trucks spokesperson Christopher Heffner.
As Mack executives went about selecting the site for the new medium duty operation, they zeroed in on Roanoke County. “It’s a great central location, already within our manufacturing footprint along the I-81 corridor,” Randall says of the new facility. “Our suppliers are already there. They’re already coming through those areas to deliver.”
Mack’s Roanoke Valley facility sits about 45 miles from sister company Volvo Trucks North America’s factory in Dublin, which builds heavy duty trucks.
Even after working in local government for three decades, Jill Loope, Roanoke County’s director of economic development, still got butterflies in her stomach while working to land Mack Trucks. “These things don’t happen every day,” says Loope. “These types of projects — they’re rare.”
As far as she can tell, Loope says, the Mack MD Series is the first prototype-to-production automotive manufacturing operation in the commonwealth. “This is the first to actually be invented, created, developed and produced in Virginia, start to finish,” she says. “And that’s pretty exciting because the innovation occurred here.”
To help lure Mack Trucks to the Glenvar site, Roanoke County offered the company $700,000 in incentives, matching a grant from the state government’s opportunity fund. Additionally, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership’s Virginia Jobs Investment Program will assist with employee training. Positions at the Mack facility pay an average wage of $42,200, according to Loope.
“Not only does it bring hundreds of new jobs,” Loope says of the Mack facility, “it also bolsters our existing supplier base in the region and brings with it the opportunity for new supplier companies to locate here. So, the growth potential long-term for this company is enormous.”
Loope
In this case, “enormous” means having an estimated annual economic impact of $364.17 million, according to an analysis by the partnership, which also predicts the Roanoke Valley facility will spur the creation of 594 secondary jobs.
“It’s been phenomenal for the county and for the region,” Loope says of the Mack Trucks project. “It’s really elevating the regional footprint in a global marketplace because it’s such a well-known brand.”
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The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
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