M.J. McAteer Archives - Page 8 of 15

Thicker than water

“It isn’t personal. It’s just business.”

Those phrases are too often used in the commercial world, but they just don’t apply when talking about most family-run enterprises.

The business of running these companies is deeply personal.

The priorities of family businesses “go well beyond financial concerns,” says Barry DuVal, president and CEO of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce.

While public companies are forced to focus on maximizing shareholder value in the short term, the bottom line for family businesses is, well, not always the bottom line, DuVal explains. Family businesses worry almost as much about their reputations, their longevity and their legacies. And, unlike some corporate entities, many feel a heavy responsibility toward their employees. It’s not by chance that most principals of family businesses interviewed for this story refer to their workers as “their people.”

Like all businesses, family businesses have been walloped by COVID-19. Con-sumer spending in the commonwealth was down 32.3% in April, and, as of Aug. 9, was still down by 6.3%, according to the economic tracker provided by Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit based at Harvard University. In the commonwealth, unemployment bottomed out at 11.2% in the spring, but as of July that figure stood at 8%.

“Compared to every post-World War II recession, this is the worst,” says Robert M. McNab, an economics professor at Old Dominion University. Businesses requiring frequent interaction with customers in indoor spaces, such as gyms and hospitality and entertainment venues, have suffered disproportionately, he says, and some in the Hampton Roads area, where he is based, closed permanently after the summer brought a spike in virus cases and renewed lockdowns.

Smaller family-run enterprises in all sectors tend to be especially vulnerable to severe downturns, McNab says. They usually have thinner profit margins, less access to capital and a more limited ability to absorb financial shock.

And, to a great extent, he says, they must “live and die on the customers they have.” The “survivors,” he says, “have very loyal customer bases, who say, ‘We’re going to stick with you. You’re part of the community.’” Big corporations typically don’t build that same type of loyalty, he adds.

Betsey Fortlouis is the director of development and partnerships at InnerWill, a Manakin-Sabot-based nonprofit that specializes in leadership training. Founded by Charlie Luck IV, president and CEO of the family-owned Luck Cos., InnerWill works with about 50 family-run businesses nationwide, and, though none of them have gone out of business due to the coronavirus pandemic, Fortlouis says many “feel great uncertainty and fear.”

She has found that first- and second-generation family businesses are at the highest risk of failure, but “clients who have been around for 50-plus years seem to have cracked the code for resilience. Culture trumps everything else in terms of a business that thrives.”

Survival can come at a high cost, however, as the additional stress of crises like COVID-19 can create deep fissures in familial relationships. DuVal, who owned a family business in Newport News in the ’90s, can attest to that. He vividly remembers how difficult it was when a recession early in that decade forced him to reduce his brother’s salary, affecting not just his brother, but also his brother’s children.

On the plus side, DuVal notes, family businesses that come out on the other side of such a crisis often find “a renewed sense of mission and purpose.”

Here is a snapshot of seven family businesses in Virginia that have been weathering the storm of COVID-19. None have closed but all have made adjustments to the harsh realities of 2020.

“The advantage of a family business is that they’re already there. The disadvantage of a family business is that they are already there.”

Charles Carter, 11th generation, Shirley Plantation

Charles City

Dating to 1613, Shirley Plantation is the nation’s oldest family-run business. The Hill branch of Charles H. Carter III’s family arrived there in 1638, making him the 11th generation to live at the site along the James River in Charles City. “We just never moved,” Carter says. “The stubborn gene was turned on.”

Carter is president of the nonprofit Shirley Plantation Foundation, which operates the 1738 “Great House” and 11 surrounding acres as a historic site. With no government support, the foundation relies on membership dues and admissions to survive, and revenues are way down because of the pandemic.

Carter’s position has always been unpaid, but his wife, Lauren, the organization’s treasurer, drew a salary until the coronavirus struck. All but two of the 15 people the plantation normally employs, mostly as guides, have been laid off.

Until recently, plantation tours were confined to the grounds, though limited house tours have resumed. The problem has been, “How do you clean 330-year-old surfaces?” Carter says. Dealing with that along with the relentless upkeep demanded by such an old house falls squarely on him. “If I have to go in that basement and pump it out one more time, my head will explode,” he says.

After the nationwide racial justice protests that began in May, the plantation issued a statement in support of Black Lives Matter and recognizing Shirley Plantation’s role in slavery. The Carters have expanded information about enslaved people in their tours, showcasing the African American craftsmanship in the plantation’s buildings.

Carter also runs Weanack Land LLC on the other 700 or so acres of the plantation, where he has tried several ventures with mixed results. A shrimp farm failed but a land reclamation initiative, filling abandoned sand and gravel pits on the property with materials from dredging projects, has been successful.

He is growing pecans now, too, though it’s a slow go because the first harvest takes seven or eight years. “It’s like breeding elephants,” he says wryly.

But being a family business offers the luxury of the long term. “You have more opportunities to try things,” he says.

Carter also enjoys working with his family, although with caveats. “If you get along well, it can be great. You don’t have to ask a lot of questions. But the rough patches are harder, and you’re always on call.”

Still, Carter fully expects his 4-year-old twins will get involved in the business when they are old enough. “My kids will be tour guides one day, just like I was.”

“First time being in the middle of nowhere has been an advantage.”

Den Crallé III, third generation, Green Front Furniture

Farmville

A dominant presence in downtown Farmville, Green Front Furniture occupies about 1 million square feet across four old tobacco warehouses and six storefronts. That vast capacity in a somewhat isolated locale has made customers feel relatively safe shopping at Green Front, and the company has been experiencing “unprecedented business,” says its president, Richard “Den” Crallé III.

Crallé is the third Richard to run the 50-year-old furniture business, which began as a sideline operation behind the family grocery store — thus the “green front” name — and now has locations in Manassas and Raleigh, North Carolina.

“I started off working summers, running up and down rug piles,” Crallé says, but since taking over from his father, Richard Jr.,
two years ago, he has been focusing on modernizing the business — updating facilities and signage, rebranding and
creating a social media presence.

Crallé also has the company “dipping a toe into e-commerce.” In addition to its website, Green Front now has a second site exclusively devoted to rugs to capitalize on Richard Jr.’s buying trips to India and Pakistan. “We are honing in on what we do best,” his son says.

Green Front shut down for a month because of COVID-19, but it didn’t lay off any of its 100 or so employees. “Everyone is part of the family,” Crallé says. A loan through the federal Paycheck Protection Program “obviously helped” the company through the early days of the virus, he adds.

Taking over from his father has required some tough calls and “harder conversations,” Crallé says, yet the level of trust and security in the family culture “bleeds over to everyone. I was lucky enough to get on the train when it was already moving,” he says. As he sees it, his job now is to keep the company squarely on track to an even more prosperous future.

“We don’t have to put the bottom line first, and that’s powerful.”

Arlene Lee, fourth generation, R.E. Lee Cos.

Arlene Lee took over R.E. Lee Cos. after her husband died in 2015. Photo by Norm Shafer

Charlottesville

Arlene Lee is the fourth generation of her family to run R.E. Lee Cos., a construction firm that started in 1939 as a father-son team of restorers of fine and historic houses. “The fifth generation will be joining us soon,” she says.

R.E. Lee has evolved from its beginnings into what its CEO and principal calls the full cycle of building, now focusing mostly on commercial projects. “Construction is notoriously slow to change, but we can’t be slow to change,” she says.

Thrust into a leadership role after her husband’s death in 2015, she has made it a point to keep the company flexible and open to innovation. In the past five years, for instance, the company, which has about 150 employees, has completely overhauled its technology. “Being family-run, you can pivot quickly,” Lee says. “That gives you resilience.”

Company culture is also a huge plus for both R.E. Lee employees and clients.

“We have a tremendous responsibility to our employees, to their livelihoods, to treat them with compassion and empathy,” Lee says, noting that some of her workers are multigenerational, too. “People choose that culture over what big corporations can offer,” she says. “Family businesses tend to be more local or regional, and the people we do business with are us. We are building community in the community where we live.”

COVID-19, Lee says, “has been triggering a lot of anxiety and extra stress,” as it has for many companies, but the crisis also brings opportunities. “Six months ago, we had a workforce shortage. Now incredible talent is available for companies willing to think outside the box. It is not all doom and gloom.”

“We’re very, very fortunate to be considered essential.”

Bob Archer, second generation, Blue Ridge Beverage Co.

Salem

“We lost at least 18% of our business overnight,” says Blue Ridge Beverage Co. Chairman and CEO Robert A. “Bob” Archer. The double-digit decline was caused by this spring’s statewide lockdown when restaurants and bars were shuttered to curb the spread of COVID-19. When that window closed, however, another opened for the beverage distributor. Demand for its potables surged at “off-premise” outlets such as grocery and convenience stores, making up for the sudden losses, Archer says.

In 1959, Archer’s father and mother, James M. and Regine Archer, bought Blue Ridge Beverage, which had distributed beer in the region since 1938. His father died in 1972, but at age 95, his mother “is still on board,” Archer says.

The business started out with just 10 employees, but as Archer added wine and other products to its distribution portfolio, the company gradually grew. Today, it has 469 employees, and Archer has not had to lay off even one of them because of the pandemic. Instead, he has shuffled people from the languishing sector of the business to the part that is flourishing.

It hasn’t been easy, though. “Our people are at risk,” Archer says, noting that they make deliveries in 49 counties, and the effort to keep employees safe has required time and money.

Being family-run has made pivoting to meet the COVID-19 crisis easier in some ways, however. “We can make decisions not strictly on the bottom line,” he says. “We have more freedom and more flexibility” than non-family-owned businesses.

Family is central at Blue Ridge Beverage. Archer’s five brothers and sisters have been involved in the company at various times, and some members of the next generation already work for the company part time and during the summer. Archer convenes a family council thrice yearly to discuss the business, and once a year, the whole family meets, though attendance was limited this year due to the pandemic.

Archer worries a bit about succession planning. “You have to have the right skill set and the right family members,” he explains, but, overall, he is staying positive.

“As a business,” he says, “we’ve been blessed.”

“It’s a struggle, but we made it through the Great Depression, and we continue on.”

David Waller, fourth generation,Waller & Co. Jewelers

Richmond

When rioting broke out in May during Black Lives Matter protests in Richmond, 120-year-old Waller & Co. Jewelers, one of the city’s oldest Black-owned businesses, saw its windows broken and its showcases looted of watches and jewelry. Yet owner David Waller, the fourth generation to run the business, focused not on the destruction, but the goodwill that followed.

“A ton of outpouring came from the community,” he says. “A lot of people came to help clean up and buy items.”

Many of those people were members of Black fraternities and sororities. For generations, Waller & Co. has been the go-to place for their Hellenic-themed needs, including rings, necklaces and pendants. Close to 100 Greeks appeared the morning after the break-in to help with cleanup. They also went shopping. “It turned out it was a blessing,” Waller says. He told Fox News that the criminality of that one night was “just a small blip in that whole narrative.”

Waller & Co.’s narrative starts with his great-grandfather’s talent for repairing clocks, watches and jewelry. Shopping at Wallers became a tradition for some local Black families. “You are able to know who the owners are. You get the personal touch,” Waller says. “You get to know the customers, generations of customers.”

“We talked salary cuts early in this thing, and all my executives said, ‘You can cut my salary, but not my employees.’ So, we didn’t cut anybody’s — except mine.”

Bill Dean, third generation, M.C. Dean Inc.

Bill Dean is CEO of M.C. Dean, a billion-dollar company that grew out of the electrical firm his grandfather started in 1949. Photo by Will Schermerhorn

Tysons

In 1949, Bill Dean’s grandfather, Marion Caleb Dean, started an electrical firm that, under the leadership of his son, Marion Casey Dean, grew into a $44 million national business. In 1997, his son, Bill Dean, became CEO, inheriting leadership of a company that had “150 good employees with good DNA and a great work ethic.”

In the 20-plus years since then, the third-generation Dean has turned the Tysons-based firm into one of the biggest electrical contractors in the country. Early on, Dean added a focus on systems engineering, and when that sector “blew up in the ’90s,” the company began “spiraling into technology,” he says. M.C. Dean is now a multinational, billion-dollar business providing a range of electrical, cyber and physical services for clients such as the U.S. Department of Defense and Washington Dulles International Airport.

Dean’s brother, Eric, is the company’s chief technology officer for the security and electronic systems division, and two other family members hold non-leadership positions in the business. Another two are interns. “It’s awesome. I love working with my family,” Dean says, though he admits that characterizing M.C. Dean as a family business might be a bit of a stretch these days. “Of the 3,700 employees we have, 3,695 aren’t family,” he says. “Still, we want that kind of culture. A caring culture is the biggest responsibility of leadership.”

COVID-19 has made that responsibility all that much heavier. To keep the payroll flowing, Dean has redefined jobs. The company’s operations in Orlando, for example, “were crushed” by the virus, he says, which led to major shuffling. Yet only about 50 employees declined to relocate and left the company.

“We’re very lucky to be headquartered in NoVa,” Dean says, describing its economy as strong and resilient. And, although he doesn’t expect a recovery to reach pre-COVID-19 levels anytime soon, he believes opportunities will emerge. “Anyone prudent,” he says, “has to plan multiple scenarios.”

“I got out of business school full of myself with how to do this and that, but I got a dose of reality.”

Ben Davenport Jr. photo by Meridith De Avila Khan

Ben Davenport Jr., second generation, Davenport Energy Inc.

Gretna

Ben Davenport Jr. is the chairman of Davenport Energy, a company founded by his father in 1941 as Chatham Oil Co. The Gretna-based business currently supplies propane and heating oil to about 30,000 customers in Southwest and Central Virginia as well as in parts of North Carolina.

Davenport went to work for his father in the 1960s.

“My father was a product of the Depression,” he says. When he came to his father early on, armed with ambitious ideas from business school, his father just said, “We don’t borrow money.”

That old-school style of doing business turned out to be a plus for the younger Davenport. When he needed to raise capital quickly to launch First Piedmont Corp., a waste management company he started in 1969, he says, “the good name my father had given me helped me in the banking world.”

Today, Davenport’s companies employ about 350 people. “We have high standards as to the character of our people,” he says. “Our work family is an extension of our family.”

During the pandemic, not having to account to shareholders has allowed both of Davenport’s companies to be nimble in adapting to the unpredictably evolving situation.

“We allowed a lot of our people to work from home — we had never done anything like that before,” he says. The unexpected result of this year’s hard times? “We have actually become closer than before.”

Neither of Davenport’s companies has had any layoffs, and, although some employees may not be working as many hours, they all have kept their benefits.

“Profitability is down some, but we are truly blessed. We’re all hanging in there together,” Davenport says.

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The mentor

Gregory Washington, the new president of George Mason, “embodies our university,” says Thomas M. Davis, rector of the school’s governing Board of Visitors.

How? In just about every way possible, both personally and professionally, say Davis and others.

Mason’s stated mission is to provide “equal opportunity and an educational and work environment free from any discrimination.” On its way to fulfilling that goal, it has become the most racially diverse institute of higher learning in the Virginia system, and the most economically inclusive, too. Nearly a third of its 37,000-plus students qualify for Pell Grants, and 40% are the first people in their families to go on to higher education.

Tom Davis, Board of Visitors. Photo by Creative Services/George Mason University

“We don’t consider ourselves an elitist university,” says Davis, the former Republican congressman and House Oversight Committee chairman who once represented most of Fairfax County in the U.S. House of Representatives. “We pride ourselves on who we accept, not who we reject.”

That parallels Washington’s own belief in “inclusive excellence,” the notion that diversity augments opportunities for academic achievement.

GMU’s eighth president, Washington took office on July 1, succeeding former state Secretary of Education Anne Holton.She had served as Mason’s interim president since August 2019, when Ángel Cabrera ended his seven-year tenure as GMU president to take over the leadership of his alma mater, Georgia Tech.

Washington is Mason’s first Black president, and like so many of GMU’s students, he was the first person in his family to go to college, courtesy of an ROTC program.

Setting a standard

Washington credits his impressive rise through academia to the mentors who believed in him early on. His fifth-grade teacher in New York City told him, “You are better than your behavior, and I’m going to make you better.”

“I came in a troubled student and left an honor student,” he recalls.

Although Washington says he was always a “curious kid” who planned to either pursue college or the military — the latter the path that many members of his family chose — he needed someone to show him how school, and science in particular, was relevant to real life.

That happened after his family relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina. A physics teacher at William G. Enloe High School spotted his potential. “She brought the subject to life,” says Washington, who recently came across a Facebook post from the teacher, asking her former students to share what they are doing as adults.

“I was blown away” by how many of her former students had successful careers, Washington says. That solidified his conviction that “an individual can have a profound impact on a person’s life. I’ve always wanted to be that person for others, to push them beyond what they thought was possible.”

Washington, 54, is a living example of going above and beyond expectations. After earning bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University, he taught at Ohio State University for 16 years, before becoming the first African American to lead a school of engineering in the University of California system. At the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine, he worked to bring others the same opportunities, making a concerted push to diversify and expand both the faculty and the student body.

“He was able to recruit exceptional researchers and teachers,” says James Bullock, dean of the School of Physical Sciences at UC Irvine. “He set a standard that I want to emulate.”

Washington also notably improved the ability of community college students to transfer to UC Irvine, a situation analogous to GMU’s relationship with Northern Virginia Community College.

Dalia Hammouri, a biomedical engineering student and president of the UC Irvine Engineering Student Council, describes Washington as “super involved” and “hands-on. … He took his role as being more than just a dean,” she says. “When you can do what you say you value, that is the proof in the pudding.”

Research bona fides

By all accounts, Washington matches his commitment to expanding educational opportunities to nontraditional educators and students with that intangible known as charisma. “He is very well liked and good at lightening the mood and making you feel welcome,” Bullock says.

“You know when he is in the room,” Davis says. “He’s no wallflower. He’s a great communicator.”

Washington’s easy rapport with people served him well during a grueling three days of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. interviews for the job of GMU president. “Greg,” says GMU Vice Rector James W. Hazel, “not only excelled in conversations with the [visitors] board, but with faculty, who were, for the first time, given input into the selection of the president. No matter what the audience, he was comfortable with them.”

Washington was also a top fundraiser at UC Irvine, not a minor skill for a university president to possess. Hazel says Washington was responsible for landing the largest gift in the California system, a $9.5 million donation from the Opus Foundation to go toward scholarships and support for STEM outreach. That funding helped Washington institute a STEM program that reached more than 2,500 students in the Orange County school system.

During his California tenure, Washington also helped oversee the construction of the largest building in the state university system, an engineering building that houses 150,000 square feet of space for cross-disciplinary research and collaboration in areas ranging from artificial intelligence, to machine learning and cybersecurity.

All these glowing attributes, however, would not have been enough to push Washington’s name to the top of a pile of more than 90 applicants and make him the unanimous choice of the GMU board if they weren’t coupled with the other essential element of his matchup with Mason: His outstanding academic and research bona fides, which sync seamlessly with the university’s emphasis on forward-looking technology.

“Mason is very good at STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] education,” Davis says, and so is Washington, who has authored more than 150 technical papers, demonstrating his expertise in such areas as the modeling of smart materials and systems — “machines that think.” At UC Irvine, he spearheaded the development of the Horiba Institute for Mobility and Connectivity to advance next-generation mobility systems, such as driverless cars and vehicles powered by nontraditional fuel sources, just the kind of high-tech, public-private endeavor that is part of GMU’s mission.

Washington threw his hat in the ring to be president of GMU, he says, precisely because it is an R1 research institution, the highest designation awarded by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. “Mason will be part of the work on technologies of the future,” he says, citing GMU’s new School of Computing at its Arlington campus and the university’s determined push into high-tech areas such as data science, artificial intelligence and adaptive materials.

Washington also intends to maintain a research lab at Mason where he can work with young faculty. “The research game is a difficult game,” he explains. “They are going to need as many mentors as possible.”

Opportunities and challenges

Working with Amazon.com Inc., which is projected to employ a staggering 25,000 people at its East Coast HQ2 headquarters under construction in Arlington, is on Washington’s to-do list as well.

“He had done his homework on Mason and recognized HQ2’s importance to the region,” Hazel says.

Amazon already has forged a special relationship with Virginia Tech, which is building an Innovation campus in Alexandria.

“Has there been a competition [among the local universities]? Yes,” Washington admits. “But no one institution can accommodate the needs of a 900,000-member company.” Washington knows the Tech Innovation Campus’ incoming vice president, Lance Collins, well and plans to work with him “to figure out ways to do this together.”

Of course, the coronavirus pandemic has posed enormous challenges to higher education in the past few months. “It’s a very different job now from when I took it,” Washington says.

The announcement of Washington’s selection happened on Feb. 24, shortly before COVID-19 seized the national consciousness, and Hazel says the search for a new GMU president “could have cratered if it had gone into March.”

COVID-19 certainly has added to the stresses of taking on this huge, new job for Washington. He had hoped to visit GMU a couple of times a week in the interim between being named president and taking office four months later. But with states putting quarantines into effect, he was able to visit Mason only twice before taking up the presidency — once to interview and the second time when he was introduced as the newly hired president. He and his wife, Nicole, sheltered in California and, due to the pandemic, have had difficulty finding a moving service for their relocation to Fairfax County, where they will live on campus.

As of late May, Washington said, the shape of Mason’s fall semester was still under discussion, but he doesn’t expect the in-class experience to go away. “There is the innate drive of students to be together,” he says. Nonetheless, “major aspects of higher education will be changed forever” and “virtual engagement” will be here to stay, he says.

“Education has been democratized globally,” he continues, putting universal access almost within reach of everyone. Conversely, the rise of nationalism around the world and the lack of a coordinated international strategy for dealing with COVID-19 demonstrates that science alone cannot solve the world’s problems.

“We need to communicate globally. We need to understand other cultures,” Washington says. “Now, more than ever, we will need the humanities.”

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High-rise horizon

The numbers are mind-boggling.

During the next decade, Amazon.com Inc. plans to develop about 6 million square feet of office space in Arlington County’s Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard areas to accommodate the mammoth e-tailer’s new HQ2 East Coast headquarters. That’s almost as large as the biggest office building in the world, the Pentagon, roughly the size of 138 football fields.

Yet as massive as it may be, HQ2 is only half of the story, literally, for what lies ahead for the project’s three abutting neighborhoods, which are being rebranded as National Landing. Another 6 million square feet of development eventually could surround the Amazon mothership, an amount way beyond the ripple effect that generally follows major projects. The growth potentially headed for National Landing could better be described as a tsunami.

It will be “transformative,” says Tracy Sayegh Gabriel, president and executive director of the Crystal City Business Improvement District.

Amazon’s decision to locate HQ2 in National Landing “changed the market’s perception of the area,” which had slumped badly in the wake of the base realignment and closures (BRAC) in recent decades, she says.

BRAC drained away thousands of workers, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of square feet of vacant office space, turning Crystal City into something like an urban ghost town. Amazon’s arrival erased that negative perception, Gabriel says.

“We long had great bones,” she adds, referring to the area’s prime location across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital, with immediate access to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, two Metro lines, the VRE train system and the Beltway.

But it took the advent of HQ2 to finally “unlock unprecedented levels of investment,” Gabriel says. To better align with the enormous changes that lie ahead, her public-private nonprofit partnership is rebranding itself as the National Landing Business Improvement District.

Crystal City comeback

By far the most dominant player in the coming transformation of National Landing will be JBG Smith Properties. Amazon chose the Bethesda, Maryland-based real estate investment trust to be its partner in developing HQ2. JBG Smith will act as landlord, property manager and builder, due in part to its ownership of 6.2 million square feet of office space and 2,850 multifamily units in the National Landing area.

JBG Smith also will work with Virginia Tech to build out the area around the site of the university’s planned $1 billion Innovation Campus in Potomac Yard. The university will “build its own buildings on three acres during the next decade,” says Andy Van Horn, JBG Smith’s executive vice president of development. However, he adds, JBG Smith will “build everything around it. We’ll be their partner in every way.”

JBG Smith is moving quickly and on an unprecedented scale to develop or redevelop its many properties in the National Landing area. In all, Van Horn says, “north of 60%” of the work currently being undertaken by JBG Smith is taking place there. It controls 6.9 million square feet of local development possibilities outside of Amazon’s needs, and in the near term, Van Horn expects the company to develop 2.2 million square feet of office space and 4.7 million square feet of residential space, adding 4,000 to 5,000 housing units to the area.

JBG Smith started on Crystal City’s comeback when Northern Virginia was just a gleam in Amazon’s eye. In 2018, the developer gained county approval to build the Central District Retail, a 109,000-square-foot entertainment and shopping destination. Slated to open in 2021, it will be anchored by an Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and offer a specialty grocer, restaurants and bars.

But that was only the beginning of JBG Smith’s ambitions. It also plans eight high-rises.

Expected to be completed in 2023, two residential towers at 1900 Crystal Drive will climb 26 and 27 stories high. Rendering courtesy JBG Smith Properties

In March, JBG Smith received approval from Arlington County to erect the first two towers, one 27 stories, the other 26 stories, at 1900 Crystal Drive. These residential high-rises, expected to deliver in 2023, will offer about 800 residential units and 600 parking spaces.

Both will also contain a combined 40,000 square feet of street-level retail connected by a woonerf, a Dutch term meaning “living street.” The woonerf is intended to allow motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to mingle in a shared safe space, part of the push to make National Landing more appealing on the ground — and to the Amazon ethos.

Reaching for the moon

Also in the JGB Smith pipeline are towers at 2300 Crystal Drive and 223 23rd St., one commercial and one residential. The Crystal Drive tower will be 24 stories and include 520,000 square feet of office space and 15,000-plus square feet of ground-floor retail space. The other tower, 31 stories, will have 645 apartments and 20,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.

A third and fourth set of towers are planned for 2525 Crystal Drive and 2000/2001 S. Bell St. The interconnected buildings would form a striking V shape, encompassing 710,000 square feet of residential space and 59,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.

Because one tower would rise 300 feet, exceeding the county’s 200-foot zoning restrictions, the project has been temporarily tabled. It “pushed the envelope,” says Van Horn, who is confident a resolution will be reached with the county on the project.

These projects alone could keep construction crews in overtime, but they aren’t all the company has in the offing.

JBG Smith also submitted plans to the county in November 2019 for a nine-story building at 101 12th St. Layered in bright, stainless-steel shingles, which would contain 235,000 square feet of office space and 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. In keeping with Amazon’s culture, the proposal includes community amenities, such as a park.

Additionally, JBG Smith is seeking county approval to expand its 36-acre RiverHouse apartment complex in Pentagon City. Already the Washington, D.C., area’s fourth-largest apartment complex, RiverHouse would add 750 apartments and 250 town homes to its existing 1,670 units.

The expansion would include 70 units of affordable housing. Affordable housing has been a community concern, and, in exchange for being allowed a collective 1 million square feet of bonus density, Smith has agreed to contribute $4.3 million to the county’s affordable housing loan fund or provide more affordable housing.

Jumping on the bandwagon

As seen in this rendering, JBG Smith Properties will build Amazon’s HQ2 East Coast headquarters towers around Metropolitan Park in the new National Landing area, which includes parts of Arlington’s Crystal City and Pentagon City neighborhoods. Rendering courtesy JBG Smith Properties

Several other developers will join JBG Smith in transforming National Landing.

Commonwealth Crystal Holding I Inc. has received county approval to top an existing one-story retail space at 2351 Richmond Highway with 23 stories of apartments to be called New Century Center Residential.

An LCOR Inc. subsidiary is developing a 19-story building with 285 residential units and 12,194 square feet of shops at 400 11th St. South. And Crystal House Apartments Investors is adding four infill buildings with 800 housing units to the Crystal House apartment complex in Crystal City.

In nearby Pentagon City, at the Pentagon Centre mixed-use development, New York-based Kimco Realty Corp. is adding a second residential building, after opening a 400-unit residential tower near HQ2 in summer 2019.

All of this private development has opened the floodgates for public money. Virginia has dedicated $295 million for improvements to the Crystal City Metro station. In December, the much-delayed groundbreaking for the new Potomac Yard station took place, and a pedestrian bridge connecting Crystal City to Reagan National is on the books, along with lowering the elevated section of Richmond Highway (Route 1) to grade-level to transform it into an “urban boulevard.” State funding will be augmented by $28 million in local funding for improvements to streetscapes, parks and other infrastructure.

Many of the projected improvements, both publicly and privately funded, are focused on “next generation mobility,” which emphasizes pedestrian walkways, bicycle lanes and street-level connectivity, Gabriel says. These values, not coincidentally, are central to the Amazon mindset and that of the millennial workers who will largely populate its offices and live in the residential towers popping up around HQ2.

“There’s a lot of excitement,” Gabriel says, “but some trepidation about how inclusive the change will be.”

But with the first wave of this sea change washing ashore at National Landing, Gabriel and other civic boosters are hopeful that this rising tide of growth will not only float all boats, but also bring a deluge of prosperity.

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Planting the flag

• Amazon’s twin towers coming in 2023

• HQ2 “base camp” office opened in September

• 400+ workers hired; 24,500+ to go

In November 2018, Virginia won big — really big — when Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. chose Arlington County as one of two locations where it would build operations for its planned East Coast headquarters.

Virginia and New York’s Long Island City neighborhood beat out more than 230 other hopeful localities across North America that vied for the project, sending out proposals packed with economic development incentives.

A few months later, though, the news got even sweeter for Virginia after Amazon dropped plans for the New York branch, leaving Arlington as the sole locale for Amazon’s $2.5 billion second headquarters, which promises to create 25,000 high-paying jobs and add more than 8 million square feet of development to be centered in Arlington’s Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard areas.

Amazon HQ2 is “the single biggest economic deal in history, period,” says Marian Marquez, director of Arlington Business Investment Group. Photo by Stephen Gosling

Marian Marquez, director of Arlington Business Investment Group, doesn’t mince words when she describes what that means for Arlington — and the commonwealth.

“It’s the single biggest economic deal in history,” she says, “period.”

HQ2, as the Arlington headquarters is commonly known, will not be realized overnight, of course. Amazon expects that it will take about a decade for the nascent headquarters to reach full capacity. In 2019, however, it already had established a foothold in the heart of Crystal City for what will be a steep climb ahead.

That outpost, three floors of leased space at 241 18th St. S., has been nicknamed “base camp” by Amazon in honor of it being the first location where the e-tailer planted the flag for its East Coast operational center, and its simple decor suits that moniker.

In a techie take on industrial chic, Amazon HQ2 base camp has largely unadorned walls and a monochromatic palette. Identical work stations stretch row upon row in a disorienting sameness, and meeting spaces are mostly open and austere — a cluster of stools, a simple table, a whiteboard. Privacy in this setting, so attuned to the collaborative mindset of the millennial, is provided by stepping into one of a number of soundproof booths where employees can go when they need to make private phone calls or conduct other sensitive business. The booths further provide a factor of cool in the otherwise stripped-down environment.

This minimalist design also reflects “frugality,” one of Amazon’s 14 core principles, says Amazon spokesperson Erin Mulhall. Frugality and other Amazon aphorisms — such as “It Is Always Day One” and “Invent and Simplify” — are prominently displayed in three rows of colorful circles on the wall of the base camp reception area. However, it’s the one on the bottom row, second from the left — “Think Big”— that obviously has Northern Virginia, especially Arlington County, giddy with excitement.

“Think Big” actually is quite an understatement. “Think Super Colossal” might be more on the mark.

The two towers

This mural outside the lobby of Amazon HQ2’s first office in Arlington offers a whimsical take on its “base camp” nickname. Photo by Stephen Gosling

One of the few artistic touches at Amazon’s Crystal City base camp is a whimsical mural depicting an Amazon delivery truck climbing an Everest-like mountain. An obvious nod to the outpost’s nickname, the mural is also an apt metaphor for Amazon’s unprecedented trajectory for HQ2’s development.

As noted above, Amazon initially announced its selection of Arlington and Long Island City as dual sites for its new headquarters. But Amazon pulled out of New York a few months later after encountering stiff backlash from local politicians and residents concerning — among other issues — the plan to grant Amazon nearly $3 billion in state and local tax breaks.

However, Amazon has encountered little such blowback in Virginia, where the commonwealth has promised the company more than $750 million in cash incentives in exchange for the long-range possibility of as many as 37,850 high-paying jobs at HQ2, although the e-tailer has committed only to filling 25,000 positions during the 2020s. Virginia also has pledged to invest $1 billion in a tech-talent pipeline to boost the number of in-demand computer science graduates from state universities.

In 2018, Gov. Ralph Northam said that, altogether, the commonwealth would be spending up to $2.5 billion on Amazon-linked investments in education, transportation and affordable housing. Arlington County has added to the pot by proffering a $23 million pay-for-performance grant (paid in annual installments over 15 years), plus $28 million in tax-increment financing (paid over 10 years).

One final impediment to Amazon’s HQ2 plans remained, however: A change in zoning was required to allow construction of Amazon’s proposed twin, 22-story office towers in Crystal City. The proposed 2.1 million square feet of space represented a 600,000-square-foot increase over the previously allowed density. The matter was resolved in December, after the Arlington County Board voted to allow HQ2 to move forward in exchange for Amazon’s promise to contribute a record-setting $20 million for affordable housing. (Arlington residents have raised concerns about the e-tailer’s arrival pushing local real estate prices out of reach for working families.)

At that same board meeting, Amazon also moved quickly to settle a kerfuffle that had arisen involving construction workers who were alleging payroll fraud and misclassification of jobs. Amazon fired the contractors involved in the dispute. Amazon’s global vice president of real estate and facilities, John Schoettler, told the board members, “I will tolerate absolutely none of this going forward, and people on my team will be held accountable.”

Staging at base camp

With that final hurdle overcome, Amazon now is gearing up to make its steep ascent in Arlington.

The 88,000-square-foot base camp office opened barely more than six months ago, and by the end of December Amazon had more than 400 employees in Arlington.

Amazon began hiring the first employees for HQ2 in September 2019. By the beginning of January, the company had hired more than 400 workers. Photo by Stephen Gosling

HQ2 hires will include programmers, software developers and specialists for the company’s Amazon Web Services cloud computing subsidiary as well as consumer-focused initiatives such as its Alexa virtual assistant. But the online Leviathan also will be needing many employees in fields across the business spectrum, including consumer affairs, advertising, law, finance and public relations, says Brian Riley, head of Amazon’s recruiting programs and strategies for HQ2.

Riley anticipates making 1,500 to 3,000 hires annually from now through the foreseeable future. With eye-popping figures like that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 6,000 people attended an Amazon HQ2 job-information day the company held back in September.

“The richness of the talent pool here helps us build something from the ground up,” Riley says. The company already employs 10,000 workers in Virginia across its various distribution centers and offices, he adds, “and we are engaged very heavily in having fewer barriers to bringing in local talent.”

Right now, Riley says, about half of the company’s new hires have been from the Northern Virginia region, but that could increase as Amazon builds more bridges to the region’s educational institutions.

To facilitate that, Amazon is seeing ways to help cultivate the workforce talent it needs across a broad group of Virginia schools, nurturing interest not only among college students but at the middle school and high school levels, too.

In addition to meeting with state education officials and higher education leaders, Amazon’s head of workforce development for HQ2, Ardine Williams, has also been working on outreach efforts with local public schools’ superintendents and has hosted children’s education events at Amazon’s Washington, D.C., office to promote teaching computer coding skills to kids. (See interview with Williams.)

After all, Williams points out, kids who are in fifth or sixth grade now are the future college graduates Amazon will be seeking to hire for HQ2 by the end of the decade. “Making sure that there are adequate numbers of teachers, and teachers who are digitally literate and providing technology in an integrated way in the classroom, is incredibly important to us,” she says.

Ascending to new heights

In a touch of kismet, the number of employees Amazon ultimately will bring to Crystal City is roughly equivalent to the number of jobs lost in the area due to the federal Base Realignment and Closure of 15 years ago.

In December 2019, Arlington County granted the final approvals for Amazon HQ2’s planned twin 22-story towers, depicted in this rendering. Courtesy Amazon

Of course, all these new employees will need someplace to hang their hats and, in late December 2019, Amazon began its physical expansion beyond base camp, moving into 191,000 square feet of renovated leased space at nearby 1800 S. Bell St. That building is owned by developer and property manager JBG Smith Properties, which is leasing multiple spaces to Amazon as well as constructing HQ2’s twin office towers.

In its news releases, JBG Smith, which owns a whopping 6.2 million square feet of space in Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard, has been rebranding the HQ2 area as “National Landing.” It’s even launched a website, nationallanding.com, which describes it as a “newly defined interconnected and walkable neighborhood.” Perhaps out of sensitivity to local feelings, Amazon is staying agnostic on the National Landing moniker, though. Spokesperson Mulhall says only that “the name is being championed by other groups.”

By the end of 2020, Amazon plans to lease all 14 stories of this building under construction by owner JBG Smith Properties at 1770 Crystal Drive. HQ2 will include leased space in addition to the two towers Amazon will own. Photo by Stephen Gosling

Meanwhile, Amazon additionally is slated to occupy JBG Smith’s extensively renovated, reskinned 14-story building at 1770 Crystal Drive by the end of this year. “We’re taking the whole building,” Mulhall says. Lease space is part of Amazon’s overall plan for its East Coast campus in addition to the two towers, which it will own.

Work is scheduled to begin this year on the centerpiece of HQ2, the 6.2-acre Metropolitan Park site where the towers will be raised. It’s now mostly occupied by defunct warehouses and parking lots — some surrounded by white painted fences emblazoned with cheery Amazon admonishments such as “Judge Less” and “Breathe.” Brightly colored bicycles with fake flowers woven into their spokes hang from the fences, adding an artsy touch.

The e-tailer’s plans for the Metropolitan Park site emphasize its commitment to community outreach. It will invest $14 million to double the size of a one-acre swath of green space already in place there, adding amenities such as wide sidewalks and public artwork. (Amazon is contributing $225,000 to the Arlington County Public Art Fund.) HQ2 also will include a 700-person meeting center and a 160-slot daycare facility, both open for public use, and an underground parking facility of nearly 2,000 spaces.

Bus shelters, bike lanes with protective curbing and 600 parking spaces for cyclists are also in the mix, as well as space for a farmers market and a dog park. All Amazon offices are dog-friendly, Mulhall says, adding that “up to 7,000 dogs come to work at Amazon every day.”

To further facilitate interaction with its neighborhood, the street-level floors of both HQ2 towers will be given over to 69,545 square feet of retail space, with HQ2 lobbies relegated to the second floors. The towers, which together eventually will house 12,500 employees, are set to open in 2023.

For a company with one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable logos on Planet Earth, it’s notable that the HQ2 towers will have a conspicuous lack of external Amazon branding. It’s an approach the company also follows at its Seattle headquarters, known for its distinctive trio of spheres.

The HQ2 towers will be LEED Platinum-certified and 100% powered by energy produced on-site or through credits obtained from external renewable energy sources. The towers will feature 13 green roofs and terraces, with one building trimmed in blue and the other in red in a stepped-back design intended to minimize the shadows cast over the streetscape.

Plans for 4.2 million square feet of additional Amazon office space at the 10-acre Pen Place site in Pentagon City are expected to be fleshed out this year and come to fruition in 2025.

Buoyed by Amazon’s massive commitment to HQ2, JBG Smith intends to redevelop about 2.6 million square feet in the area, including erecting five residential buildings and an office tower. A new entertainment and shopping complex anchored by a 49,000-square-foot Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is one of the developer’s priorities. Although Crystal City was once an entertainment wasteland, one of the main thoroughfares in the area, Crystal Drive, now is lined with eateries ranging from fine dining establishments such as chef José Andrés’ Spanish restaurant, Jaleo, to fast-casual emporiums such as Sweetgreen and Chick-fil-A.

The Arlington Chamber of Commerce and the Northern Virginia Economic Development Alliance forecast that all the development attendant to HQ2 will create more than 47,000 direct and indirect jobs.

As one might easily surmise, Arlington County is loving all of this.

Since the Amazon announcement, Marquez says, the county has been getting cold calls from companies around the globe that hadn’t previously considered Arlington. The county’s small-business program has been “slammed” with inquiries too, she says, from companies eager to partner with Amazon.

“People don’t realize the work that Amazon does with small businesses,” she says.

As to the future, Marquez expects “more and more momentum to come.”

“This,” she says in an understatement, “is pretty exciting for everybody.”

Approaching equality

Women may make up more than half of Virginia’s population, but their presence in the statehouse has always fallen far short of parity. This year’s election brought a seismic change, however.

Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, says that women now hold 41 of the General Assembly’s 140 seats. While still not equal, that translates to 29% of the legislative body, and that, she points out, is a darn sight better than the 15% of seats women now hold in Congress.

“I can’t stress how much of a change this is over 2017, when female representation in the state legislature was still below 20%,” Bitecofer says. “It would not be an overstatement to say that 2020 will be the Year of the Woman in Virginia politics.”

Meet some of the notable female legislators who are part of this new paradigm:

Editor’s Note: All photos contributed except Danica Roem (photo by Stephen Gosling) and Shelly Simonds (photo by Will Schermerhorn/Blueberry Shoes Productions).

Del. Dawn Adams

D-Richmond

As a first-time delegate in 2017, Dawn Adams, the first openly lesbian Virginia legislator, squeaked into office by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. This time she won easily, but her reelection has been clouded by two controversies. First, Adams cosponsored legislation that would have lifted restrictions on third-trimester abortions. She later disavowed the unsuccessful bill and apologized for not exercising “due diligence” before attaching her name to it. An even fresher controversy, though, is a lawsuit brought by her former legislative aide, who alleged the delegate may have accessed the former aide’s personal email and social media accounts without permission in order to “cover up” evidence that the aide had performed unpaid work for the delegate’s private company. Adams, a nurse practitioner and health-care advocate, “strongly” denied the allegations in a pre-election statement.

Del. Hala Ayala

D-Prince William County

When stumping for Hala Ayala’s reelection, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker cited the famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote about how “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Then, he added, “We cannot wait for the arc to bend. We must be arc benders.” Ayala could put “arc bender” on her résumé. Two years ago, the single mother of two became one of the first two Latinas elected to the General Assembly. (The other was Elizabeth Guzman, D-31st District.) Ayala tells a bootstrap story about her determined rise from a

service worker with no health insurance for her children to a respected cybersecurity specialist working for the Department of Homeland Security. As a legislator, she has channeled that determination into advocating for women’s and minority rights. Her focus has been on raising the minimum wage and ensuring equal pay and affordable health care access for her constituents. “I want to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves,” she says.

Del. Lashrecse Aird

D-Petersburg

After easily winning her third term in office, progressive millennial lawmaker Lashrecse Aird made a bold bid to be House speaker, which would have made her not only the first woman to hold that post, but the first African American. At age 33, she would have been one of the youngest state speakers in the nation’s history, as well. “I think I’m exactly what is necessary to unify us as a caucus,” said the confident Aird, who even had a 60-day transition plan ready if she got the job. But it was not to be. Instead, a six-term moderate, House Minority Leader Del. Eileen Filler-Corn of Fairfax, 55, was tapped for the speakership. Aird was gracious in defeat, though. “[I’m ready] to roll up my sleeves and get to work,” she says.

Sen. Amanda Chase

R-Chesterfield County

Just call her Sen. Teflon. In a state that has turned blue and has experienced a major mass shooting in the last year, Sen. Amanda Chase is known for packing heat on the floor of the state Senate. In the #MeToo era, she has called rape victims “naive and unprepared.” And there’s more. In September, the Chesterfield GOP gave her the boot for supporting the opponent of a Republican nominee for sheriff. That controversy came on top of damaging press about Chase’s heated argument with a Capitol Police officer over a parking issue. Yet, the vocal Trump fan won reelection handily and she keeps on fighting — most recently with her fellow Senate Republicans. She announced in November she wouldn’t caucus with them in protest over the selection of state Sen. Tommy Norment, R-James City County, as minority leader.

Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant

R-Henrico County

Dr. Siobhan Dunnavant knows how to multitask. As a mother, a business owner and a physician — she’s the only medical doctor in the Senate — she’s had lots of practice with problem-solving and consensus-building. “It’s the only way I can get everything done,” she quips. “Everything” includes helping to pass 55 pieces of legislation during her first Senate term. Twenty-six of those bills concerned health care, and 13 were passed in conjunction with Democrats — an example of the consensus-building she touts. In 2015, the pro-life Dunnavant, who has delivered more than 2,500 babies, won her first term in a runaway. This election, however, was decided by fewer than 2,000 votes and featured the specter of a polarizing president, close to $5 million in partisan spending and rough attack ads about gun control and abortion. On what turned out to be a dark day for the state GOP, Dunnavant described her narrow victory as “a bright shining light. We’re going to get great things done for Virginia,” she promises.

Del. Wendy Gooditis

D-Clarke County

Better health care for Virginians is personal for Wendy Gooditis, who cruised to victory over the same opponent she faced in her debut run for delegate in 2017. Until recently, Gooditis and her family had medical coverage through the Affordable Care Act. Her brother, who had been denied Medicaid coverage for his longstanding mental-health problems, died by suicide two years ago. Those facts were a catalyst for Gooditis to not only support Medicaid expansion but to take a leading role in passing legislation meant to strengthen suicide-prevention programs, a law that garnered unanimous support in both chambers of the General Assembly.

Del.-elect Nancy Guy

D-Virginia Beach

Former Virginia Beach School Board member Nancy Guy declared victory over incumbent Republican Del. Chris Stolle – but it wasn’t a done deal. Guy won by just 27 votes, or about 0.02% of all votes cast, and Stolle — whose siblings are Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant and former state Sen. Ken Stolle — filed for a recount. However, he ended up conceding after the December recount found Guy ahead by 41 votes. Her election gives the Democrats a 55-45 majority in the House of Delegates.

Sen.-elect Ghazala Hashmi

D-Chesterfield County

Home is not a place, it’s a feeling, a wise woman once said, so when the Trump administration proposed a partial ban on Muslim refugees entering the country, Ghazala Hashmi panicked. “I had to wonder, after living here for nearly 50 years, whether I had a home anymore,” she said. The answer to that question turned out to be a resounding “yes” when voters made her the first Muslim woman elected to the Virginia Senate. Born in India, Hashmi emigrated to the United States with her family at age 4. She campaigned on typical Democratic priorities such as gun control, expanded educational opportunities and climate change, but she characterized her win as a victory for any Virginian who has felt “unheard, unseen and unrepresented.” Says Hashmi: “This victory is not mine alone.”

Del. Charniele Herring

D-Alexandria

As the first African American woman to represent Northern Virginia in Richmond and the first African American to chair the state Democratic Party, being first has become almost second nature to Charniele Herring. Now she is a double first — the first woman and the first African American to become House majority leader. “The nature of what I am, a woman and a black woman … it’s not been an easy road,” Herring says. She is tired of being considered a novelty, too. “We hear of two African American women thinking about running for governor, and that’s awesome,” she said recently, referring to state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, and Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Woodbridge. However, she adds, “then people say, ‘But what if they run against each other? Then maybe one won’t win the general election.’ We need to call that kind of thinking out.”

Sen.-elect Jen Kiggans

R-Virginia Beach

Jen Kiggans believes in public service, and she doesn’t just talk about it. Kiggans spent 10 years as a Navy helicopter pilot, including two deployments to the Persian Gulf, and her day job now is as a nurse practitioner caring for adult and geriatric patients. The first-time politician won a squeaker of a race, which came down to just 514 ballots. In the final tally, she earned 50.36% of the votes. Now, as a legislator, and the only female veteran in the General Assembly, she plans to concentrate on what she knows best: veterans’ affairs and health-care reform. She intends to listen carefully to her constituents and value their priorities. “What you see is what you get with me,” Kiggans says.

Sen. Jennifer McClellan

D-Richmond

Jennifer McClellan didn’t just beat her opponent on her way to reelection. She shellacked him: 47,195 to 11,432. That power at the polls is adding to speculation that the state senator and former 11-year delegate might have her sights set on the governorship in 2021. Earlier this year, McClellan launched a political action committee to help elect Democrats to state offices, and speculation is that the PAC could also be used to advance her gubernatorial aspirations. Back in February, the African American legislator was rumored to be on the short list of potential lieutenant governor appointees when it seemed possible that either Gov. Ralph Northam or Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax might be forced to resign over scandals involving blackface and alleged sexual misconduct, respectively. The Verizon corporate lawyer said then that the timing wasn’t right for her. However, as this unprecedented election attests, the times they are a-changin’.

Del. Danica Roem

D-Manassas

“I’m grateful to represent you because of who you are — never despite it,” Democrat Danica Roem tweeted after she won reelection. That was a none-too-subtle reminder of how Roem initially came to office two years ago. Then, she was the first openly transgender person to be elected and serve as a state legislator in the U.S., and her run against an incumbent who styled himself as the commonwealth’s “chief homophobe” had propelled Roem into the national spotlight. Running for reelection, Roem focused on her record as a freshman delegate and less about who she is. She delivered on her promises to constituents, she said, by expanding Medicaid, raising teacher pay and chipping away at that perpetual problem of the Washington suburbs, traffic. Her reward? Thumping her opponent and successfully becoming a pothole politician.

Del.-elect Shelly Simonds

D-Newport News

In 2017, Shelly Simonds lost her race for delegate by zero votes. Happily for her, her rematch against Republican David Yancey “didn’t have to end with a bowl,” she says. That’s a reference to the highly publicized ceramic bowl from which the chairman of the State Board of Elections randomly drew a film canister containing Yancey’s name, declaring him the winner in early 2018. The election had been a crucial one; a Simonds win would have ended the GOP’s 17-year domination of the House, creating a delegate deadlock at 50-50. This time, in a reconfigured district, no bowl was required. Simonds trounced Yancey by 18 percentage points. “I’m just so glad that the voters of Newport News helped us rewrite the ending of our story,” Simonds says.

The place for placemaking

It must be nice to be Fairfax, where affluence has been the norm for decades, and where a continuous line of better days is anticipated to stretch ahead.

The D.C. suburb of 1.2 million — at 400 square miles, Fairfax is the big kahuna of the region — boasts an average household income of more than $150,000, just about the highest in the nation, and a barely there unemployment rate of 2.3%. Housing prices are up 1.5% in the past year alone, with the average cost of a house in the county now standing at $542,000.

The good fortune of being located next to the national seat of government has played a big part in Fairfax’s prosperity, of course, but the county also has become an increasingly active agent in shaping its own prosperity. The catalyst was the government spending cuts of a dozen years ago. When Uncle Sam turned tightfisted, Fairfax’s slew of federal contractors felt the pain, and what hurt them hurt the county — big time.

Local leaders realized that they needed to get serious about diversifying their economy, and the result has been an ambitious, two-pronged plan to refashion Fairfax into a center of the knowledge economy.

Innovation pipeline
In the knowledge economy, the capital is intellectual, and the products are not wheat, or steel, but innovative ideas, especially in the technology and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. Examples of businesses that fall under the term include cloud computing, aerospace, cybersecurity, genomic medicine, autonomous vehicles and data analytics — all white-collar, future-looking enterprises.

The county’s laser focus on these industries has paid big dividends. Fairfax now has almost 9,000 such technology companies based within its borders, and white-collar jobs make up 28% of its employment, a figure that is four times the national average. The workforce is young, too — a third are just 19 to 34 years old.Those are impressive stats for any jurisdiction, but Fairfax wants more, and that’s where its two-pronged plan kicks in.

The first prong is to produce more of these workers close to home.

“We need to double the tech talent pipeline in 20 years. It is one of our highest priorities,” says Victor Hoskins, president and CEO of the Fairfax Economic Development Authority.

“If we had everyone we needed with the right skill sets, we could add 12,000 to 16,000 jobs” to the regional economy, concurs Terry Clower, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and director of Mason’s Center for Regional Analysis.

Fairfax recently allocated $1 million to figure out how best to get the talent pipeline flowing. “Concepts don’t get things done,” Hoskins says, explaining that $200,000 of that money will go to research to find out how to be most effective.

The county already spends 53% of its budget on schools. It has 1.9 million square feet of school construction in the works, according to school spokesman John Torre, and it’s busily retooling its curricula to align with the exploding need for tech talent. That effort has to start in pre-K, Hoskins says.

One way the county is accelerating change in its schools is by partnering with other educational institutions, regional entities and the private sector. “It’s always about partnerships,” says Rachel Flynn, deputy county executive.

For example, Northern Virginia Community College, George Mason and Amazon Web Services joined forces recently to establish a bachelor’s degree in cloud computing. By spring 2020, NOVA expects to have 300 students in its program. Their credits will be transferable to GMU, which began offering classes in cloud computing this fall and is launching a degree program in 2020.

At the Inova Center for Personalized Medicine on the 117-acre former Exxon campus near Fairfax Hospital, collaboration on medical research will be ongoing with both GMU and the University of Virginia.

Personalized medicine is seen by the county as a huge field of opportunity. The new partnerships will focus on cutting-edge research into treatments for cancer, as well as metabolic and heart diseases.
GMU also is investing $250 million in its Arlington campus to turn it into an “innovation district.” The university will add 1,000 professors and expand to

1.2 million square feet. The site will be home to the Institute for Digital Innovation and Virginia’s first-ever School of Computing. (See related story, Page 76.) Mason officials expect these changes eventually will more than double its number of computing majors to more than 15,000.

Placemaking’s poster child
The second prong of the county’s master plan is more visible to the naked eye — a concentration on “placemaking.” By that term, Fairfax means the physical transformation of a number of its hubs to appeal to the workers of the knowledge economy — mostly millennials and Generation Zers.

“The knowledge worker does not want to be in a business park,” says Christopher B. Leinberger, professor of urban real estate at George Washington University. “Seventy percent of all net new occupied space since 2010 is walkable urban. That’s the future.”

The placemaking going on at Tysons — formerly known as Tysons Corner — is remarkable. The suburban crossroads, once notorious for its concrete lack of character and hostility to all modes of transport other than the automobile, is envisioned to be the location of 200,000 jobs, 100,000 residents and 150 million square feet of development by 2050, mostly clustered around its four Silver Line Metro stops. Already, the in-process city is home to five Fortune 500 tech companies.

Matt Calkins, founder and CEO of Appian, recently moved his software company’s 700-person headquarters to Tysons. The attraction was multifold, he says. “Everything you need to build a tech company is right here in Fairfax,” he says, including great education, local capital, savvy business leaders and — unexpectedly for those who picture the Tysons of the past — green space. Plus, Tysons is at the crossroads of excellent transportation options, Calkins says, with easy-on/off to a network of sophisticated multilane highways and good access to Washington Dulles International Airport, which will get even better when the second phase of Metro’s Silver Line opens next year.

Tysons’ poster child of what it wants to become when it grows up — literally up, as it now possesses the tallest buildings in the region — is The Boro, a mix of luxury residences, high-end office space and retail, including a Whole Foods supermarket that sits on 18 walkable acres hard by the Greensboro Metro station. It eventually will encompass 4.25 million square feet of development. Also new at Tysons is a 32-story luxury apartment tower called The Lumen and a Wegmans grocery store at the Capital One site. A $120 million performing arts center with a rooftop park is slated to open nearby in fall of 2021.

More huge projects are in the works, as well. In July, county supervisors approved plans for The Mile, a development near the Tysons Corner Metro station. The Mile will feature 10 acres of parks and more than 3 million square feet of mixed-use development on 38-plus acres. And in October, the supervisors approved Clemente Development Co.’s The View, a 3-million-square-foot mixed-use development near the Spring Hill Metro station that will include the 600-foot-tall Iconic Tower building as its centerpiece. When complete, the skyscraper will be the tallest structure in Virginia, as well as the metro D.C. region — rising higher than the Washington Monument.

Such overwhelming numbers combined with such soaring ambitions may well be unprecedented. “It will be a decades-long evolution to a 24-7 urbanized area,” says Sol Glasner, president of the Tysons Partnership. “It is the greatest placemaking experiment in America.”

Fairfax’s official bird?
Placemaking on a smaller scale is going on at other Fairfax locations, as well. The Mosaic District in the Merrifield area of the county, for instance, is exactly the kind of mixed-use development that Fairfax wants.

Thirty acres of what had been a suburban desert has been turned into an oasis of cool, with 1,000 residential units, 500,000 square feet of retail and 73,000 square feet of Class A office space, all complemented by two parks and a multiplex theater. Property that was valued at $38 million before redevelopment is now assessed at $615 million.

Christine Richardson, president of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, says the Mosaic District is “doing extremely well.” That success has made it difficult for the local schools to keep up with demand. “The millennials are having kids, but they still want that urban neighborhood,” Flynn says.

Reston is yet another hot spot for placemaking. Robert E. Simon founded the suburb in 1964 along the very mixed-use principles that are being so fervently embraced 50-plus years later, but the Silver Line is spurring a new surge in development even in this long-established community.

Around the Wiehle-Reston East Metro stop, which opened in 2014, the Metro Commerce Center will include two apartment buildings, a 22-story office building, and a hotel, along with retail space, a civic center and pocket parks — small green spaces that will feature public art, terraces and open lawns. Nearby, the transformation of an aged office complex called Isaac Newton Square also is under consideration. Plans call for 2,100 residential units, along with about 68,000 square feet of retail, as well as an athletic field.

Near the yet-to-open Reston Town Center Silver Line station, projected to be in service next year, growth is likewise go-go. The 36-acre Reston Crescent mixed-use development is envisioned as eight urban blocks that will encompass 1.5 million square feet in office space, 1,721 residential units, a 200-room hotel and 380,000 square feet of retail, including a Wegmans. A neighboring development called the Reston Gateway additionally promises 4.8 million square feet in offices, apartments, hotels and retail.

Even more placemaking development is in the works at two farther-out, under-construction Metro stations expected to open next year on the Silver Line. At the Herndon station, Amazon Web Services’ prominent presence is expected to spur mixed-use development. “Nothing grows a crowd like a crowd,” says Clower. And at the Innovation Center Metro station, development is expected to piggyback on the presence of the nonprofit Center for Innovative Technology, which helps tech entrepreneurs develop business strategies.

“The construction crane could be our official bird,” quips Hoskins.

Even the Inova Center for Personalized Medicine wants to jump aboard the placemaking bandwagon. What originally was planned as an exclusively research and medical site now is being pitched to county planners to include commercial and residential projects.

Given its bona fides, only a fool would bet against that request being approved by Fairfax, a county that is so wholeheartedly committed to making the future happen now.

Cities from scratch

For decades, Northern Virginia has experienced the kind of growth and prosperity that other areas of the country see only in their dreams. Now, several projects that are massive in both scale and ambition are poised to push development in NoVa to a level unprecedented even for such a go-go region.

In Tysons, once a sterile suburban crossroads known for its car dealerships and shopping malls, a brand-new city is taking form, and by 2050, it is projected to be home to 200,000 jobs, 100,000 residents, and 150 million square feet of development.

In Arlington, one of the world’s biggest and wealthiest corporations, Amazon, is building its East Coast HQ2 headquarters, which is expected to encompass as much as 6 million square feet of office, retail and residential space and employ at least 25,000 people in highly skilled — and highly paid — jobs by 2030. Like Tysons, it will also create a new region from scratch: the burgeoning National Landing district.

And in Alexandria, Virginia Tech is making a $1 billion investment in the creation of its 1-million-square-foot Innovation Campus, which will produce graduates who can help the region fulfill its aspirations to rival Silicon Valley as a tech nexus.

Northern Virginia “is sitting pretty. It’s a remarkable thing it has pulled off,” says Christopher B. Leinberger, research professor of urban real estate and chair of the Center for Real Estate & Urban Analysis at the George Washington University School of Business. Leinberger believes that NoVa is positioning itself “to become a powerhouse in the 21st-century tech world,” and it’s nailing its audition for the part by busily creating precisely the kind of high-density, multiuse neighborhoods this new world demands.

Tysons
On the outskirts of Washington, D.C., in suburban Fairfax County, an urban, citylike area dotted by skyscrapers has been very deliberately emerging during the last decade. On any given day in Tysons, one can spot a host of construction cranes across the horizon.

It’s “the greatest placemaking experiment in America,” says Tysons Partnership President Sol Glasner. The phrase “endpoint” does not apply to growth there, he says, because “there isn’t one.”

One of the latest deliveries at Tysons is The Lumen, a 32-story apartment building advertised as being just steps away from the Silver Line’s Greensboro Metro station. The sleek, amenity-heavy tower is typical of the new Tysons vibe. The building’s 398 units have been filling up rapidly, with an assortment of millennials, married-with-no-children couples and empty nesters attracted by the urban setting, says Rob Mooney, director of business development for The Lumen’s builder, Hoar Construction.

Although the walkable quotient essential to a real city is still largely lacking, it will increase with more development, he says.

True walkability also remains aspirational at the Capital One complex at Tysons, but as the neighborhood near the Silver Line’s McLean stop is built out, that too should change.

The Capital One site is anchored by a 31-story office tower, the tallest building in the region, second only to the Washington Monument. A Wegmans grocery store opened nearby last year, and a $120 million performing arts center with a rooftop park is slated to open in fall 2021. A second tower is expected to be completed in 2023.

The Boro, however, already is walkable and thus is something of a template for redevelopment at Tysons.

“The street grid came first” at this mix of luxury residences, high-end office space and retail located just a block from the Silver Line’s Greensboro Station, says Robert Sponseller, design principal for Shalom Baranes Associates, which co-designed the complex with the architecture, design and planning firm Gensler. A joint project of two commercial real estate development companies, The Meridian Group and Kettler, The Boro is projected to top out at 4.25 million square feet of development and includes the largest Whole Foods market in the region.

What Sponseller calls the “new urbanization” at The Boro emphasizes the public realm by paying particular attention to how buildings complement the street network. The Boro’s taller structures have been kept to the periphery of the 18-acre site, and parking lots are hidden underground or screened by other uses. The aim is to create a neighborhood on “a good scale, like SoHo,” the architect says.

In the planning stages next for Tysons is The View, a 600-foot tower that will be taller than the Washington Monument. Another Gensler project, The View promises 3 million square feet of mixed-use development on eight acres near the Spring Hill Metro. It is slated to go before the Fairfax Board of Supervisors in October.

In July, supervisors also approved plans for another gargantuan project, The Mile. Located near the Tysons Corner Metro station, it will feature 10 acres of parks and more than 3 million square feet of mixed-use development on 38-plus acres. The project of PS Business Parks LP “is a super-big deal,” Glasner says.

Eventually, Tysons, which covers about 4 square miles, is envisioned to be redeveloped into eight neighborhoods like The Mile and The Boro, all clustered around Metro stops and linked by strollable streets. In the interim, however, Fairfax County is considering an autonomous shuttle to help residents and workers negotiate pedestrian-unfriendly areas, says Terry Clower, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis. “It should help with the ‘cool’ factor,” as well, he says.

Nevertheless, Glasner says, “a lot has to happen before Tysons becomes a true, cohesive 24-7 urbanized area,” and Sponseller, The Boro architect, seconds that opinion.

“Tysons was the notorious poster child for the worst kind of urban planning and sprawl,” he says. “Giving it a soul is a big undertaking.”

Amazon HQ2
Unlike Tysons, National Landing, the new moniker for the areas of Crystal City, Pentagon City and Potomac Yard that will host Amazon’s HQ2, already has an excellent street network, plus easy walkability to the Crystal City Metro.

Like Tysons, though, the Arlington area has long been derided as a soulless place, notorious for becoming an empty concrete canyon after 5 p.m.

That is a decidedly un-Amazon situation, and all indications are that changing that atmosphere will be a top priority.

Bryan Moll, executive vice president for Maryland-based developer and property manager JBG Smith, which is developing the HQ2 project, says his company is looking to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters for guidance in how it should go about reconfiguring the National Landing landscape.

“The culture of Amazon is walking and biking,” Moll says. “Amazon likes to build communities, not campuses.”

The online retailer deliberately does not offer subsidized food or have a fitness center at its Seattle headquarters, the better to encourage its employees to venture out and become part of the neighborhood. Tellingly, JBG Smith’s first building project at Crystal City, the 109,000-square-foot Central District Retail, will provide the area with what Moll calls “eater-tainment” — dining venues that have been largely absent until now.

The first phase of HQ2’s construction will see the redevelopment of a block of vacant warehouses into two LEED Gold-certified buildings, along with retail and open space. It will include space for 600 bikes and an expanded bike path network.

During the coming decade, JBG Smith also plans to add 4,000 to 5,000 multifamily units to its existing National Landing portfolio of 6.2 million square feet of office space and 2,850 multifamily units, as well as 6.9 million square feet of space available for additional development possibilities.

“We have a playbook that really works,” Moll says. “It is research-driven, with the right designers and the right feel.”

Virginia has promised $573 million in incentives for jobs created at HQ2, and the state and Arlington County have pledged $223 million in transportation improvements.

Arlington’s interim economic development director, Alex Iams, believes that will be money well spent. During the next 16 years, he predicts, HQ2 will generate $342 million in tax revenue, while diversifying the tax base away from reliance on a shrinking federal sector.

Virginia Tech Innovation Campus
“This is a watershed moment for Virginia Tech and a great day for the commonwealth,” the university’s president, Tim Sands, said in announcing the plans for the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus last year.

Calling it a “brilliant move,” GW’s Leinberger predicts it will perform a similar role in providing a tech-talent pipeline as the University of Washington has at Amazon’s original corporate headquarters in Seattle.

But those effects are going to take a while to kick in.

The Innovation Campus will be built in Alexandria’s Potomac Yards neighborhood on a 65-acre mixed-use site owned by Houston-based Lionstone Investments, which will co-develop the campus with JBG Smith. It will have direct access to the new Potomac Yard Metro station, which is expected to open in 2022.

In August, 175 construction firms packed a meeting seeking proposals for the campus’s first project, a 300,000-square-foot academic building that should open in 2024.

“All the infrastructure is there, but we are rebuilding a city,” says Stephanie Landrum, president and CEO of the Alexandria Economic Development Partnership. “Usually planners look 10 to 15 years out,” but this time, she says, “we are planning for the next 100 years.”

The university and the state have committed $250 million to the Innovation Campus, and projections are for it eventually to offer 300,000 square feet of academic and research space, 250,000 square feet of partner space for startups and other businesses, 350,000 square feet of housing and 100,000 square feet of retail, along with green space. A predicted enrollment of 750 students is not expected to be reached for a decade.

“We have a long way to go,” says Clower.

Still, the Innovation Campus, Amazon HQ2 and Tysons will be linchpins in the transformation of the region into “high-density, walkable parcels driven by a knowledge economy,” Leinberger says.

“NoVa used to be second-tier in the tech world,” he says. “It is moving up to first-tier now.”

Back to the future?

A surprising coalition of strange political bedfellows has united behind deregulating Virginia’s power utilities and opening the energy market to competition.

But there’s just one hitch: Virginia tried deregulation 20 years ago and it didn’t work, says the commonwealth’s largest electric provider, Dominion Energy.

Katharine Bond, Dominion’s senior director for public policy, describes deregulation as an abject failure not only in Virginia but also in other states. Dominion customers, she says, already “enjoy low, stable prices from energy generated by a rapidly growing portfolio of renewable energy.”

In May, a group of nine politically and ideologically divergent organizations — ranging from highly conservative to very liberal — announced their formation of the Virginia Energy Reform Coalition (VERC). They intend to lobby the General Assembly to end the monopoly on Virginia electrical production held by Dominion and Appalachian Power. Instead, VERC wants to give residential and commercial energy customers a choice of electrical providers, which the coalition contends would result in lower rates.

Dominion and Appalachian, however, say that contention isn’t supported by the facts in other states where customers have encountered higher rates and undependable power service after deregulation.

Opposites attract
VERC’s May news conference saw Ken Cuccinelli, a conservative former Virginia attorney general, joined by representatives of liberal groups such as Appalachian Voices and the Virginia Poverty Law Center.

“In this day and age, when there seem to be more and tougher obstacles to working across party and ideological lines, I’m proud to stand here today with a politically eclectic group that is committed to modernizing Virginia’s electricity markets,” Cuccinelli said, speaking for coalition member FreedomWorks, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. (Cuccinelli has since left FreedomWorks to become acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration.)

On the opposite side of the coalition’s spectrum is Clean Virginia, a nonprofit devoted to reforming Virginia’s state government and energy sector. Toward that end, Clean Virginia endorses legislative candidates based on criteria including whether they accept donations from “regulated monopoly utilities” such as Dominion Energy or Appalachian Power.

Clean Virginia was founded and is funded by Michael Bills, a Charlottesville multimillionaire who is the founder and chief investment officer of Bluestem Asset Management LLC. A political activist, Bills donated more than $820,000 to Virginia Democratic candidates during the past two years — topping Dominion’s $582,313 in political donations to both parties during the same period, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

The Washington Post has quoted Dominion spokesman David Botkins as calling Clean Virginia “a dark-money, radical-left advocacy organization.” But Brennan Gilmore, the Clean Virginia organization’s executive director, says its “sole interest is the public good.”

How to achieve public good in the electric sector is a question that VERC wants to see legislators consider during the 2020 General Assembly session.

The big ‘if’
Quentin Kidd, dean of the College of Social Sciences at Christopher Newport University, says deregulation could gain traction again in the General Assembly — but that depends on the November election, in which every legislative seat will be on the ballot.

“I could put together a scenario where a deregulation bill could get through a Democratically controlled General Assembly,” Kidd says. Nonetheless, that also would require support from “free-market Republican progressives who might need to craft a market argument,” he adds, providing an apt description of some VERC members.

“The big ‘if’ is what the governor would do,” Kidd says. Gov. Ralph Northam hasn’t signaled any support for deregulation, the political analyst says, and Northam’s critics describe him as a Dominion supporter.

Even if the General Assembly moves toward deregulation, it would be a long process, Kidd says, and “would become an issue for the next governor’s race [in 2021].”

Déjà vu all over again
Virginia’s been here before.

In 1999, the General Assembly voted for deregulation and capped the rates that Dominion could charge customers. The state’s intention was to lower consumer electric bills by introducing competition among retail power resellers.

Largely because Dominion’s rates already were at or below the national average, however, very few real competitors emerged in Virginia, says State Corporation Commission (SCC) spokesman Kenneth J. Schrad.

The SCC’s research showed that customers wouldn’t jump to a different power seller unless rates were 10% to 20% less, he says. And no one could offer a competing rate that low.

“They couldn’t make a margin on it because they couldn’t beat out the incumbent utility’s price,” says Schrad. “I’d be surprised if anybody signed up more than 100 people. We just never saw any robust competitive activity.”

Richard Hirsh, a professor of technology history at Virginia Tech, says that, after deregulation resulted in virtually no competition in Southwest Virginia, folks joked that “you can have Appalachian Power or you can have Duracell. That’s the choice.”

The General Assembly finally ditched deregulation in 2007.

In recent years, Dominion’s critics say, Virginia legislators have allowed the company to have too big a role in crafting energy regulations, largely removing the SCC’s oversight of electric rates and of how much Dominion and Appalachian can reinvest profits and expand.

VERC contends deregulation failed in Virginia because competitors faced a far-from-even playing field.

“Deregulation hasn’t worked where state policies allow monopolies to continue to control the market,” says Travis Kavulla, director of energy for the conservative think-tank R Street Institute, a VERC member based in Washington, D.C.

Dominion, however, argues that in addition to failing in Virginia, deregulation also has been a bust in other states, leading to higher rates and poor service while leaving consumers vulnerable to deceptive and fraudulent “bait-and-switch” tactics by some small energy providers.

Rayhan Daudani, the utility’s media relations manager, points to California, where deregulation brought about “cataclysmic blackouts;” Texas, which had to import some power from Mexico after experiencing rolling blackouts and brownouts; Massachusetts, where households ended up paying “$34 million more per year for electricity from competitive suppliers;” and New York, where “overpayments by low-income customers prompted regulators to prohibit competitive suppliers from selling electricity to those customers.”

In fact, deregulation may have contributed to the massive 2003 Northeast blackout, says Hirsh, the Virginia Tech professor. Overgrown trees hitting power lines were one of several causes of the blackout. Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. had cut its maintenance programs to slash costs and remain competitive in its market. Regulated utilities don’t have to worry about that, Hirsh says, because oversight commissions take necessary maintenance into account when calculating rates.

Rates in deregulated states are 37% higher for residential customers and 78% higher for industrial customers, says Appalachian Power spokesman John Shepelwich, citing a recent report from Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for investor-owned electric utilities.

Additionally, state officials in Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts have warned consumers of predatory practices by some small energy retailers. These companies lured customers with “teaser rates” before raising prices significantly higher than they would have paid staying with the larger state utility.

Pros and cons
Even third-party experts can’t agree on whether deregulation is good for the energy market.

Katie Bays is the co-founder of Washington, D.C.-based Sandhill Strategy, a research and corporate consulting firm that monitors energy issues. In general, she says, well-run deregulation programs have shown themselves to be “very efficient ways to increase competition and lower the cost of delivery.” Competition can also result in creating innovative new service models, she says.

As for customers in some states paying higher prices, Bays adds, those states likely sought to deregulate because rates were higher in their regulated market already.

In general, Bays says, well-run deregulation programs have shown themselves to be “very efficient ways to increase competition and to lower the cost of delivery.”

Paul Griffin disagrees. He is executive director of Reston-based Energy Fairness, a nonprofit, energy-policy advocacy group. “The record is clear,” he says. “Electricity deregulation not only raises electric rates and threatens power supply reliability, but also exposes consumers to deceptive, predatory sales and marketing practices.”

Deregulation, says Virginia Tech’s Hirsh, is attractive to consumers because competition is generally viewed as beneficial, resulting in lower prices and innovation. But with the residential power sector, he says, it hasn’t been terribly successful, evidenced by California, Virginia and several other states repealing, suspending or delaying deregulation efforts.

With Dominion’s power rates still below the national average, Hirsh isn’t sure the outcome of deregulation in Virginia would be any different today than it was in the early 2000s.

Not easy being green
Another VERC issue is increasing renewable energy sources. It’s a big reason that organizations such as the Piedmont Environmental Council, Appalachian Voices, Earth Stewardship Alliance and Clean Virginia joined the coalition.

Dominion says it has shown its commitment to expanding renewables by investing $2.5 billion from 2015 to 2023 and launching nearly a dozen energy-efficiency programs.

During the past four years, the company has increased its number of solar-generation projects from four sites with a total of 5,200 panels to 33 sites with a total of 3.5 million panels.

Collectively these projects have the capacity to generate 884 megawatts or enough power for 221,000 homes — more than the total number of Dominion customers in Virginia Beach.

Dominion also began construction in July on its $1.1 billion offshore wind project off the Virginia Beach coast, the first to be allowed in federal waters. It’s expected to be operational next year.

With the General Assembly’s encouragement, Dominion plans to increase its power generation from wind and solar to 3,000 megawatts by 2022, enough energy to power 750,000 homes, or almost 30% of Dominion’s 2.6 million customer accounts in Virginia.

VERC, however, says that’s not enough. It maintains that insufficient oversight allows Dominion to channel resources into projects that benefit itself and its shareholders rather than its consumers. Critics point to the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline as an example. The project currently is halted amid court challenges.

“Our goal is to produce energy where there is a demand,” says Dan Holmes, director of state policy for the Piedmont Environmental Council. “We don’t want to rely on an extension-cord network,” referring to the Virginia utilities’ present system of transmitting electricity via power lines or pipelines from distant generation sources.

Greener power sources also appear more able to gain traction in open-competition markets, VERC members say. In Texas, which deregulated 17 years ago, the use of renewable energy per capita is now higher than in California, says VERC member Adrian Moore, vice president for policy at the libertarian Reason Foundation.

A common purpose
While acknowledging their differences, VERC members say they would rather talk about the common mission that brings them together.

“We live in an America where it is assumed that one cannot have commonality with those who disagree,” says Lynn Taylor, president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Adds Holmes: “I don’t think political party plays a role in this conversation.”

One thing that unites all the coalition members, however, is their criticism of the influence that Dominion, the commonwealth’s largest corporate political donor, wields over state government.

And although the coalition members maintain that deregulation is not really a political or partisan issue, they know its fate will be decided in the state legislature. And so that’s where they’re putting their focus.

“Right now, we are … talking to folks about what we want to do,” says Moore of the Reason Foundation.

This article has been updated from the version that appeared in the August issue of Virginia Business.

A bank by any other name would be more popular

When BB&T and SunTrust decided to merge, they wanted their combined institution to have a new name. Thus, a consultant was hired, focus groups were formed and, after what the banks described as a “rigorous, data-driven, brand-development process,” the new name was announced: Truist Financial.

The name-shaming on social media commenced forthwith.

“Completely underwhelming,” “blah” and “stupid” were typical of the tweets proliferating on Twitter. One commenter complained that Truist sounded “like a medication to treat eczema,” while another said it would be a suitable name for an artificial sweetener.

Such blowback is to be expected, says Kelly O’Keefe, a professor of creative brand management at Virginia Commonwealth University. Back in 1998, the new Crestar Bank name was mocked for sounding like a toothpaste, and people weren’t even sure how to pronounce Verizon when Bell Atlantic and GTE picked the neologism for their merged identity in 2000. Philip Morris Companies met with similar derision when it rebranded itself with the benevolent-sounding-but-made-up moniker Altria in 2003, a change critics said was intended to distance itself from the negatives associated with its cigarette business.

“An unfamiliar name can seem a little weird and nonintuitive at first,” the professor says, and he can think of a couple new brands that never did find their legs, such as the Volkswagen Phaeton, a 2002 luxury sedan named after a type of horse-drawn carriage. (How the heck do you even pronounce that, anyway?) The popular Chevy Nova found its name to be problematic as well, when it entered Hispanic markets: “No va” means “no go” in Spanish – “not exactly what you want in a car,” O’Keefe remarks dryly.

Mostly, though, familiarity eventually makes the heart grow fonder. For example, no one questions why a global tech company should be named after a fruit, or why an e-tail giant is named for a river full of predatory fish. Furthermore, other banks that have opted for made-up names, such as Comerica (formerly Detroit Bank & Trust) and Synovus (formerly CB&T Bancshares), were also mocked before the public settled into acceptance.

That said, O’Keefe is not a huge fan of the Truist label.

“Trust is not something you say about yourself,” he says. “It is something others say about you. In the long run, I don’t think that it will serve them well.”

Jacob Leenerts, the creative director of the business-naming consulting firm Naminium, is no fan of the Truist brand, either. The “-ist” ending “doesn’t generally have a good connotation,” he says – think “racist” and “misogynist.” A fabricated name also can “be antithetical to gaining people’s trust,” he adds, trust being the gold standard in the banking industry.

When Atlantic Union Bank rebranded earlier this year following its $500 million, all-stock acquistion of Reston-based Access National Corp., its leadership had a few goals for its new name. First and foremost, it had to be made up of “actual words that could be found in a dictionary,” says Atlantic Union CEO John Asbury.

The bank wanted to keep the Union brand due to its history (it’s descended from Union Bank & Trust, formed in 1921) and brand recognition but it also needed to differentiate itself from a host of similarly named banks across the nation. It chose the word “Atlantic” due to its Mid-Atlantic positioning with branch locations in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina.

“And ‘Bank? ’ That’s what we do. We’re a bank, ” says Atlantic Union President Maria P. Tedesco. “Those three pillars of the name signify what it is. … It’s who we are. We’re not trying to be anything different. Why would we? … We’re not trying to be trendy. ”

Adds Asbury: “We manage people’s money. It’s serious business. We’re not an app on someone’s iPhone. This is a federally insured bank. … We’re very real; we’re authentic. What you see is what you get. ”

Regardless, made-up names such as Truist have proliferated in recent decades — partly out of necessity.

With so many companies launching every week, it’s difficult to find a name that has not already been trademarked, and, while O’Keefe can’t warmly embrace the appellation Truist, he thinks the bank itself should be fine.

“It’s a good company,” he says. “I hope it prevails.”

Amazon HQ2 prompts more cloud computing degrees

The Washington metro area has an enviable problem: It has one of the highest concentrations of tech jobs in the country, but nowhere near enough qualified applicants to fill them.

In the past 12 months, says Chad Knights, provost of information and engineering technologies at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), more than 30,000 area job postings have mentioned “the cloud,” the term for software and services that run over the internet. Out of that number, 5,500 specifically requested cloud-solutions architects and 500 required it.

“We have a lot to do,” says Steven B. Partridge, NOVA’s vice president of strategic partnerships and workforce innovation. “We needed to triple the number of graduates in the next five to 10 years — and that was before Amazon arrived.” By 2030, Amazon estimates, it will have added 25,000 employees to its HQ2 facility in Arlington, expected to grow to an extraordinary 38,000 by 2034.

Meeting such unprecedented demand is requiring an unprecedented approach — at speed — and NOVA, George Mason University and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have risen to the challenge.

In the months since Amazon announced that it would build its East Coast headquarters campus in Northern Virginia, the three institutions have joined forces to fast-track the establishment of a bachelor’s degree in cloud computing that will produce graduates needed to fill all those well-paid positions that are going begging.

Last fall, NOVA began offering the Cloud Computing Specialization of the Information Systems Technology Associate of Applied Science degree. “We just call it the cloud degree,” says Knights — for obvious reasons. Thirty students enrolled in its initial class, and 112 are in the program now. By next spring, NOVA expects to have 300 cloud-degree students.

They will be able to transfer their credits to George Mason, which will begin offering classes in cloud computing this fall and will launch its degree program in 2020. That ability to transfer credits saves NOVA students an average of $15,000 to $20,000 in overall college costs.

Both NOVA and GMU are working closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on their curricula. “AWS identified the skills and competencies successful employees must have, and our faculty designed the courses,” says Michelle Marks, Mason’s vice president for academic innovation and new ventures.

Students at both NOVA and GMU will be working in Amazon virtual classrooms using “the exact tools that a pro would use,” Knights says. These tools will not be exclusively applicable to Amazon, either, but will help staff other local tech giants such as Northrop Grumman, Micron and ManTech.

“What’s good for Amazon is also good for the companies, organizations and governments of Northern Virginia,” Marks says.

Ken Eisner, director of worldwide education programs for AWS, has been pivotal in the collaboration that is producing these new degrees in cloud computing. “It’s inspiring to see the amount of collaboration that is going on,” he says.

“This,” he says, “is not a once in and out. This is a model for the rest of the world.”

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