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byline: M.J. McAteer

Loudoun contractor’s business is booming

Loudoun County-based FCi Federal got a nice present for its 25th birthday last year — a $416 million, five-year contract with the Department of Homeland Security. Not bad for a business that a local woman started in her brother’s basement.

At first, Sharon D. Virts served as a consultant to federal government contractors. A decade ago, however, she studied the marketplace and retooled the company to pursue contracts in a promising growth sector, immigration.

Under its contract with Homeland Security, FCi provides most of the staffing for the department’s National Benefits Center (NBC) in Missouri. NBC oversees the processing of the immigration applications that, when successful, lead to citizenship.

FCi employees do not adjudicate applications, says Scott F. Miller, the company’s CEO, but they do just about everything else. “If you are going to become a citizen, the center handles it,” he says.
Because of its successful bid on the contract, FCi was able to add 1,320 full-time positions, bringing its roster nationwide to about 5,000.

In addition to its immigration services, FCi works with the State Department to ensure the integrity of its diplomatic mail around the world. It has done work for Treasury and Defense, too. Miller expects it will take its experience and expertise in benefits analysis and fraud detection to other areas of government, such as law enforcement and health care.

The NBC contract was just the latest coup for FCi. Since 2012, Miller says, its business has increased by 50 percent, leading it to add 40,000 square feet of space at its Ashburn headquarters in October to accommodate its 70 core employees.

Virts and Miller, who recently married, donated $2 million to Inova Health System last year to expand its Lansdowne campus. The Inova Virts Miller Family Emergency and Trauma Center is expected to open later this year.

Last year, Virts launched the Sharon D. Virts Foundation, which will focus on preserving the culture and history of the county while encouraging economic opportunity. Its first award was $10,000 to the Land Trust of Virginia.

“We are going to stay in Loudoun,” Virts said at the ceremony marking the expansion of the Ashburn headquarters.  “I was born and raised here. I went to school here … Loudoun County is a great place to be, and we don’t ever want to be anyplace else.”

The federal budget blues

The Northern Virginia of 2017 is a prosperous place. Unemployment is gratifyingly low, and average personal incomes are enviably high. The residential housing market finally is warming up, while the commercial vacancy rates, at last, have been ticking down.

All of Northern Virginia’s jurisdictions can boast growing economies. Yet worry wafts through the region, and its source is not hard to find. Just look across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C.

President Donald Trump has sent a budget proposal to Congress that includes a $52.3 billion increase in defense spending. That spending increase, however, would be offset by deep budget cuts for other agencies, possibly creating massive job losses in the Washington area. 

The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, would lose more than 3,000 jobs if its budget is cut a proposed 31.4 percent. Trump’s budget also includes a 29 percent spending cut for the State Department and foreign aid programs and reductions of 20.7 percent each for the Labor and Agriculture departments. A number of independent agencies, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Endowment for the Arts, also would be eliminated.

In assessing the proposal’s potential effect on the region, Terry L. Clower, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, notes that “like most presidential budgets, this one will not pass as proposed.”

If the $50 billion-plus shift to military spending occurs, Clower says, Northern Virginia defense contractors will capture some of that extra money. Nonetheless, he expects job losses from other agencies would have a bigger impact. “It would literally set us back billions of dollars of economic activity” in part because of the ripple effect of job losses.

Clower still expects “decent job growth this year in Northern Virginia” and notes the budget would not take effect until the next fiscal year starting Oct. 1.  Contractors not working in security and defense fields, however, may delay their hiring plans because of uncertainty surrounding the budget, he says.

The budget proposal was announced in mid-March two days after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its revised Northern Virginia job growth figures for 2016. The final numbers show that the region added 55,600 jobs during the year, down from a preliminary estimate of 72,400 jobs.

The effect on Fairfax
Officials in Northern Virginia localities are assessing how the budget proposal will affect them. Gerald L. Gordon, president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, notes that Fairfax is home to contractors serving a variety of government agencies.

“The existing contracts in the county for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are often significantly larger than the others,” he says. “As such, there is the possibility that many contractors will expand operations. All of this remains to be seen. Further, even if DoD and Homeland Security contracts do expand, it is not yet clear which contracts will be affected. Given the relative size of the DoD contracts, the outlook for Fairfax County appears more positive than it might be elsewhere.”

While cautious in his assessment of future effects of federal spending, Gordon is bullish about the growth of private-sector industry in the county, particularly the potential of personalized medicine, to move Fairfax from dependence on federal largesse. Last year, Inova Health System received $60 million in private contributions for its new research campus in Merrifield, and earlier this year it entered into a partnership with the University of Virginia that could reap significant rewards.  

Dr. Richard Shannon, executive vice president for health affairs for the University of Virginia Health System, says the university and Inova will conduct genomic and cancer research while U.Va. will open a branch of its medical school in Fairfax.

The plan also includes the creation of an investment vehicle to fund research and seek private investment. Still another goal of the partnership is for the Schar Cancer Institute in Merrifield and the U.Va. Cancer Center to win designation as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Institutes of Health. That designation, now held by about 40 U.S. hospitals, would “make Inova part of a fraternity with access to cutting-edge therapies,” Shannon says.

Todd Stottlemyer, CEO of the Inova Center for Personalized Health, says that Inova intends to build an even more extensive collaboration with U.Va. Already, it is working with an accelerator led by the university’s Darden School of Business to help commercialize research results. “As we have new discoveries, we want to have the infrastructure to get them to the marketplace,” Stottlemyer says.
GMU partnerships

Prince William County similarly has been pursuing an academic-business relationship with George Mason University’s Science and Technology campus in Manassas. The university, for example  is collaborating with startups that are developing products at the Prince William Science Accelerator.

George Mason also has pursued a  regional partnership with the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce. The aim is to develop degree programs that address the region’s employee needs. Government contracting, big data, bioengineering, entrepreneurship and public policy are some of the areas that Paul Liberty, GMU’s vice president for government and community relations, calls “naturals” for attention. “We hope to bring into alignment the job providers and those who are going to fund this growth.”

Jennifer Aument, chair of the chamber’s board, says that, in addition to the joint effort to build “a world-class workforce,” the partnership will provide a forum for discussion of key policies and facilitate interactions between the university and Northern Virginia businesses.

Meanwhile, Arlington County has enhanced its reputation as a U.S. headquarters site for international companies. Long heavily Washington-dependent, the county scored a coup earlier this year when it landed the U.S. headquarters of Switzerland-based Nestlé.

Nestlé will move its domestic operations from California to Rosslyn in a deal representing a $39.8 million investment and 748 jobs. The company will occupy about half of 1812 N. Moore St., a 535,000-plus square-foot building that had stood empty for three years. “Nestlé is an epic tenant for Arlington,” says Christina Winn, the county’s director of business investment.

Transportation and traffic
Although the federal budget may be center stage in Northern Virginia at the moment, another area of shared concern is always lurking in the wings: transportation and traffic. There, prospects are as mixed as those on government spending.

The good news is that Metro will open six new Silver Line stations in 2020 in Fairfax and Loudoun counties and the $268 million Potomac Yard in-fill stop in Alexandria. These stations are expected to generate massive growth around them, which will be terrific for the tax coffers of their jurisdictions. For Metro itself, unfortunately, the other recent news has been bad.

In February, the system temporarily lost millions in federal funding because of the failure of Virginia, Maryland and the District to meet a deadline for setting up an independent agency to oversee safety. And, even if that problem finds a resolution, a bigger obstacle looms: a $125 million budget shortfall for this fiscal year.

During the coming decade, Metro is estimated to need $25 billion to run its aging system, yet it lacks any dedicated funding for that. It also has a $2.5 billion unfunded pension liability, and no means to cover that, either. Meanwhile, delays caused by its effort to conduct long-deferred maintenance through its SafeTrack program undoubtedly were a factor in a 12 percent drop in ridership from July through December. Lurking in the background of this dismal situation is the desire of many Republicans on the Hill to eliminate federal funding for mass transit altogether. That would leave Metro between a rock and an even harder place than it is in now.

Atlantic Gateway Project
Happily, the area’s perpetually clogged highways have fared better of late, mostly thanks to the Atlantic Gateway Project. This $1.4 billion undertaking is financed through a $165 million federal grant, $710 million in other public financing, and $565 million in private investment. Its highlights include:

  • Making Interstate 66 inside the Beltway a toll road during rush hour. Designated express lanes on this stretch of highway are scheduled to open this summer.
  • Upgrading I-66 outside the Beltway to three lanes in each direction; adding two express lanes in each direction between the Beltway and Gainesville while adding and expanding park-and-ride lots.
  • Extending express lanes on Interstate 95 to Fredericksburg, and adding express lanes on Interstate 395.
  • Constructing a new southbound bridge on I-95.
  • Adding commuter parking and expanded bus service in the I-95 corridor.
  • Building 14 miles of new track for Virginia Railway Express, Amtrak and freight trains.
  • Beginning reconstruction of the rail bridge across the Potomac River.

All these upgrades are “vital to moving more people and goods reliably to and through the region,” says Kelley S. Coyner, a senior fellow at George Mason’s Center for Regional Analysis. What’s more, she says, “The business community here understands how critical government reform and reliably sustainable funding are.”
That, obviously, is great news for Northern Virginia’s future prospects, but it, nonetheless, leaves an even bigger question on the table:
Will Washington be on the same page?

Growth gains momentum

Northern Virginia is in an upbeat frame of mind. An economic growth trend that began a few years ago gained momentum in 2016, and all signs point toward an even more prosperous 2017.

“Growth was generally good across the region, even as the nature of it may be changing,” says Terry L. Clower, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis.  By changing, Clower means that economic expansion in NoVa now is spread out more fully across the region, embracing not just the close-to-Washington suburbs of the city of Alexandria and the counties of Arlington and Fairfax, but the outer-ring jurisdictions of Prince William and Loudoun counties, too.

The region got a big boost with the February announcement that Nestlé’s U.S. subsidiary will move its headquarters to Arlington, a project that represents a nearly $40 million investment and will create 748 jobs (see story on page 24).

Loudoun County
Loudoun took home best-in-show honors for the state in 2016. “It was incredible,” says Buddy Rizer, the county’s executive director for economic development. “Our biggest year yet.”

Loudoun led the commonwealth with $2.3 billion in new investment, a repeat of its No. 1 performance in 2015. It was first in the nation in household income for the third year in a row, and, at 6.2 percent, third in job growth.

Its data centers, which occupy 5.2 million square feet and generate $100 million in annual revenue for Loudoun, were go-go-go in 2016, as well. Up to 70 percent of all internet traffic already flows through Loudoun daily, and data center behemoths Digital Realty Trust, Equinix and DuPont Fabros Technology all were adding space last year.

Nonetheless, the county is trying to diversify its commercial tax base, Rizer says. Examples of that diversification include JK Services, which is constructing a $55 million headquarters in Sterling; EPL Archives, a life-sciences company, which was at work on $21 million in offices and labs in Leesburg; and, Unanet, a tech company, which moved to a larger space in Ashburn and promised to add 100 jobs.

Prince William County
Next door, in Prince William County, last year also was “a good one,” says Jeff Kaczmarek, executive director of its department of economic development. In 2016, the county logged 22 projects representing 501 new jobs. Capital investment totaled $1.3 billion.

Like Loudoun, data centers play a major part in the Prince William economy. The county has more than 3 million square feet of data center space and, in March, it announced that Iron Mountain Information Management LLC would develop a $350 million facility in Manassas, creating 25 jobs.

Information technology along with life sciences are major growth drivers in his jurisdiction, Kaczmarek says, noting that a modern life sciences accelerator in Manassas has filled all nine of its labs.

Fairfax County
In Northern Virginia’s closer-in jurisdictions, the economy is on an upswing, but “a lot of legacy” is putting a strain on local coffers, Clower says. 

Fairfax County is the prime example, where business is good, even as supervisors wrestle with a proposed budget that would give county schools $61 million less than they are seeking. That gap can be attributed to the fact that the school system has 186,000 children and grows by an average of 17 students a day.

Meanwhile, unemployment was at 3 percent in December, and Gerald L. Gordon, president and CEO of the county’s economic development authority, can point to a number of pluses for the Fairfax economy, including $60 million in private contributions to Inova’s new research campus in Merrifield.

The county also has clinched a number of deals, Gordon says. For instance, one of the county’s largest employers, the government and commercial IT contractor CACI International, announced an addition of 344 jobs in Fairfax City; M.C. Dean, an electrical contractor, announced that it is moving into new space at Tysons and creating 250 jobs; and Favor TechConsulting and Cvent both are expanding at Tysons, adding 235 and 121 jobs, respectively.

Gordon says the county plans a push to attract more businesses specializing in cybersecurity, cloud computing and translational medicine. And, with the arrival of an administration that may be friendly to homeland security and defense spending, he says, Fairfax, despite its legacy issues, “is bullish about coming contracting opportunities.”

Arlington
In addition to the Nestlé deal, Arlington has had several recent project announcements that are expected to create new jobs.

Applied Predictive Technologies added offices in Ballston and promised 368 new jobs, and television station WJLA TV renewed its lease on 100,000 square feet in Rosslyn.  The accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton was consolidating its operations in McLean and Alexandria into 76,000 square feet in Rosslyn. That promises to bring 1,000 workers to Arlington and 348 more jobs within five years. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority further announced it was decamping from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to 75,000 square feet of space in Crystal City, bringing with it 260 jobs.

Christina Winn, director of business investment at Arlington Economic Development, says the county’s efforts will stay centered on retaining key federal tenants along with nonprofits, professional services, and aerospace and defense companies. The county believes that cybersecurity, health care and education IT, big data and green industries will be important elements in further development.

“We’ve had good success,” Winn says. “We’ve demonstrated that we are open to do business.”

Alexandria
Activity in Alexandria was somewhat subdued in 2016. In Old Town, however, work continues on the Robinson Landing South multiuse project, and the Hotel Indigo is nearing the end of construction and should open in the second quarter of this year. 

Metro is figuring large in Alexandria’s  assessment of things to come. After a decade of wrangling, the Potomac Yard Metro station finally got a green light for construction last year. The $268-million rail stop is projected to go into service in 2020.

The other milestone for the city was a first-ever incentive program to encourage homegrown businesses to stay put. The first two grants, $350,000 to the Motley Fool investment firm and $250,000 to Port City Brewing, were matched by the state.

Like the rest of the region’s locales, Alexandria is keeping tabs on the dramatic alterations underway in that large government based on the other side of the Potomac.

“Any time there is a change in the administration, we see an influx of activity as new players move in,” says Stephanie Landrum, president and CEO of the city’s Economic Development Partnership. She echoes the expectations of all her suburban counterparts when she says, “Northern Virginia should do well.”

Game on

History has traditionally drawn tourists to Virginia along with the state’s mountains and beaches. These days, fast-pitch softball and Frisbee competitions are filling bleachers and hotel rooms, with sports tourism a fast-growing sector of the tourism market in Virginia and across the country.

In 2015, the National Association of Sports Commissions (NASC) estimated that visitor spending associated with sporting events was $9.4 billion nationally, a 5 percent increase from $8.9 billion the year before and part of a steady growth pattern of at least six years. Such muscular statistics have not gone unnoticed in Virginia, where cities and counties have been busy trying to make themselves into major players in this market.

“In Virginia, I can’t name a city that isn’t looking at taking advantage of the growth in sports tourism,” says Dev Pathik, founder and CEO of The Sports Facilities Advisory/The Sports Facilities Management. The Florida-based company specializes in developing and running recreational assets, including a number of public and private venues in the commonwealth.

Youth and amateur contests
Virginia has a deep bench of jurisdictions that attract sports tourism, says Joni Johnson, the Virginia Tourism Corp’s national sales manager, domestic sales. Virginia Beach, Salem, Roanoke, Hampton and Norfolk, as well as Stafford, Fairfax and Loudoun counties have all stepped up to the plate. Promoting sports, primarily youth and amateur competitions in activities as diverse as ultimate Frisbee, bowling, basketball and fencing, has been an economic winner for them, says Johnson, because these events draw people who spend money.  

Salem is a prime example. It hosts both the NCAA Division III National Football Championship and the Division III Men’s Basketball championship. It also has been home to women’s soccer and softball championships along with volleyball and baseball tourneys. In 2015, a fast-pitch tournament there generated 8,900 hotel nights in seven days, says Carey Harveycutter, the city’s director of tourism. That represented nearly half of the 19,000 hotel nights Salem logged that year and about $20 million in revenue generated by hotel, food and transportation taxes.

Like many other jurisdictions, Salem is looking to upgrade its facilities. Harveycutter says a feasibility study for a new basketball and volleyball indoor venue is in progress. “Everyone wants to be in sports marketing,” explains John P. Shaner, director of Salem’s Parks and Recreation Department. “Everyone is building facilities.”

The NASC reports that 40 percent of the jurisdictions it surveyed in 2015 said that they had facilities under development, and 75 percent reported recently completing renovations.  
Loudoun County is working with George Washington University on a study about the feasibility of a new sports complex, says Jennifer Sigal, media relations manager for Visit Loudoun.

Stafford County already has taken the plunge on a major investment. To stay on top of the competition, it has upgraded Embrey Mill Park, adding a $12 million swim center, two turf fields and four synthetic fields, with two more synthetic fields planned. The intention was not only to serve residents, but to attract more competitions, and it has had the desired effect.

During Columbus Day weekend, 169 teams participated in a three-day youth soccer tournament at the park and at other county sites. Lisa M. Logan, tourism manager for Stafford County Economic Development and Tourism, estimates that each team represents 45 to 50 people, with 1.5 to two spectators per athlete.  Thanks to its facility expansion, the county also recently won the right to host the 2017-18 U.S. Youth Soccer National Championship Series.

Chesterfield County deal
Chesterfield County is poised to make a large investment, too. At press time it was in the final stages of approving a deal that allows the county to acquire the River City Sportsplex for $5.5 million. The 12-field, 115-acre facility is expected to augment the $1.4 million in annual tax revenues the county already earns from sports tourism, but it needs more than $4 million in site improvements.

Lynchburg is still another locality that has come off the sidelines to join the pursuit of sports tourism dollars. Johnson says it teamed with Liberty University to co-host the Commonwealth Games last April, which attracted about 10,000 athletes of all ages and skill levels. Furthermore, the partners will host the event for four more years. In 2019, Lynchburg and Liberty additionally will be the site of the State Games of America, an Olympic-style competition expected to draw 14,000 to 15,000 athletes.

Pathik says sports tourism has proven uniquely desirable for several reasons.  First, it brings in visitors who otherwise wouldn’t travel. Even better, it is “recession resistant.” Parents may forgo a weekend getaway for themselves when the budget is tight, he says, yet they rarely stint on their children’s recreational opportunities. Thus, when other forms of travel took a hit during the last economic downturn, travel linked to youth sports continued to thrive.  

In the Richmond region, for example, nearly 50 percent of hotel bookings now are attributable to sports tourism, says Danielle Vincenti, senior sports development manager for Richmond Region Tourism.  What’s more, this sector of the industry fills rooms during slow times.

Dead times no more
Thanksgiving and Independence Day are traditionally dead periods, she explains, but not anymore. In 2016 and through 2019, the River City Sportsplex is hosting the Shooting Star Field Hockey Tournament, which attracts college recruiters. Last July 4, the Greater Richmond Convention Center hosted the USA Taekwondo National Championships, and next year it has booked the Teen Masters Bowling National Championships.

Still another attraction of sports tourism is its ability to spur economic development. More spending takes place outside the sporting venues than at the events themselves, Pathik says, because athletes and their family need to sleep, eat and be entertained off the field or court.

All these pluses have made amateur athletics, especially youth sports, into the power forward of sports tourism in the commonwealth. Outdoor and adventure sports, such as hiking and horseback riding, make up the next largest segment of the market, Pathik says, while the role of professional sports, so far, has been relatively minor. The potential is there, however.  

In 2015, the UCI Road World Championships had a $161 million impact on the Richmond area. If a Redskins stadium ends up being located in Northern Virginia, Eric Terry is sure that the region’s economy would get an economic boost.

“Look at what the Dallas Cowboys did for Arlington, Texas,” says Terry, president of the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging and Travel Association.  “I have not seen a stadium built anywhere that didn’t have a big impact on hotels and a very, very big impact on restaurants. And not just for the limited number of games.”

Even without the Redskins, sports tourism has been a home run for Virginia. The challenge for the commonwealth now will be to keep finding ways to run up the score.

Business imperative?

Swaziland, Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and the United States are literally and figuratively worlds apart, yet the four countries share a startling distinction.  According to a Human Rights Watch report, out of all the world’s nations, they alone offer working women no legal right to paid maternity leave.

Contrast that lack of support with Croatia, population 4.2 million, which has the world’s most generous benefit for working mothers — 406 fully paid days off. Or with Iceland,  population 332,000, where each parent gets five months off at 80 percent pay and a further two months off  for whichever parent chooses to take it, for a total of a year.

In the U.S., the only federal law concerning parental leave is the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act. It requires that companies with more than 50 employees give new parents — including same-sex couples — and workers with personal or family medical issues, up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. This act allows for so many exemptions, however, that it covers just 59 percent of U.S. workers.

What’s more, the Department of Labor says 64 percent of the people who are eligible for the unpaid leave but don’t take it are women, likely because they can’t afford to. This situation is unlikely to be changed by law anytime soon, either. A proposal introduced in Congress last year to give federal employees six weeks of paid parental leave went nowhere.

States are free to enact their own laws regarding paid parental leave, of course, but few have done so. In Virginia, no such law exists, and the Washington, D.C.-based National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF) could find no bill concerning this subject currently under consideration in Richmond.

The upshot of this lack of interest on the part of state and federal government is that that just 12 percent of working Americans have access to paid parental or family leave, according to the Department of Labor Statistics. Nevertheless, the movement toward making paid leave an employee benefit is picking up in Virginia and elsewhere, with the impetus for change coming from the marketplace.

“Paid leave has moved from being a social issue to being a business imperative,” says Pam Jeffords, a partner based in Denver at Mercer, a global consulting firm with a specialty in employee benefits. In particular, Jeffords says, she is witnessing “a new emphasis on maternity’s role in female success.”

Hurting the workforce?
According to the NPWF, the more than 2 million working women in Virginia represent 47 percent of the state’s overall workforce. Yet a 2014 New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Foundation poll showed that, on average, more than 40 percent of working women nationally will quit their jobs at some point, mostly because of family obligations, such as caring for a newborn or an ailing parent. That hurts not just their careers, but their employers’ businesses.

In a written statement to a Senate subcommittee hearing on children and families, Vicki Shabo, NPWF’s vice president, cited a survey of 31 companies, along with academic case studies, which found that the median cost for employee turnover equaled, on average, 21 percent of a worker’s annual wages because of issues including separation expenses, higher unemployment insurance, temporary staffing and training. On the other hand, a 2011 study by California’s Center for Economic and Policy Research found that 91 percent of businesses it surveyed reported that paid parental leave either boosted profits or had no effect on the bottom line.

“Parental leave is getting studied a lot,” says Bill Howard, a principal in health and benefits at Mercer’s Richmond office. “Employers want to understand the cost, and everyone wants a benchmark.”

That benchmark now is being set by two sectors of the economy in particular — technology and financial services.

Tech firms in the lead
“Tech companies have been first out of the gate,” says Jeffords, and the obvious reason for that is the rise of the millennials.  

This demographic group, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, now makes up 35 percent of the nation’s workforce, and its presence in the tech industry is disproportionally much larger.  By 2025, millennials are expected to constitute 75 percent of the overall labor force.

Paid parental leave is an especially important employee benefit to these young workers because many are starting families or planning to do so soon. Millennials also expect employers to allow them flexibility in how they balance their work and personal lives.

“As more millennials move up through the chain, companies need a much more results-oriented environment,” says Julie Simmons, managing director of Human Capital Strategic Consulting in Fairfax.

Uber tech companies such as Google and Netflix are setting a high bar on leave policies. Google, for instance, gives birth mothers 18 weeks of paid leave and other caregivers 12 weeks. Netflix guarantees new parents unlimited time off for a year.

Leave policies among Virginia’s tech sector are more modest. The Northern Virginia Technology Council, for example, instituted a two-week, fully paid leave policy a few years ago, which its 21 employees can access for parental leave or to take care of family issues. “Morale-wise, it’s been very popular,” says Christine Kallivokas, the council’s chief operating officer.

Policies at other Virginia tech companies seem to be a rather closely guarded secret, but senior benefits consultant Derek Winn of the Business Benefits Group of Fairfax says that his firm works with many tech firms in Northern Virginia and that about 90 percent now have paid parental leave.

No joke at The Motley Fool
The financial services industry is another sector in the vanguard of change. Employees at Bank of America, for example, are eligible for up to 16 weeks of paid maternity, paternity and adoption leave and are given flexible schedules for the 12 months after a child arrives. The company also reimburses up to $8,000 in adoption expenses.

In Virginia, the parental leave policy at the Alexandria-based investment services company The Motley Fool is hard to top. The Fool, as it calls itself, allows its 330 employees to take 16 weeks of paid parental leave and as much as 12 weeks of paid family medical leave, says Christine Noonan, the head of human resources.

“We have fun and work at the same time,” Noonan says. “We don’t micromanage. We treat people like adults.”  The Fool recently won a Game Changer Award from the Virginia Center for Health Innovation for its employee benefits program.

Farther south, in Henrico County, another white-collar business, Elephant Insurance, recently adopted a new parental leave policy for its 600 employees. It now pays new mothers 40 percent of their salary for the first six weeks of leave (eight weeks if they have a cesarean birth), says Louisa Scadden, head of the company’s people services. Short-term disability insurance covers the other 60 percent for those employees who elect to carry the insurance.

For employees who have been with Elephant for more than a year, paid leave is extended to 12 weeks, with the company picking up the whole tab after disability insurance runs out. The primary-care parents additionally receive an extra week of leave during their first year back to tend to family matters and are paid a bonus of two weeks’ salary after six months. Their spouses or partners receive two weeks off at full pay, as well.

“We don’t anticipate a huge change to the bottom line,” Scadden says of the new policy. “If anything, we expect we’ll save money.”

That belief is becoming more common in the private sector, but any law requiring paid parental leave is unlikely anytime soon.

GMU research addresses world issues

Forget about those clichéd images of professors closeted in ivory towers, working away on obscure subjects with no practical purpose. Research at George Mason University is aimed at producing results that have real-life repercussions.

In the past 20 years, research has become the university’s growth industry. In fiscal year 2007, it spent $67.6 million on research. By 2015, that figure had increased by 49 percent to $101 million. The school now ranks among the top 20 public universities in the country for its research in the social and economic sciences and among the top 50 for math and computer science. It further has been elevated to the tier of “highest research activity” by the prestigious Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.

“Research has grown in leaps and bounds,” says Deborah L. Crawford, vice president of research for Mason. “What distinguishes us is that it is woven into the learning environment at all levels, from undergraduate to postdoctoral.”  

Terry L. Clower, director of  the GMU’s Center for Regional Analysis, says that “very much like a business, we are creating jobs, not just through our spending, but because of how business and government benefit from the research we do.” Economic data supplied by the center help public and private entities in the region make more informed decisions.

Work at Mason covers the social, biological and physical sciences, with concentrations that include sustainability and the environment; regional, national and international policy; technology and information; and homeland and global security. The school has almost 100 research centers devoted to fields ranging from computational fluid dynamics to women and gender.

That’s a lot of irons in the fire, and Crawford says that the university intends to concentrate on expanding in “three multidisciplinary areas that align with the economy of the area.”

Biotech and health
The first, and, arguably, most important, is biotech and health. Northern Virginia is seeking to position itself as a locus for personalized medicine, and George Mason is joining with Inova Health System at the forefront of that ambition.

On the former ExxonMobil campus in Fairfax, Inova is opening a huge complex that will be largely devoted to translational medicine, which uses knowledge from research to develop new treatments and drugs. There and elsewhere, the health-care system will collaborate with Mason on innovative treatments, particularly for cancer and heart and metabolic diseases. In addition, Inova and the university will form the Institute for Biomedical Innovation, which Crawford describes as “an intellectual community” that will facilitate the interaction of scientists and clinicians.

The university already is doing intensive work in the fields of genomics and bioinformatics, with many of its labs located on or adjacent to Mason’s recently designated science campus in Prince William County.

At its Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine in Prince William, for instance, scientists are identifying biomarkers in body fluids that might predict disease.  Co-director Lance A. Liotta says that a pilot breast-cancer program, currently in its third round of testing, is showing positive results.

Of particular interest in a state in which Lyme disease is endemic, his team also has developed a more accurate test for the tick-borne disease.  “Thousands of patients under conventional testing get a wrong diagnosis 50 percent of the time,” Liotta says. The accuracy of the center’s new test is more than 90 percent.

At Mason’s MicroBiome Analysis Center, the role of the microbial environment in the human gut, mouth, and urogenital and respiratory tracts is being examined.

“We’re so clean that the body doesn’t get exposed to the proper antigens anymore,” says Director Patrick Gillevet. He noted that an imbalance or maladaptation of microbes in the body is suspected of having links to conditions as different as inflammatory bowel disease, cirrhosis of the liver and autism.

In the near term, the center is working on replacing the invasive colonoscopy procedure currently in use with a test that would reveal the presence of polyps through a test of stool samples.

The Center for Neural Informatics, Neural Structures, and Neural Plasticity, part of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, puts the human brain under the microscope.

“We are at the very beginning,” says Giorgio Ascoli, the center’s founding director.  “We don’t know the code yet for neurons.”

To remedy that, Ascoli’s scientists have been compiling a database of neurons, 50,000 so far. The long-term application of the center’s efforts would be to understand the effects of aging on the brain and to build artificial brains or computers that more closely mimic humans.

The quest at the National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases is no less sweeping. The animal research facility seeks to come up with strategies for fighting airborne bioterrorist attacks. Additionally, it contracts with commercial companies to evaluate antiviral drugs.

Executive Director Charles Bailey says the center’s latest target is the Zika virus. At the invitation of the Costa Rican ambassador to the United States, Bailey’s scientists are traveling to Central America to engage in a joint investigation of this burgeoning threat to human health.

The center’s influence at home, too, is significant. “We are serving as a magnet for biotech industry in Northern Virginia,” Bailey says.

Security and resilience
The second prong of future research at Mason will be what Crawford calls security and resilience, which includes engineering, cybersecurity and the social sciences. As with the biotech and health care, the intention is to do “research of consequence,” she says, with outcomes that address existing needs.

An outstanding example of just that has been done at Mason’s Center for Clean Water and Sustainable Technologies. Thanks to its work, uncounted numbers of people in Bangladesh, India and Nepal now have access to clean water. The center’s founding director, Abul Hussam, has developed an innovative filter, which removes arsenic from ground water. The filter won a $1 million prize from the National Academy of Engineering — money that subsequently funded the manufacture and distribution of 350,000 of the devices.

Faculty members at Mason’s Volgenau School of Engineering hold 80 patents, and at the school’s six centers and six labs, dozens of studies are being conducted on topics ranging from air transportation to secure information systems.

One project, overseen by David Lattanzi, has been to develop a drone to safely and inexpensively inspect civil infrastructure, especially bridges, which are in notoriously bad shape across the country.

“We don’t get great data right now,” Lattanzi says. With his drone, however, the assistant professor of structural engineering can capture a previously unmatched level of detail, down to the micro-millimeter level. The images then can be assembled into a 3-D virtual reality model of the structure.

Lattanzi took his drone to Haiti after the devastating earthquake there in 2010. “A major part of our research is the post-disaster assessment,” he says.   He is gratified that his drone has attracted significant interest from local communities and private businesses. Getting it “into the hands of practitioners,” is his ultimate goal, he says.

Information, communication and entertainment
Mason’s third research priority will be information, communication and entertainment. Because so much of the work underway at the school is interdisciplinary, many projects could fit into more than one of Crawford’s categories. This third area is broad enough to encompass studies as diverse as the effects of digital media on African-American families to the reaction of a population to a nuclear attack.   

Mason’s Center for Geospatial Intelligence deals with information and communication. Its analysts examine how data is amassed and disseminated about everything from physical features and man-made structures to people and events.

Information used to flow from the top down, says Director Anthony Stefanidis, but no more. Technology has forever changed that age-old paradigm. Information today is, instead, generated and gathered through multiple outlets, including crowdsourcing, social media, digital images and sensor networks. One of the center’s recent projects looked at how activity on Twitter provided information about an earthquake. In that study of the 2011 earthquake on the East Coast, tweets, the study found, functioned as a human sensor network.

Because the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is in Springfield, “NoVa is the epicenter of geospatial intelligence,” Stefanidis says, and his center has positioned itself to be a crucial part of that.

At the university’s Institute for Immigration Research, the goal is to provide accurate data about immigrants, despite a highly politicized environment.

Executive Director Monica Gomez Isaac says her institute is creating a data base using statistics from the American Community Survey, which is conducted  annually. Through the survey, the institute is able to  create maps of immigrant populations in specific communities. If, say,  a Fairfax official wants to know the median income of immigrants in the county or the level of their educational attainment, that information can be found on the center’s Data on Demand.   

In June, the institute co-authored a report that showed the prominent role that immigrants play in health care. Although immigrants  make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population, the institute found that they represent 40 percent of all medical scientists and 28 percent of physicians and surgeons.

Gomez’s organization, like so many others at Mason, sees itself playing a dual role. Its work not only is aimed at bolstering the NoVa economy, but, is as appropriate for a nonprofit institution, at advancing the public good.
“We are pushing to translate our research outcomes, not necessarily commercialize them,” Crawford says. “At Mason, we want to be globally renowned and regionally relevant.”

Aiming high

Northern Virginia Community College stands apart among the commonwealth’s public institutions of higher learning by virtue of its size and diversity and the scope of its ambitions.

With 78,000 students enrolled, it is the largest of Virginia’s public two- and four-year schools and the second-largest community college in the United States. It has six campuses, three academic centers and online studies offering certificates and degrees.

Its huge student body represents every age bracket and ethnicity and more than 200 countries worldwide, and it has a mission statement that is as expansive as its demographics. The college aims for no less than being a go-to supplier of a workforce that will power the economy of its NoVa home, while simultaneously being a place that welcomes all those who “are pursuing the American dream.”

President Scott Ralls took over leadership of the sprawling community college last year, drawn from his stewardship of the North Carolina Community College System by the opportunity to work in NoVa’s tech-driven environment.

“Information technology, biotechnology, cybersecurity, health care — we are training tomorrow’s workforce today,” he says.

Preparing people for work
Projections for the makeup of tomorrow’s workforce have been changing rapidly and drastically in recent years. Northern Virginia used to be a company — read, government — town, and the feds hired mainly based on a job applicant’s academic credentials. Tech jobs were important, but not transcendent. These days, IT is the region’s biggest growth area, with NoVa ranked as the second-largest STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) employment base in the country, Ralls says.

The private sector, though, unlike the government, is profit-driven and pragmatic. It wants employees who can hit the ground running, and NVCC is determined that its students will be fast out of the starting gate.

Steven B. Partridge’s job is to make sure that the college is up to speed on this objective. He is NVCC’s vice president of workforce development

“Getting people ready to go to work is a huge part of what we do,” he says. He spends much of his time talking with employers and advisory groups, including the Northern Virginia Technology Council, to gather  input on how best to get “rid of the disconnect between education and jobs.”  

Cybersecurity effort
Cybersecurity is a good example of how the college has been reshaping its curricula to fit the changing job picture. Northern Virginia has evolved into the premier cybersecurity center of the nation during the past decade, yet good jobs in this burgeoning sector have been going begging for want of qualified applicants.

Until recently, NVCC hadn’t been much of a factor in closing the gap between supply and demand. Although it began offering a career studies certificate in network security as early as 2001, it had just 49 enrolled in its cybersecurity courses at the end of the fall 2014 semester. As of April this year, however, it had 750, with more expansion anticipated.

Cybersecurity professor Margaret Leary, who also is director of curriculum for the National Cyberwatch Center (a consortium of higher-learning institutions devoted to cybersecurity), says that NVCC works with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency on course content and standards. The feds’ seal of approval on future employees is vitally important to government contractors who continue to make up a big, if somewhat diminished, chunk of NoVa’s economy. In addition, the government has designated NVCC’s cybersecurity program as a center for academic excellence, which helps ensure that the credits students earn at the two-year college are fully transferrable.

Leary’s cybersecurity students, like the school’s student body population in general, have goals as varied as their backgrounds. Some plan to go straight to work after earning their associate degrees. Others plan to continue in four-year institutions.  Still others already have four-year degrees, yet either are in search of hands-on training or want to switch careers.

Amy N. Thomas, 48, is an example of one of these typically atypical NVCC students. She had been doing grant writing for nonprofits when she took a career test. Thomas was startled to find that she scored higher on computers than on writing. That led her to take a class at NVCC where she “fell in love with the whole field.”  

Five semesters later, Thomas had an associate degree in applied science and cybersecurity, and in May, she and her partner, Immanuel Silva, showed off their cyber chops by winning second place in the inaugural Black T-Shirt Cyber Forensics Challenge. The contest, sponsored by  colleges and private industry,  attracted 900 teams nationwide and tested such skills as file system and operating system identification, recovery of operating systems and event reconstruction. Thomas now works for the Alexandria Public Schools system and says she is getting lots of interest from recruiters.

Focus on diversity
Career placement is NVCC’s stated No. 1 mission, but it gives equal importance to “increas[ing] the number and diversity of students being served” and to being “a leader in developing educational and economic opportunities for all Northern Virginians.”

That is a tall order, considering that Northern Virginia is quite the melting pot. As of fall 2014, 39.5 percent of the community college’s students were white, 20.7 percent were Hispanic, 17.9 percent were black, and 15.3 percent were Asian. Another 3.6 percent were of two or more races. As Ralls notes, the school has a minority majority.

The survey further showed that only 42.1 percent of students fell into the traditional college age category of 18- to 21-year-olds, while 30.6 percent were between 22 and 29, and 23 percent were 30 or older.

To help this array of individuals achieve success, NVCC strives to foster an environment of inclusion and support through two special enterprises:  Pathway to the Baccalaureate and Adult Career Pathways. Kerin A. Hilker-Balkissoon, the executive director of both initiatives, says that together they now serve 14,000 students.

Under the auspices of the baccalaureate program, NVCC works with George Mason University, K-12 schools, nonprofits, social services groups and employers to “create pipelines for students to come and successfully compete.” GMU smooths the way for participants by waiving their application fees and offering them various uses of its staff and facilities.

Admission to the baccalaureate program is based on desire, not GPA. “We look at drive and determination,” Hilker-Balkissoon says. Applicants must write a statement about intent, and, if accepted, fulfill supplemental responsibilities such as mandatory community service and attendance at various workshops. In return, they get one-on-one coaching on everything from applying for scholarships and financial aid to dealing with the “transfer shock” that they may experience when moving to a four-year school.

Monica P. Gomez has been a baccalaureate counselor for 10 years. She is usually responsible for four or five high schools and carries a caseload of 300 to 350, mostly Latinos, Asians and Middle Eastern students, she says.

Gomez maintains a formidable schedule, attending senior events and parents’ nights, doing one-on-one counseling and holding group sessions.

The result is that about 70 or 75 percent of her charges make it through the program. Statistics of how many achieve the ultimate prize of a four-year degree, however, are hard to come by  because  community college students are notoriously hard to track, given that many are part time and do not necessarily take classes every semester.  Nonetheless, Gomez is able to proudly point to the achievements of one of her students, David, who went through NVCC, won one of only 85 Jack Kent Cook undergraduate transfer scholarships offered nationally, graduated from Cornell, and now is in graduate school at Brown University.

The Adult Career Pathways’ focus is on helping students “upskill to better-paying jobs,” Hilker-Balkissoon says. It targets veterans — more than 5,000 are enrolled at NVCC — single parents, immigrants and the unemployed or underemployed. It also reaches out to faith and interfaith organizations, nonprofits and community groups, not only to foster college awareness but also to help support people who may never have thought higher education was an option for them.

“There are so many nonacademic issues going on in their lives that can derail them,” Hilker-Balkissoon says about those in Adult Pathways.  “Many are one flat tire away from dropping out of college.”

More emergency funding to help these students, she says, is her next priority.

Money, unfortunately, may be a tad tighter than it has been in the past. Nationwide, enrollment in higher education has gone down from a peak about five years ago, and funding is driven by the numbers.

NVCC has fared better than most community colleges, falling from its peak full-time equivalent student enrollment of 34,697 in the 2010-11 academic year to 34,586 in 2014-15, a drop of less than 1 percent.

“We reached a plateau five years ago,” Ralls says, “And in the last two years we’ve had some drops, but at a quarter of the rate of most other schools.

The reason behind the decline, he says, is a “good news/bad news” scenario.

The bad news is that as work opportunities have expanded, students, particularly older, working ones, feel the need to take fewer courses.

The good news is that the companies that are hiring need more highly skilled technology workers than ever. That fact alone would seem to promise that Northern Virginia Community College should enjoy its own version of cybersecurity in years to come.

Diversifying the economy

Northern Virginia, which once put its faith in the federal government to provide almost unparalleled prosperity, has become a true believer in the power of the private sector.

Curtailed government spending and the unlikelihood that Uncle Sam will ever return to his once open-handed ways made this conversion a necessity, of course, but the push toward a more diversified workforce is paying off.

NoVa’s economy picked up momentum late in 2014 and throughout 2015, says Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. This year it is on track to being better still.

The most optimistic statistic for Northern Virginia is the unemployment rate. According to  GMU’s analysis center, the rate dropped from just under 4 percent in the first quarter of last year to 3.4 percent in the first quarter of 2016. That bests the most recent unemployment rate of 4.7 percent nationally and 3.9 percent in Virginia overall.

Direct federal employment had next to nothing to do with the improvement. Instead, the addition of about 10,000 jobs in professional and business services during the past year delivered the economic boost, with IT, cybersecurity, and bio health particularly hot sectors.
Alexandria’s bright spots

In Alexandria, the commercial vacancy rate has stayed stubbornly high — 24.2 percent for Class A space, according to Costar, a commercial real estate research firm — but select areas are blossoming.

Stephanie Landrum, director of the city’s Economic Development Partnership, says that the reconfigurement of the waterfront in Old Town is a bright spot. Work has begun on the Indigo Hotel, and developers of the Robinson South Terminal are getting together site plans and permits.

At Eisenhower Avenue, next year’s arrival of the National Science Foundation is acting as a catalyst for office development and retail projects, plans that include a supermarket and a hotel. The area also is in contention to be the new home of the Transportation Security Administration.

And at Potomac Yard, where residential building has been ongoing, the city has been working with the owner of a former industrial park to facilitate the transformation of the 20-acre Oakville Triangle site into 1.5 million square feet of mixed-use development.  

Landrum says that while the federal government always will be an anchor for Alexandria, the city is trying to attract more private businesses and nonprofits by making sure that old and new buildings alike are tailored to their rising demand for smaller, boutique spaces. Office tenants now expect the same amenities that residents seek, she says, and millennial workers, in particular, want to be in neighborhoods — preferably “authentic” ones as opposed to office parks.

Arlington’s ‘new way forward’
Like Alexandria, nearby Arlington County was heavily impacted by federal pullbacks, consolidations and relocations, and the effects of those actions will continue to be felt for some time. In the first quarter of 2016, the vacancy rate in Class A office space along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor was 20.7 percent.

Christina Winn, director of business investment for Arlington Economic Development, acknowledges that with more leases set to expire, office vacancies will remain “a bumpy road.” Still, she is optimistic that the pursuit of a “new way forward” will reap benefits. “We are going to be doing more national branding,” she says.

Arlington had a presence at the SXSW technology conference in Austin, Texas, this March, and it also showcased itself as a location for IT businesses at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.  

“A lot of tech companies are gaining traction [in the county],” Winn says. The shopping app Basket recently announced that it would move from the District to Clarendon. Silicon Valley’s Shift Technologies is bringing its East Coast operations to the county, and the clean energy company OPower is expanding its local operations.

At GMU’s law school in Arlington, the thinking is not just national — it’s international. The new dean, Henry N. Butler, says the school is developing a master’s degree program in global anti-trust law and has state approval for a similar program in U.S. law aimed at foreign students. Also on the dean’s agenda is seeking permission from the state for a global degree program with classes to be held abroad. No doubt helpful to those expansion plans is the recent announcement of two gifts worth a total of $30 million to the law school. One gift, for $20 million, included the somewhat controversial request that the school be renamed in honor of recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

‘No one has tried harder’
Like Alexandria and Arlington, Fairfax County, with its legion of government contractors, hasn’t shaken off the consequences of federal cutbacks. Office vacancy rate for Class A space stands at 18.6 percent in Greater Fairfax, although development near the new Silver line Metro stations in Reston and Tysons has been brisk. Two of  NoVa’s biggest projects, the Capital One Campus and the Corporate Office Centre, for example, are under construction at the latter location.

Still, Fairfax has learned a hard lesson, and, of all of the Northern Virginia jurisdictions, it is perhaps the most proactive in trying to diversify.

“No one has to try harder, and we are not waiting until there are dramatic problems to act,” says Gerald L. Gordon, president and CEO of the Fairfax Economic Development Authority.

He cites Fairfax’s facilitation of the arrival of the Inova Center for Personalized Health (ICPH) at the former ExxonMobil campus near Inova Fairfax Hospital as a prime example of the county’s can-change spirit. 

Inova took possession of the 117-acre campus in December, and it is working on reconfiguring the 1.2 million square feet of space in the five buildings that already are there. A clinic will open next year, and the Schar Cancer Institute will open in 2018. Also planned at the site are the Inova Translational Medicine Institute, a bioinformatics research center, a biotech innovation incubator, and a wellness and education center.

“It will be a whole ecosystem based around personalized medicine,” says the center’s CEO Todd Stottlemyer. “We want it to be a destination location for the smartest people.”

Research at ICPM will be conducted with the intent to commercialize discoveries, and job recruitment for the center has begun. Stottlemyer expects that 3,000 people eventually will work there.

Mach37 is another example of the new future envisioned by Fairfax. The cybersecurity accelerator, which takes its name from the velocity that rockets must attain to escape Earth’s atmosphere, is located at the Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon. It uses state and private funding to provide seed money, advice and even physical space to fledgling entrepreneurs. Just three years after its founding, managing partner Rick Gordon says Mach37 has helped 35 startups raise capital, find talent and develop business skills.

“The deal is that they have to have a significant presence in Virginia within two years,” he says.

Encouraging startups
Prince William County is pursuing a similar strategy of encouraging startups. Jeff Kaczmarek, executive director of the county’s Department of Economic Development, says that at Innovation Park, adjacent to George Mason University’s science and technology campus in Manassas, seven of nine wet labs are active at a new science accelerator. The county is considering building similar facilities.

The Virginia Serious Game Institute on the GMU campus also works with entrepreneurs to develop IT products with applications in areas such as health care and defense. Its establishment was a joint effort of the university, the county and the state. Additionally this year, the county opened its Regional Center for Workforce Education and Training in Woodbridge to promote the training of technicians in the fields of IT management, health care and cybersecurity.

Prince William is less dependent on the federal government than jurisdictions closer to the capital, and, perhaps, as a result, the Class A vacancy rate in Manassas and along the Route 29 and I-66 corridor was 7 percent in the first quarter. Just the same, Kaczmarek says, “We continue to pivot away from the feds.” 

Data centers are “big capital generators” for his county, he says, and Prince William is pursuing more small and midsize companies, too. The insurer BerkleyNet will open a 70,000-square-foot facility at Innovation Park next year, and Virginia Railway Express plans three new stations in Prince William that should spur development.

“We want to get above the noise of D.C.,” Kaczmarek says.

Data center hub
In adjacent Loudoun County, the story is much the same. It has the largest concentration of data centers in the country — more than 60 — with more on the way. These data centers generated $104 million in tax revenue in fiscal 2015, says Buddy Rizer, director of the county’s Department of Economic Development.  He expects that number to swell to $120 million this fiscal year.

Like Prince William, Loudoun’s well-being is less dependent on the federal government, and, along the Leesburg/Route 7 corridor, its Class A vacancy rate of 12.3 percent in the first quarter reflected that.  Still, Rizer says, economic development in Loudoun “is all about diversity.” 
That means more aviation and logistics centers near Washington Dulles International Airport, more farm breweries in western Loudoun and more light industrial facilities along the Route 50 corridor. Loudoun is pursuing international business as well, and, in May, Rizer traveled to Germany where the county had a booth at a tech show.

The arrival of Metro’s Silver line in the eastern part of the county in 2020 provides another opportunity to diversify by building more housing attractive to younger segments of the workforce.  “We want to have an 18-hour economy rather than an eight-hour one,” Rizer says.
Traffic, housing issues

Unfortunately, like all the other NoVa jurisdictions, Rizer’s county has yet to resolve two problems that affect its future prospects. First, infrastructure improvements such as the widening of the Beltway and the opening of Phase 1 of the Silver line have hardly dented the region’s terrible  traffic: The only part of the country with worse congestion is Los Angeles.

Second, the housing market throughout Northern Virginia  remains spotty.  The Northern Virginia Association of Realtors reports that sales were up 9 percent in April over March, however, only properties closer to Washington or with access to mass transit are selling well; those without those assets, are not. And even with prices suppressed in some markets, housing overall remains expensive.  George Mason’s Clower says that companies contemplating locations in Northern Virginia can be put off by the prospect of their employees being unable to afford to live near where they work.

Nevertheless, these negatives aside, the region is in a far better place than it was just a few years ago.

“I’m not running down the street singing happy, happy, joy, joy — not yet,” Clower says, “but Northern Virginia is performing very well, with no particular winners or losers.”

He believes, however, that NoVa could be doing even better if, amid its rush to diversify, it thought more about the potential benefits of unity as well. Rather than poaching business from one another, Clower would like to see  its jurisdictions  present a “united economic story.”

“We are a world capital,” he says. “Why couldn’t we become a global business capital, too?”

Spotting the trends

Scott Homa says he’s been a real estate nerd since childhood. He speculates that his condition was brought on by his first sight of the New York skyline. “The mystique, the skyscrapers,” he recalls.

That early glimpse of what heights commercial real estate could reach put Homa on the path to his current job, which he relishes: vice president of mid-Atlantic research for JLL, a global provider of commercial real estate information and services.

Homa’s arrival at JLL was practically preordained. High school and college internships with commercial real estate firms were followed by a degree in finance from Georgetown University. Within a year of his 2003 graduation, he had landed a job as a real estate analyst. Not long after that he went to work for JLL (formerly known as Jones Lang Lasalle).

Homa was one of the first hires of Vice President John Sikaitis, who was also new to JLL when Homa interviewed for a job 11 years ago. Hiring Homa, Sikaitis says, remains one his best decisions.

“We try to create research that inspires actions,” says Sikaitis, who is in charge of JLL’s office and local markets research for the Americas. “Our clients come to us for deep, substantial advice,” and that is what Homa provides.  He repeatedly has won JLL’s VIP award, a testimony to his devotion to his job.

Homa’s assignment has three phases. First, using a network of public and private sources, he assembles masses of commercial real estate information, ranging from the granular to the macro, from boots-on-the-ground to broad economic trends. Then, he has to synthesize and analyze it.

“I love to figure out the dynamic,” he says.

That assessment, according to Sikaitis, requires the intellect to understand lots of disparate ideas, the organization to track a slew of data points, the confidence to believe in your findings, and, yes, even a geeky love for real estate.

“You need to be intrigued by the crane in the sky,” explains Sikaitis.

JLL counts owners, developers, tenants, public entities and potential investors among its clients, so the third element of Homa’s job is one somewhat outside the box for many researchers: Doing a face-to-face presentation of his findings.

“We want our people to be in front of clients on an everyday basis,” Sikaitis says, “not just heads down, pushing something out on a PDF. Scott’s DNA was perfectly suited to be a consultant, not a front-facing salesperson, but he has shifted into that [role] and is seamless at it now.”

Jim Gillen is one of the many JLL clients who have come to rely on what Homa calls his story of the market. The senior director in asset management for Invesco Real Estate, which manages about $70 billion in properties worldwide, says that he tries to meet with the researcher and his team every time he is in Washington, even if he has no specific agenda.

“Scott doesn’t just provide facts and figures,” Gillen says. “He gets behind the numbers to what is driving the numbers.”

What has been driving the numbers lately, Homa says, is transit-oriented development. People, especially millennials, want a walkable, car-free, integrated space where they can live and work, and the evidence of that is the number of mixed-use real estate projects going up along Metro’s new Silver Line in Northern Virginia, even while less-connected markets struggle with high vacancy rates. Homa expects that this type of development will be a defining trend for years to come.

Recently, the researcher says, he spent time taking pictures of the half-demolished Washington Post building in downtown Washington. He and JJL played a role in Fannie Mae deciding to use the site for its new headquarters.

“That block is going to be so activated,” he says with enthusiasm. “I am such a real estate nerd. I get a kick out of seeing development take hold that we had a part in.”

Years in the industry: 13
Where did you grow up? A slew of places: Chicago; Louisville, Ky.; Fairfield County, Conn.; Baltimore; Miami; Northern Virginia; and Washington, D.C.
Where did you go to school? Gilman School in Baltimore. Georgetown University.
Family: Wife, Jessica, executive director of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. They have two young children, Cooper and Maddie, and a terrier named Pepper.
Hobbies: Homa has recently joined his wife on the yoga mat to counteract his sedentary hours at the office. “Sitting is the new smoking,” he says.
Favorite app or mobile site: Twitter.
Favorite reads: “I love politics and current events, so I spend most of my time reading daily or weekly publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Economist. My favorite book is ‘You Can Negotiate Anything’ by Herb Cohen.”
On the bucket list: A trip to Walt Disney World with his son.

A millennial mindset

Unique experiences, good food, connectivity.

Those are some of the major trends shaping the meetings and convention industry in Virginia, an industry on the upswing. In fact, planners say 2016 promises to be the best year in recent memory.

“We’re doing more meetings than we’ve ever done,” says Rick Eisenman, the former vice president of the Virginia Society of Association Executives Inc. and the owner of a meeting-planning firm in Richmond.

“We are seeing more hospitality revenue than ever,” concurs Jeff Schmid, president of the Virginia chapter of Meeting Professionals International.

The occupancy and average daily revenue (ADR) rates at hotels throughout the state help bear out the rosy predictions. Some areas saw healthy increases in occupancy last year, while others saw only marginal increases, but none of the areas surveyed by STR Inc., a hotel market data company, reported downward trends.

In the Richmond region, for instance, occupancy rose from 64 percent in 2014 to 65.2 percent in 2015, while ADR rates increased from $89.31 to $98.66.

In Northern Virginia, STR figures show that occupancy rose from 71.6 percent to 72.7 percent. The ADR increased from $128.62 to $133.92, the highest rate in the state in 2015. 

Two areas — Chesapeake/Suffolk and Staunton/Harrisonburg — each saw occupancy increases of 3 percent. Chesapeake/Suffolk’s rate bumped up to 65.7 percent in 2015 with an ADR of $72.12 while Staunton/Harrisonburg’s rate was 60.4 percent with an ADR of $85.31. 

Overall, statewide hotel occupancy rates in Virginia last year were 61.6 percent — below the national average of 65.6 percent, according to the STR Inc.

Still, the future is still looking better than the past. With the recession of eight years ago in the rearview mirror and a dip in government meetings due to sequestration leveling off, meeting planners remain optimistic, in part because of an uptick in medical meetings.

Todd Bertka, vice president for convention marketing and sales with the Virginia Beach Convention and Visitors Bureau, sees medical meetings as an emerging market for Hampton Roads. “We’re in a growth mode,” he says.

Other jurisdictions have gotten serious about attracting medical meetings as well. In Alexandria, staffers are being trained to negotiate the web of federal regulations that come into play when biotech, pharmaceutical, medical-device and health-care firms meet. Lorraine Lloyd, senior vice president of sales for the convention and visitors association, says that a million medical meetings took place across the country last year, and Alexandria is trying to ensure that more of them come its way.

One cloud, however, dims the sunny outlook for the meetings and convention industry: While meetings have become more numerous and frequent, most aren’t as long as they used to be. What was once a three-day conclave typically has been pared to a day-and-a-half.

“People don’t want to be out of the office that much,” Eisenman says. “It’s not no frills. There still gets to be fun, but budgets are being cut.”

Such abbreviated schedules make easy access to a facility nearly as important to meeting planners as price. Eisenman and Schmid say space — is there enough of it and is it configured in the right way —and service — can the facility handle a mass influx of people — are other top concerns. Add to that list of basics a more recent must-have: connectivity, free and available throughout a venue.

The influence of young workers attending business conclaves has hastened the shift from fast Internet service being a nice-to-have to a necessity. For the so-called millennials, electronic sharing is a way of life, and they are unwilling to do without it. Other prevalent trends in the meetings and planning industry also can be traced to the outsized influence of the millennial mindset. They include the demise of the rubber chicken.

Healthy, distinctive food
Generic, bland food once ruled the table at meetings and conventions, but it just doesn’t cut the mustard, anymore. Like their leisure travel counterparts, meeting goers want more distinctive fare, and the healthier and more local, the better.

“People have a lot of memories of who they were with and what they ate,” says Kristin McGrath, vice president of sales and services for Richmond Regional Tourism, a nonprofit destination marketing organization.  “We’re definitely seeing more planners ask about the food.”

“Millennials want to be able to share their experiences,” says Schmid, and that includes being able to post pictures of what they eat.  No one is likely to bother to take a selfie with a plate of chicken a la king. However, oysters in the Tidewater area, peanut soup in Richmond or ramen noodle beer in Northern Virginia? Those can log some hits and buzz.

Executive Chef Anthony Frank exemplifies the move toward more Facebook-worthy foods. The executive chef and food and beverage director at Williamsburg Lodge and Woodlands Conference Center has banquet menus that feature regional dishes such as braised collard greens and cornmeal-fried catfish, and he does frequent “pints and pairings,” using craft beers from local breweries.

Frank is able to draw on 90 acres of gardens in Williamsburg to boost his farm-to-table credentials, yet he says being served foods that are hormone-free, steroid-free, sustainable and free-range, no matter what their origin, is just as important to his convention clients.

Unique experiences
Convention goers also want a special experience. More and more travelers want to participate in offbeat activities, not just observe them, and this desire is refiguring the on- and off-site events offered during meetings.

In Alexandra, for instance, team-building groups can brainstorm clues a la Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allan Poe in a locked-room mystery called Escape Room Live.  “We pride ourselves on offering off-site activities,” says Lloyd.

It’s got to be “experiential,” says Jennifer Ritter, director of sales for Visit Loudoun. On-site, Ritter notes, the conference center at Lansdowne has reimagined some of its common space as the casual gathering areas millennials prefer.

Off-site meeting bait in Ritter’s county includes Topgolf, a driving range that bills itself as an entertainment complex — which happens to bake its own bread. “It is very cool, very hip,” she says. The new indoor skydiving facility, iFly, should be another draw for meeting planners in search of hard-to-duplicate experiences for their braver clients.

Many participatory activities offered across the state strive to be indigenous to the area as a way of being “authentic,” another popular adjective that describes what travelers seek these days.

In Roanoke, team spirit can be forged by dangling off the end of a rope in a rock-climbing class. Meeting goers want to “get away from the same old, same old,” says Alex Michaels, director of sales for the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau.
At equine-centered Middleburg, Salamander Resort & Spa offers leadership building activities through an EquiSpective program that promises to explore communication styles and techniques by uniting horses and humans.

Offsite outings
Virginia wineries, in general, have been part of the locovore movement for years, and they are a common off-site outing for many meeting goers. They, too, are going beyond tastings to offer hands-on experiences. At Early Mountain Vineyards in Madison, business groups can participate in wine blending. “The overall corporate market is looking for more unique things to keep attendees’ interest,” says Susan Holland, the vineyard’s corporate sales manager.

Altruism also plays a role at today’s meetings. Frank, the Williamsburg chef, says that young meeting attendees not only want to eat healthier, they want to eat more responsibly. He serves coffee that is single-sourced directly from Rwandan growers, meaning the African farmers see more of the profit without a middleman. That back story on the java helps satisfy the do-good impulses of young meeting goers.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a movement in which companies embrace charitable activities as part of their business model, and CSR plays a role in where some millennials choose to work. The convention and meeting industry has responded to that trend by facilitating more team-building exercises centered on local charitable efforts.  

In Loudoun County and other jurisdictions, tourism offices help coordinate volunteer opportunities for meeting goers, whether they want to pack meals for the hungry, build bikes for needy children, or help with a blood drive. In Virginia Beach, activities to support the large military presence there are particularly popular.

“Part of being sustainable is giving back,” says Sally Noona, director of sales and marketing for Virginia Beach’s convention center. She describes the changes affecting her business as “a cultural shift.”

Noona might just as well have said a generational shift. Like other aspects of society, the meetings and convention industry is witnessing a baton being passed, and part of its job is to be ready for the handoff.

 

List of Conference Hotels