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Cycling industry rolls into Roanoke

Roanoke is on a roll with bicycling enthusiasts.

Already known as a mountain-biking mecca — earning a rare Silver-Level Ride Center designation from the International Mountain Bicycling Association — Virginia’s Blue Ridge region has broadened its brand by becoming the site of a national bicycling championship this summer and persuading the nation’s premier women’s cycling team to move its operations base from Idaho to Roanoke.

In March, Colorado-based USA Cycling Inc., the national governing body for the sport of cycling, announced that Virginia’s Blue Ridge would host the 2022 Amateur Road National Championships from June 29 to July 2 in Roanoke.

Local economic development officials see gold in them thar bikes.

Landon Howard, president of Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge, the region’s destination marketing organization, estimates that VVBR’s sponsorship of the women’s team will generate an annual economic impact of $23 million
in earned media and brand recognition/impressions for the Roanoke region as the team participates in nearly 25 races around the country, along with local and state events drawing some of the top racers in the world to the region.

The summer amateur road championships are projected to yield another $1.3 million to $1.5 million for the region, Howard says.

When the same event was held in Hagerstown, Maryland, in 2018, it generated direct spending of $1.5 million and drew athletes from 42 states, says Tara McCarthy, USA Cycling’s director of national events, adding that average hotel occupancy was 85.8% during the event.

“Certainly, this is a major economic development strategy,” Howard adds. “We want to use the fact that this team and now these championships that we’re attracting may also attract the interest of business and people that are in the cycling industry.”

The USA Cycling event announcement came just two months after Team TWENTY24 — which has earned 14 Olympic and Paralympic medals, 17 world championships and numerous national championships — said it was setting up shop in the Roanoke area.

The team, renamed Virginia’s Blue Ridge TWENTY24, includes six professional athletes, five virtual Zwift eSports athletes and 27 junior athletes from 9 to 17 years old. The “24” in the team’s name refers to the Paris 2024 Olympics.

“There’s no question [that] the cycling industry is growing tremendously throughout the world,” Howard says. “And so, we’re going to be at the top of the game on that.” 

Turning on a dime

Though many American consumers may not think about it much, trucks move just about everything they buy, use, eat, drink and wear.

The U.S. trucking industry hauled 72.5% of all freight transported nationwide in 2019, according to the Arlington-based American Trucking Associations.

Why should anybody care? Because the ranks of truckers are shrinking: Last year, the nationwide shortage of truckers was estimated to be 80,000, up from 60,800 in 2018 and 50,700 in 2017.

The shortage could more than double by 2030, the ATA projects. Part of the problem is due to the high average age of truckers and an increasing number of retirements. Other factors include a shortage of women truck drivers, just 7% of all 3.36 million U.S. commercial truck drivers; the inability of some candidates to pass a drug test, complicated by the growing legalization of marijuana; and a federal law prohibiting truckers younger than 21 years old from crossing state lines.

“This is our No. 1 issue,” says Dale Bennett, president and CEO of the Richmond-based Virginia Trucking Association, who puts Virginia’s trucker shortage somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000 drivers. “We had a shortage of drivers before the pandemic hit,” he notes, adding that once COVID-19 arrived, “it just exacerbated it.”

On the national level, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 passed by Congress includes a nationwide pilot program — the Safe Driver Apprenticeship Program — to train truckers under the age of 21 to cross state lines, which could provide some relief, Bennett says.

But to help turn the situation around on the state level, the Virginia Trucking Association partnered in January with the Virginia Ready Initiative (VA Ready), a nonprofit that is marshaling the training power of the state’s 23 community colleges to “reskill” Virginians for in-demand jobs through a series of credentialing programs.

“There’s been a lot of demand and interest from the community as the supply chain shortages and the logistics issues have really struck America,” says Taylor Beck, partnerships manager with VA Ready, which was started in summer 2020 by future Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his wife, Suzanne, now the first lady of Virginia. That demand and interest is “what sparked VA Ready to reach out to the Virginia Trucking Association,” Beck adds.

Initially founded to aid companies harmed by the pandemic, VA Ready has since identified three industries to focus on: technology, health care and manufacturing/skilled trades, a category that includes truck drivers. VA Ready’s more than 20 business partners include Dominion Energy Inc., Huntington Ingalls Industries and Sentara Healthcare.

Since January, when the trucking association began partnering with VA Ready on the initiative, 188 candidates have enrolled in the commercial driver’s license program. 

VA Ready first launched its own version of the CDL reskilling program in August 2020. Since then, a total of 963 people have enrolled in CDL classes with VA Ready’s help, with 393 earning their certification and CDL. Of those who successfully completed the course, 197, or 50.1%, are now employed.

Students who complete the course successfully are eligible to receive a $1,000 award from VA Ready. Depending on which community college one attends, it can take 6 to 12 weeks to complete a certificate course and earn a CDL.

Bennett says those enrolling in the partnership’s program with VA Ready are in their mid-30s on average, suggesting to him that they’re people who initially couldn’t get jobs in interstate trucking but are now giving it another shot.

The trucking association has eight of its member companies participating, including Chesapeake-based Service Transfer Inc., one of the biggest trucking firms in Hampton Roads.

“There’s a great need for more port truckers; there’s a severe shortage,” says Ray Jalkio, Service Transfer’s vice president of sales and also president of the Tidewater Motor Truck Association, which has 60 member companies, most of which haul containers to and from the Port of Virginia.

“We want to add drivers to our fleet,” Jalkio says. “Our hope is that through our sponsorship of the program, we’ll benefit.”  

Forward motion

Shenandoah is known for apple blossoms, but something else is popping up this spring in Front Royal: a new 340,000-square-foot warehouse logistics center.

About a half-mile from the Virginia Inland Port, the center is one of roughly a dozen projects in the region built by Equus Capital Partners Ltd., a commercial real estate agency based in the Philadelphia area.

It offers further evidence that when the Port of Virginia took a gamble and opened a rail-linked intermodal container facility in Front Royal 33 years ago, it was onto something. “We’re a huge believer in the inland port and a big fan of the region,” says Dan DiLella Jr., senior vice president at Equus.

In the years after the inland port opened, surrounding land was gobbled up for development, eventually pushing some big users of the facility — among them, Home Depot, Geodis, Rubbermaid and Mercury Paper Inc. — to Equus-built properties in the nearby Winchester area, 10 to 20 miles away, DiLella adds.

The company’s new facility, known as the Virginia Inland Port Logistics Center, sits just down the street from the port’s terminal. As of early March, at least three potential tenants were interested, DiLella notes.

The Port of Virginia earned pioneer status of sorts when it opened the Virginia Inland Port in March 1989 in Front Royal, about 70 miles west of Washington, D.C. The idea was to set up a cargo hub just a stone’s throw from Interstates 66 and 81, linked by rail to the port’s ocean terminals about 220 miles to the south.

It worked.

Virginia was able to divert cargo from Baltimore, as officials had hoped, and surpass it as a container port. In 2010, the port resorted to the same playbook when it leased the aging Port of Richmond on the west side of the James River just south of the city, next to Interstate 95.

The Virginia Port Authority eventually poured $24 million in state, federal and its own funds into what is now known as Richmond Marine Terminal, where a river barge service hauls containers to and from Hampton Roads on three round-trip sailings a week along the James.

At a time when clogged ports worldwide have generated headlines, both of Virginia’s inland-port facilities have served as safety nets for the port’s big container facilities in Portsmouth and Norfolk, helping to maintain fluidity as cargo volume grows.

Improvements in Richmond, such as an expanded, modernized gate complex, are nearly complete, while $26 million in upgrades planned since 2018 in Front Royal are still in the pipeline.

The two inland ports’ container volumes last year — 31,282 in Front Royal and 40,058 in Richmond — amounted to just a small fraction of the port’s overall volume of nearly 2 million containers, though Port spokesman Joe Harris says it’s a critical fraction because of the role the ports play in keeping container volume in Hampton Roads moving.

In January 2022, a study of the port’s fiscal year 2021 economic impact by William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business found that the contributions from Front Royal and Richmond dipped slightly from those reported in a fiscal year 2018 study.

“The big story here is supply chain crisis,” says W&M international business and marketing professor K. Scott Swan, who conducted the study, adding that a shortage of containers created because of scores of marooned ships, especially off the West Coast, created a frenzy to get freshly emptied boxes on their way back to ships without delay.

The inland ports’ economic value “goes far beyond just moving containers,” Swan’s study notes, highlighting value-added purchases, labor income and employment among their contributions.

Late last year, the state announced that Montreal-based Nature’s Touch Frozen Foods LLC, a global supplier of frozen fruit, was expanding in Front Royal, building a 126,000-square-foot facility across the street from its current smaller location. It’s expected to open in early 2023.

Though its existing operation sits virtually next door to the inland port, Nature’s Touch has not been a customer because of special refrigeration needs unavailable there.

“We’ve had limited success using the inland port today,” says John Tentomas, president and owner of Nature’s Touch. His company’s decision to expand there, however, was made with the understanding that the situation will change soon. “We expect to be using it,” Tentomas adds.

Nature’s Touch’s new complex is being built by Harrisonburg-based InterChange Group Inc., a third-party logistics provider with extensive warehouse operations in Virginia.

“Larger companies are using the inland port,” says InterChange President Devon Anders, citing a difference between companies moving five containers a month and those moving 100.

At Front Royal, companies experience something unusual, he adds: “Getting in and out of the inland port is absolutely wonderful. … Their turn times are so quick,” Anders says, referring to the total time it takes trucks to load and unload at the terminal.

The soon-to-open Equus facility will be in the same neighborhood as Nature’s Touch, Anders notes. “They wouldn’t be doing that if they didn’t think there was a market there.”

Rocket Lab to boost Eastern Shore space biz

The Eastern Shore and Accomack County are well-acquainted with the rockets’ red glare.

One of the oldest launch sites in the world, the NASA Wallops Flight Facility launched its first rocket on July 4, 1945. Given its history, it seems fitting that Wallops’ rocket business got a big payload boost in late February when California-based Rocket Lab USA announced plans to build a 250,000-square-foot facility on Accomack’s Wallops Island for manufacturing Rocket Lab’s reusable Neutron rockets. The company also plans to construct a new launch pad.

“Neutron is huge for the Eastern Shore,” says Ted Mercer, CEO and executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, known as Virginia Space, which owns and operates the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops.

“They’re going to bring 250 jobs,” Mercer says of Rocket Lab, adding that while most if not all of the positions are expected to be in Accomack, exact details aren’t yet known.

The state’s aerospace and unmanned systems industry workforce is projected to grow by 8.5% during the next decade, according to state Secretary of Commerce and Trade Caren Merrick.

“The growth potential is huge in the future,” Mercer says, adding that as of 2018, the “Wallops Cluster” made up of NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Northrop Grumman Corp., the Navy and Virginia Space, among
others, had an annual economic impact of $1.37 billion on the Eastern Shore.

Accomack County Administrator Mike Mason estimates that the Neutron program at buildout will generate roughly $2 million in direct annual property tax revenue to the county, which would increase the county’s total property tax revenues by roughly 6%.

“We’re a rural county,” says Supervisor Ron Wolff, who represents the district where the project will unfold. For Accomack, 250 jobs is “staggering; we’re scrambling to find places to put them all,” he says, adding it would be about a year before new workers start arriving.

Accomack’s planning commission has already recommended building a 140-unit townhouse development roughly 20 minutes from Wallops, Wolff says.

Rocket Lab broke ground on Neutron’s production facility in April, but a spokesperson declined to provide details on the construction’s timeline or the rocket’s launch. Virginia committed to an incentive package valued at about $57 million,
and Rocket Lab expects to spend about $103 million supporting Neutron’s development in the state over the next eight years.

Accomack has a strong relationship with NASA and Virginia Space, Mason says: “When they succeed, we succeed.”  

Martinsville moves forward on reversion

Exactly when it happens remains up in the air, but the city of Martinsville is set on downsizing to town status.

It’s been about a year and a half since Martinsville City Council set in motion the complicated process of dropping the locality’s status as one of Virginia’s 38 independent cities and morphing it into the state’s 191st town, partially consolidating with Henry County. On May 26, the two governments signed a non-legally binding memorandum of understanding supporting Martinsville’s reversion to a town within Henry. Martinsville hopes to revert by July 1, 2022, but Henry County officials are eyeing a 2023 time frame.

Why did Martinsville put the reversion in motion? “Economics,” explains Martinsville Mayor Kathy Lawson. “It’s the financial aspect. We have so much duplication.”

Virginia is the only state in the nation that grants independent status to cities under its constitution, making cities and counties mutually exclusive.

Getting into the weeds of how that happened and what it means especially for small cities in rural areas is not for the faint-hearted, but the bottom line is that it leads to situations in which cities and adjacent or surrounding counties end up with parallel school systems, government administrations and constitutional officers.

Since the late 1980s, the state has let small cities petition to “revert” to town status, partially merging the former city with a surrounding county and shifting major costs, such as operating schools for example, to the county.

“The cost to provide services for the citizens of Martinsville continues to increase, while revenue does not,” City Manager Leon Towarnicki told Martinsville City Council in November 2019.

The next month, the council put the reversion process in motion.

“This is an — undeniably — a negative financial event for the county,” says George Lyle, Henry County attorney. “We think the annual expense will start off at $5 million a year,” excluding one-time capital costs such as moving courthouses.

Options under consideration to meet those financial challenges include raising the county’s real-estate tax rate by 18%, from 55 cents per $100 of assessed value to 65 cents, he adds.

Martinsville and Henry County officials entered mediation talks in late April. The state Commission on Local Government, which must weigh in on the matter, has an Aug. 8 deadline to issue a report. That document eventually will go to a three-judge panel appointed by the Virginia Supreme Court, which typically rules on reversion requests within six to nine months.

Only three former cities in Virginia have successfully reverted to town status: South Boston in 1995; Clifton Forge in 2001; and Bedford in 2013. 

(In)land of opportunity

Now more than 80 years old, Richmond Marine Terminal is hardly acting like an old-timer.

Nestled along the west side of the James River, about five miles south of downtown, it’s one of two inland ports operated by the Port of Virginia — terminals situated in the interior of the commonwealth that extend the reach of the port and give shippers additional options for pushing cargo via rail, truck and river barge to other areas of the state and nation.

Richmond’s counterpart, the rail-connected Virginia Inland Port, sits about 60 miles west of Washington, D.C., in Front Royal. Established in 1989, the
operation
played a key role in siphoning cargo away from Baltimore, enabling Virginia to overtake it as a container port.

“We were sort of the first ones to do that,” says Joe Dorto, former CEO of Virginia International Terminals, the Virginia Port Authority’s operations arm. “It was a gamble, but it was one that paid off.”

Over the last decade, the ports of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, have opened rail-linked inland ports much like Front Royal’s.

The Richmond terminal is another apparent trailblazer, with the port billing it as “the nation’s longest-running and most successful container-on-barge service.”

Not too long ago, however, it was a very different story.

Owned by the city and known as the Port of Richmond, the operation’s business tanked in 2009 as the Great Recession continued to unfold; waterborne-cargo volume plummeted by 78%.

A year earlier, however, a lifeline was thrown its way by the James River Barge Line’s 64 Express, a barge service ferrying containers between the Port of Virginia’s container terminals and the Richmond facility.

Two years later, in 2010, the Port of Virginia signed a five-year lease for the facility. And in 2016, the port extended the lease by another 40 years to 2056.

From all indications, that commitment by the port appears to have paid off.

Though year-over-year container volume at the Port of Virginia fell by 5.3% in 2020, a decline attributed to the pandemic and tariffs, container volume at the Richmond terminal grew by 12.1%, while the Virginia Inland Port saw a drop of 16.5%.

It wasn’t the first time that the Richmond facility — on a percentage basis — outperformed its parent organization and its partner inland port.

So how to explain Richmond’s rebirth?

Proximity to I-95, the number of major companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Lidl, Bissell and Brother International locating distribution centers and warehouses around the terminal over the past few years, as well as the ability to handle refrigerated cargo via its barge service, help explain why Richmond Marine Terminal is performing so well, says Joe Harris, Port of Virginia spokesman. “All those things are contributing to the success, and we don’t see that changing.”

The more than half-dozen companies that have invested in sites near the Richmond facility since the signing of the 40-year lease have created nearly 700 jobs, according to the port.

The Richmond operation “is a good example of the economic spillover of maritime infrastructure development,” says Ricardo Ungo, director of the International Maritime Institute at Old Dominion University.

Over the past six years, more than $24 million — through a mix of state, federal and port funds — has been invested in a range of improvements at the facility, including the addition of a new crane, a second barge, bulkhead repairs and an array of rail enhancements.

Improvements are also scheduled at Virginia Inland Port, where the port is working on a $26 million project to improve traffic flow and expand the terminal’s cargo handling capabilities.

Railyard design work there also is nearing completion, while plans for another rail project needed some modifications, slowing it down somewhat. Nevertheless, work on that project is expected to begin in early 2022, Harris adds.

Both of Virginia’s inland terminals handle only small slivers of the port’s overall container volume. Last year, Virginia Inland Port handled 28,493 containers, or 1.8% of the port’s total volume of 1.55 million containers, while Richmond moved 42,254 containers, or 2.7% of the total.

While cargo is a very important part of the picture, it’s not the whole story, Harris says.

Another part of the port’s mission is statewide economic development, creating jobs and attracting new investment, which the inland ports have delivered, Harris says.

And both Harris and Ungo say the inland operations provide another key function: getting containers out of the Hampton Roads port terminals, freeing up warehousing and container storage space and relieving congestion.

The inland terminals are also beneficial to the environment, helping to cut carbon emissions, Ungo says. 

In the last fiscal year, the Richmond barge operation offered rail and barge alternatives for about 80,000 truck trips, according to the port.

“Barges and rails versus trucks — those are options that need to be considered,” Ungo says. “What we are seeing is that, even on a very small scale, we see that these activities are providing results.” 

ODU mapping tool to help site wind turbines

The answer, they say, is blowin’ in the wind.

In August 2020, Old Dominion University won a $775,000 grant from the Department of Defense that will help create a “wind energy siting solution,” enabling offshore and onshore wind-energy developers to avoid potential conflicts with military operations and trainings.

The ODU grant followed Dominion Energy Inc.’s June 2020 installation of two monster wind turbines some 27 miles off Cape Henry during the summer — the first wind turbines in the nation in federal waters. 

The two turbines — each standing more than 600 feet above the ocean surface — eventually will be joined by more than 180 even larger turbines in an adjacent 112,800-acre expanse of the Atlantic Ocean leased by Dominion Energy from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Plans call for construction to begin in 2024 on the largest single offshore wind project in the country. Known as Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and scheduled for completion in 2026, it will provide 2.6 gigawatts of power, enough for more than 650,000 customers.

As big as it’ll be, though, the project will get Virginia only halfway to its goal of generating 5.2 gigawatts from wind energy by 2034, says George Hagerman, senior project scientist at ODU’s Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography.

That means more offshore wind lease areas will have to be identified, though exactly where those will be located is, well, up in the air. Part of this is due to all the stakeholders that have to be considered. Dominion Energy’s project had to take into account the military, ports and commercial shippers.

That’s where ODU’s new siting solution tool comes in.

ODU’s tool, once rolled out, will help in the development of future wind-energy sites by providing a “web-based map portal,” weaving together unclassified military GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data layers and visualizing offshore and onshore features such as training routes, restricted airspace and radar coverage, says Tom Allen, professor of geography and political science at ODU, who will serve as principal investigator.

The tool will cover the state and extend 200 miles out into the ocean, across the “Exclusive Economic Zone,” he says.

“Not long ago, the ocean was considered open space,” Hagerman explains. “Nobody had to worry about where they fished; and once outside designated shipping lanes, nobody had to worry about where they sailed their ships.”

Offshore wind energy has changed all of that.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” he says. 

Fairfax indoor ski resort plan may spur economic flurry

Vail. Breckenridge. Aspen. Fairfax?

You read that right.

Skiers — someday — could swoosh over fresh powder at an indoor ski resort if everything falls into place for a proposed public-private partnership project on portions of the I-95 Landfill Complex in Lorton.

Fairfax Peak, as the project is known, would feature a 450,000-square-foot indoor snow sports facility, a 1,700-foot ski slope and a 100-plus-room luxury hotel, among other features.

An interim agreement with the developers — Alpine-X LLC, a Virginia firm linked with Netherlands-based indoor ski resort company Snow World International B.V. — was passed by the Fairfax Board of Supervisors on Nov. 17, extending a study period to Dec. 31, 2021.

The complex, projected to cost more than $200 million, would be the first of its kind in the nation, says John Emery, a partner with Alpine-X and one of the original developers and former CEO of Great Wolf Resorts Inc. The latter company maintains nearly 20 indoor water parks nationwide.

The Fairfax ski facility, he estimates, would generate annual revenue in the $50 million range and employ more than 600 people.

The interim agreement gives the developers a lock on further property studies and the feasibility of the project through 2021, as well as an option to renew the agreement for another year.

Concerns about environmental impacts figured prominently at an Oct. 6 hearing on the interim agreement.

“We’re all facing irreversible warming of the planet — this is happening now,” said Renee Grebe, with the environmental advocacy nonprofit Audubon Naturalist Society, who was among the speakers at the hearing. “Is producing snow inside, year-round, the best use of energy?”

The concept of indoor ski resorts — including on top of closed landfill sites — is not new, Emery says.

“I am aware of six of them in Europe,” says Niels ten Berge, another Alpine-X partner, referring specifically to resorts built on former landfill properties. Emery said the developers have met with environmental advocates about the project and share concerns about energy conservation.

“That’s in our best interests as well,” he says.

Energy-efficient technologies the developers could use include collaborating with Covanta’s nearby waste-to-energy plant to capture and reuse steam, along with using solar energy. Other parts of the I-95 Landfill Complex — including a recycling facility and a household hazardous waste drop-off — will continue to operate if Fairfax Peak becomes a reality.

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A whole new ball game in Va. Beach

Attention, athletic leagues: The $68 million, 285,000-square-foot Virginia Beach Sports Center is open for business.

“We’re ready to get this party started,” says Nancy Helman, the city’s director of sports marketing, who celebrated the facility’s Oct. 1 debut with Mayor Bobby Dyer and other city officials.

The cavernous structure has 12 basketball courts, 24 volleyball courts, nine field-hockey courts and a 200-meter, hydraulically banked track (which can control the track’s height) with permanent seating for 5,000 spectators, among many other features.

While not big enough to host an NCAA basketball tournament game, it would be a good fit for the NCAA  indoor track-and-field championship, Helman says.

Dyer says the new center will help the city morph into more of a year-round tourist destination. Though competition wasn’t expected to start in earnest until November, the center is already in demand.

“I mean, my phone rings off the hook,” says Amber Giancola, the facility’s general manager.

The center has already booked 54 events for its first year, 39 of them new to the local market, Dyer says.

While current revenue projections were unavailable, a 2016 report provided by the city estimated that the center could generate more than $630,000 annually in city tax revenue.

In 2019, sports tourism nationwide generated $45.1 billion in spending, according to a July 2020 report for the Cincinnati-based Sports Events & Tourism Association, or SportsETA, which speaks for the industry.

That, of course, was before COVID-19.

The SportsETA report projected that as of December, at least 75 million fewer people will have traveled to sports events across the nation since March, compared with the same period a year earlier, resulting in a $20 billion loss in direct spending in 2020.

Al Kidd, SportsETA’s president and CEO, is very familiar with Virginia Beach’s new facility and has visited there.

“I’m really excited about what you guys have,” he says, noting that the facility’s strengths include a state-of-the-art track and a convenient mid-Atlantic location.

This, however, is tempered by the cloud posed by the coronavirus, he adds. Helman says the center will have an array of virus-mitigation measures specific to each event.

“The health and safety of the athletes and fans and families that come to visit in Virginia Beach is obviously the top priority,” she says.

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Canceled oyster fest hits Urbanna’s wallet

Here’s a pandemic casualty unlikely to appear on Dr. Fauci’s radar: The annual Urbanna Oyster Festival, traditionally set for the first weekend in November, has been shucked off.

Citing risks from COVID-19, the Urbanna Oyster Festival Foundation, the event’s sponsor, called off the festival for the first time in 63 years, setting in motion an economic tsunami that might amount to a blip elsewhere, but not in the Middle Peninsula.

The tiny riverside town of about 500 people, nestled on the banks of the Rappahannock River about an hour east of Richmond, typically draws more than 50,000 people from all over the country to the two-day event.

The yearly invasion generates about $3 million in direct sales within a five-county radius, says Joe Heyman, chairman of the foundation’s board.

“The schools in this county have to close on Friday due to it,” says Becky Bullock, who owns the Urbanna Market IGA on Main Street with her husband, Harry. “Buses cannot get through, so the entire school system shuts down.”

Michele Hutton, the town’s treasurer, says Urbanna stands to lose about $20,000 — roughly $10,000 in meals tax revenue and another $10,000 in slip fees at its marina.

Others, though, stand to face bigger losses, she adds.

The festival is the biggest fundraiser of the year for about seven major nonprofits, groups such as the local
Boys & Girls Club, the fire department and Christ Church Parish, which together split a yearly net profit of as much as $350,000, Heyman says.

Businesses, of course, will suffer, too.

For years, J&W Seafood in nearby Deltaville has provided the Lions Club with about 325 gallons of oysters for its fritters, says owner Susan Wade. Her projected loss? About $27,000.

“It hurts a lot,” she says.

The Bullocks’ market also has come to rely on the oyster festival for about 15% of its yearly sales, Harry Bullock says.

“We’re worried, I can tell you that,” he adds, noting that roughly 15 to 20 other businesses like his are in the same boat. “Everybody’s going to take a hit.”

Like many other festivals, some elements will continue this year virtually, Heyman says. The oyster festival queen will be crowned, as will the winner of the Virginia Oyster Shucking Championship. Both contests can be viewed online Nov. 7 at urbannaoysterfestival.com.

 

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