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byline: Tim Thornton

Kentucky and Tennessee students get in-state tuition

Local connections matter more than state lines. That’s true in Southwest Virginia where the commonwealth bumps against Kentucky and Tennessee.

“We all cross borders a lot,” says Donna Henry, chancellor of the University of Virginia at Wise. “We all cross borders for heath care, for shopping, for going to the movies, for food.”

All that interaction is one reason U.Va.-Wise has begun offering in-state tuition to students from Kentucky and Tennessee who live within 50 air miles of the Wise campus.

U.Va.-Wise began in 1954 as Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, a two-year school with 109 students. Virginia committed $5,000 to the school’s first year and $5,000 to the second — if the college survived. That was more than a decade before Virginia’s community college system was created. The nearest state-supported four-year colleges were Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and its women’s division in Radford. It takes 2½ hours to drive from Wise to Radford now, but it took longer in pre-interstate 1954. East Tennessee State University, the closest state college to the Wise campus today, is still an hour and a half away.

“U.Va.-Wise was created by the people in Wise County to provide affordable access to higher education” for a region that didn’t have that, Henry says. U.Va.-Wise has grown into a four-year liberal arts college with 2,067 students on a 369-acre campus.

The college has offered reduced tuition rates to some Tennessee and Kentucky students before, but allowing them in-state tuition will cut costs even more. Those students will still pay an additional capital fee, so their total costs will be a little more than Virginia students pay.

The 50-mile extension of in-state tuition includes the Tri-Cities – Bristol, Kingsport and Johnson City – along with six counties in Tennessee and 10 in Kentucky.

The Appalachian Regional Commission classifies 11 of those 16 counties as economically distressed. That means an index of unemployment rates, poverty rates and per-capita income ranks them in the lowest 10 percent of U.S. counties. That may be the biggest motivation behind the new tuition policy.

“We really want to make college affordable and give students in the Appalachian region the ability to advance in higher education and be successful,” Henry says.

More work coming for Volvo’s New River Valley plant

Thanks to a new long-haul truck, Volvo has recalled all of the 2,400 workers it laid off in December at its New River Valley Plant.

The truck has more safety and comfort for drivers, more efficiency for owners and more jobs for Volvo’s factory in Dublin, the company’s largest truck plant. That plant is ready to begin production of the redesigned VNL truck series in September.

“Our employment is linked to the market and to the units that we sell,” says Franky Marchand, vice president and general manager of the New River Valley plant. “Having a strong new product that is the latest truck on the market can only be good news.”

Volvo unveiled its latest truck series in the company’s new customer center, part of a $38 million investment that included a new paint line and updated robotics.

“It comes with expectations to grow the business,” says, Göran Nyberg, president of Volvo Trucks North America. “We are convinced that the values we bring to our customers will give us a higher share of business here in North America.”

Volvo has about 10 percent of that long-haul truck market. Mack, also owned by Volvo, has another 10 percent. Daimler’s Freightliner has well over a third of the market.

In addition to an aerodynamic design and efficient drive train that gets more than 13 miles to the gallon while moving 80,000 pounds, the new VNL has improved safety systems, remote diagnostics and remote reprogramming. It has charging stations, USB ports, reclining bunks, connectivity, a rear view camera, a navigation system and two refrigerators – one of them under the passenger seat.

The company plans to show off these new trucks at the customer center and the adjacent test track. About 3,000 people already are visiting the track each year. With the new customer center, Marchand says, the company expects to “explode that number.”

Government regulations requiring more fuel efficiency and less pollution provide some incentive for truck buyers, Marchand says, but truck manufacturing is driven primarily by economic cycles and fleet replacement cycles, which seem to be turning in Volvo’s favor. The economy seems to be expanding, and the trucks are getting old. 

“There is plenty to be replaced,” Marchand says. “If the economy stays strong, for us the future is nice and bright.”

Moving ahead

Things are changing at Radford University. If the university’s last administration was known for leading a transformative building boom — more than $300 million in facilities were added in 11 years — the focus of the current administration is reaching out to Radford’s stakeholders.

“I’ve worked for people who very much have viewed the human resource as the most important resource in any organization, and so when the human resource is at the center of everything that you do, and it’s at the center of your focus, you approach leadership in a radically different way,” says Radford President Brian Hemphill.

Hemphill focuses on looking forward.

“And in looking forward, I knew it would be important for me to look at how we begin to connect with our faculty, our staff and our students.”

Hemphill began that process by holding open forums soon after he arrived on campus in July 2016.  He met with representatives of each college in the university. That led to meetings with faculty in all 37 departments “to hear in their own words some of the strengths, weaknesses and some of the things we need to think about as a university.”

Good reviews from faculty
The faculty seems to appreciate Hemphill’s approach. Every two years, an internal faculty survey asks faculty to rate their responses to a series of statements on a scale from 1 to 5. This year, Hemphill scored very high in response to such questions as, “The president values faculty opinion, “I am satisfied with the leadership of the president,” and  “The president does all she/he can to meet the needs of our university.” 

Every new president gets what Faculty Senate President Jake Fox calls a “honeymoon bump” in these surveys, reflecting optimism about a new administration. Yet Fox says the reaction to Hemphill is more than that.

Hemphill has earned that positive response, Fox says,  by meeting with faculty members, learning their names, responding to their emails and working hard to get their support. Hemphill’s administration has begun working through a backlog of Faculty Senate resolutions.

Some of them, Fox says, have been on the provost’s desk for three or four years. “It’s a real change in atmosphere and you can feel it on the campus,” Fox says. “It’s just a different environment.”

More demands and questions
Radford may need every bit of that goodwill and open communication at a time when society is making more demands on higher education while also questioning the value of a college degree.

The commonwealth has set a goal to become the best-educated state in the nation by 2030. Nonetheless, an on-campus task force warns of a growing tide of anti-intellectualism. In addition, a recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 58 percent of Republicans and

Republican-leaning independents say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country. On top of those trends, everyone is worried about rising college costs.

“That’s a fact that we’re facing a value proposition in higher education,” Hemphill says. “More people are asking if college is worth the cost, and many of them are saying it’s not. At the same time, employers are saying they need more workers with more and better skills.

“I think that we find ourselves at a place and time in our history that we need to be more mindful of some of the needs of business and industry, some of the messages from business and industry,” Hemphill says. “I think we have to be more mindful of what we’re hearing from parents and students in terms of them being able to attend the university and be successful.”

Higher graduation goals
Graduation rates, of course, are one way to measure a university’s success. According to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, nearly half of the students who entered Radford in the 2010-11 academic year graduated in four years; and 72.6 percent of them earned their bachelor’s degrees in six years. That’s considerably better than the 62.7 percent six-year graduation rate for the class that entered Radford in 2005-06, but the university aims to drive it higher.

It will have to if Virginia is going to achieve its goal of having 60 percent of its working-age population with at least an associate degree by 2030. The Virginia number now is 46.6 percent, but it stands at only 31 percent for non-Asian minority residents and just 27 percent for people in  rural areas, such as the Appalachian region where Radford sits.

Improving its retention rate — the percentage of students who decide to continue their college careers — is one step toward improving graduation rates. Radford has already made some progress there, improving 3 percentage points, to more than 77 percent last year.

Strategic plan
A task force of more than 180 students, faculty, administrators, staff members and community representatives began working on Radford’s next strategic plan last October. The draft is scheduled to go to the board of visitors in September, with approval of a final version expected in December. That’s when the plan will be released to the public, Hemphill says. “It will be a very public document with a very public evaluation.”

While the document isn’t complete, its Challenges and Opportunities Subgroup indentified a half-dozen themes in March, including shifting attitudes about education’s value and purpose and, of course, its cost.

“The anti-intellectualism displayed by some may place more emphasis on one of higher education’s goals, preparing students for a career, while devaluing other equally important outcomes such as learning to think, valuing diversity, having a global view or becoming outstanding citizens,” the subgroup’s report says. “For example, the fine arts and humanities may be less valued than more explicitly career-oriented and technical fields. Radford University will need to address these challenges and the ongoing shift in cultural values.”

The liberal arts aspect of a Radford education is important, Hemphill says, but, “we also receive pressure as it relates to STEM and other key areas in terms of preparing students for the workforce, and we have to make sure that we’re finding our balance, that we’re respecting our tradition of who we’ve always been in terms of teaching excellence but also focus on making sure that we’re being responsive to some of the requests that we’re receiving from business and industry, from the General Assembly and other groups out there.”

Responding to those requests and pressures may mean restructuring how education is delivered and measured, Hemphill says.

“We still very much have, for the most part in higher education, this industrial model of delivery, when you’re talking about seat time, when you’re talking about 120 hours to earn a degree, and we find ourselves in a society that’s moving at the speed of light, which I refer to as a post-industrial society,” he says. “And are we really responding? Are we looking at accelerated degree programs that will allow people to work from a self-paced standpoint that’s much more affordable, that will drive affordability? Are we looking at how we are reaching out to populations that historically are not being served?”

There are at least 28 million people in the United States with some college credit, but no degree, Hemphill says. What are colleges and universities — particularly his university — doing to reach them? “We just have to be more nimble as an institution,” he says.

Proximity to Tech
Hemphill believes Radford is well-positioned to deal with the tumult in higher education, in large part because of what he sees as the faculty’s understanding of the importance of innovation and the administration’s desire to join in and support innovation. Radford already is more nimble than some institutions, he says.

Radford also is near Virginia Tech, and sometimes has seemed to live in Tech’s shadow. In fact, for more than two decades, Radford was part of Tech, its  Women’s Division.  Hemphill sees the proximity to Tech as an opportunity. “We both have a unique mission to serve the commonwealth of Virginia,” Hemphill says. “That’s what the focus should be. How are we serving the commonwealth? How are we serving this region? How are they serving the world?”

Hemphill’s description of Radford’s relationship with Tech sounds a lot like his description of his connection with Radford University stakeholders: “It’s about how we can lock arms and work together.”

Radford’s president
Brian Hemphill became Radford’s seventh president on July 1, 2016, chosen from a field of 76 candidates.

An author who’s written about a number of topics related to higher education, Hemphill came to Radford after four years as president of West Virginia State University, a historically black college that began as the West Virginia Colored Institute, a land-grant institution founded in 1891.

In 2016, more than 53 percent of West Virginia State’s students were white. Its graduates include Katherine Johnson, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and one of the women whose work at NASA was chronicled in the book and movie “Hidden Figures.”

Hemphill and his wife, Marisela Rosas Hemphill, have four children.

A major gift
In April, less than a year into Brian Hemphill’s tenure as Radford University’s president, the university received a $5 million gift from Nancy and Pat Artis. Nancy Artis graduated from Radford in 1973, making the gift the largest Radford has  received from someone who earned a degree there.

The gift will create and sustain the Artis Endowed Scholarship Fund, which will award $3,000 scholarships to 67 Artis Scholars each year.

Senate Faculty President Jake Fox, an assistant professor of anthropology, points out this isn’t the first time the Artises have supported Radford’s College of Science and Technology.

“They’ve supported our college with many gifts before this,” Fox says, “but this was a doozy.”

In recognition of the gift, the college has been renamed the Artis College of Science and Technology.

Emory & Henry’s students bring new life to old hospital

Eventually, the students in Emory & Henry College’s School of Health Sciences will improve their patients’ health. Right now, they’re improving Marion’s economy.

“What we have done in our office is be the biggest cheerleader we can be for Emory because we see that the potential isn’t just filling up the old hospital,” says Marion Economic Development Director Ken Heath. “The potential is all the ancillary benefits we’re starting to see already – turning Marion from a pretty nice little, sleepy, cool town into a college town and all the benefits that brings.”

When Smyth County Community Hospital moved to new facilities in 2012, some folks worried the old hospital (built in 1965) would become an eyesore at the edge of town. Henderson Graham, a retired dentist, was determined that wouldn’t happen. He went to several schools promoting the idea of using the old building to teach new health professionals. Eventually, Emory & Henry, with its campus just 20 miles outside Marion, bought in.

“Henderson Graham is the one I fully credit with this whole shebang,” Heath says. “He was like a bulldog. He grabbed hold of that thing and wouldn’t let go until it thundered.”

Graham died before the college’s Marion campus opened. “He got to carry the ball almost to the goal line,” Heath says. The economic development director helped push it across.

The graduate programs of Emory & Henry’s School of Health Sciences are housed in the former hospital building. The doctor of physical therapy program’s inaugural cohort of 28 students had a white-coat ceremony in June, marking the beginning of their final year in the program. That year is devoted to clinical study. A month earlier, the 30 members of the college’s first class of physician assistants donned white coats, beginning a 27-month curriculum.

While they’re learning and supporting the local economy, students also are getting experience and helping locals through the Mel Leaman Free Clinic at Emory & Henry, the Obesity Research Center and the Falls Prevention Center.

Those programs, plus the master’s program in occupational therapy, have brought 120 students to the Marion campus. The college expects to increase that number to 180 this fall. Heath says the college expects to bring in hundreds more. “They’ve got some big dreams,” he says, “and I’m dreaming right along with them.”

Wholesome Harvest investing $22.1 million in bakery

Wholesome Harvest Baking plans to invest $22.1 million in new equipment and a new artisan bread production line at its Roanoke plant. The Virginia Jobs Investment Program (VJIP) will retrain more than 300 bakery employees so they can operate the new machinery.

Wholesome Harvest may not sound familiar, but some of its products may. Ever hear of Boboli pizza crust? Arnold Sandwich Thins? Thomas’ English Muffins? Sara Lee? Wholesome Harvest Baking makes all those, among other products.

The company’s history goes back more than a century to the Canada Bread Co.’s 1911 founding. The company expanded into the United States in 1996. In 2014, it became a subsidiary of Mexico-based Grupo Bimbo, which claims to be the largest baking company in the world, doing business in 22 countries across three continents.

The company’s website describes Wholesome Harvest as a major provider “of quality frozen and [partially baked] products to retail operators and in-store bakeries” offering packaged baked goods and producing private-label products for a number of grocery stores. It employs 1,400 people in seven bakeries across North America.

“For nearly 20 years, Wholesome Harvest Baking has provided gainful employment to hundreds of residents of the Roanoke Valley and also been a strong supporter of infrastructure development within the Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology, including the installation of sidewalks and initiation of bus service to the park,” says Roanoke Mayor Sherman P. Lea Sr. “I am delighted to see Wholesome Harvest’s further commitment to the community by announcing this expansion. It’s a good thing for our city — not just for our city, but for the whole valley and I’m all about that.”

Wholesome Harvest Baking President Dan Curtin said at the time of the expansion announcement, “We value our people who work in the Roanoke community and believe that a successful company is built on the talents of our many associates. We are proud to partner with the VJIP to provide our associates with quality training and are committed to fostering the personal and professional growth of our associates to provide our customers with exceptional products.”

Recruiting talent

In the 1990s, every community in the United States wanted to attract people like Mim Young and her husband, J.D.

Working in marketing, graphics and software design, they were solidly in the “creative class,” a group tagged by experts as cultural saviors and economic engines of the modern American city. The couple traveled across four states, measuring communities against 10 criteria.

They ended up in Roanoke. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” Young says.

Young’s praise for the Roanoke area is familiar. It’s a great place to raise a family. There’s little traffic to fight, lots of mountains to admire and lots of nature to enjoy. “If you love a livable place that’s manageable, and you want high quality of life, this is your place,” Young says.

“It’s a lovely place. If you lose your wallet in Roanoke, you’re probably going to get it back, and it’s probably going to have your money in it.”

Young saw something else in the Star City. “I saw it was cool before it saw it was cool,” she says.

The first time her family came to town, the Art Museum of Western Virginia (now the Taubman Museum of Art) was featuring the work of renowned Georgia folk artist Howard Finster. “Any place that is hip enough to have Howard Finster in its art gallery is hip enough for me,” she says.

Her grown children, however, now live in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.  “A lot of things that make it so livable and lovable in Roanoke are things that do not appeal to them,” Young says.

They aren’t the only ones. There are at least 20 colleges and universities within 60 miles of Roanoke, including a medical school in the city’s downtown. The area has more than a dozen craft breweries, an expanding innovation corridor, Virginia Tech and its Corporate Research Center and a well-publicized reputation as an outdoor adventure playground. Yet it still has a problem attracting and keeping young professionals.

Director of talent attraction
The Roanoke Regional Partnership plans to do something about that problem. It expects to hire a director of talent attraction to promote the area to millennials the way that Pete Eshelman, the partnership’s director of outdoor branding, has promoted the region as a mecca for runners, hikers, campers and cyclists.

The purpose of the new position, which the partnership plans to fill in early August, will be to capture young professionals in the area before they get away and to lure back those who’ve already left. Such a position is unusual among smaller metro markets, according to Beth Doughty, the partnership’s executive director, but it’s common in larger areas. “It’s part of modern economic development,” she says.

The partnership also is working on more traditional means of economic development, such as leading an effort to identify and assemble large sites for potential employers. Developing and maintaining a healthy economy, however, involves much more than attracting big companies. According to the Virginia Employment Commission, Roanoke alone has nearly 1,700 businesses with four or fewer employees. “Employment is all kinds of different profiles,” Doughty says. “It’s jobs, jobs, jobs, as everybody says, but it’s not limited to a big box where people work.”

In addition to building upon the region’s relatively new identity as a hip, outdoorsy place, the director of talent attraction can take heart from recent research from the Urban Land Institute showing two Virginia metro areas are already millennial magnets. Hampton Roads’ millennial population grew by more than 16 percent between 2010 and 2015. In the Richmond area, the population grew by nearly 15 percent. Only one other metro in the country topped 10 percent, the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario area of California, which saw an 11.7 percent increase.

It’s true the New York-Newark-Jersey City metroplex attracted more millennials than the top four percentage leaders combined, but the metroplex is a very big place. Those new New Yorkers increased the area’s millennial count by less than 3 percent.

On the other hand, the Pew Research Center says that, although millennials are less likely to have a spouse or house to tie them to a place, they’re also less likely to move than previous generations did at the same age.

eXperience YP
A volunteer group, supported by the partnership and the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce, has been working on the attraction and retention challenge since 2013. Thomas Becher, senior vice president at the public relations firm ndp, was instrumental in establishing eXperience YP. The original idea was to focus on graduates of nearby colleges. The group, however, quickly learned that it could make a bigger difference by concentrating on young professionals already in the labor market. The volunteers needed to show millennials, in Becher’s words, “There’s a lot of great potential, and there’s more here than you might think.”

The group has held three annual conferences focusing on professional development, and it’s put together a series of quarterly meetings, called eXpand, aimed at keeping the project’s momentum going. Attendance at the conferences has ranged from 100 to 200 people, according to Becher.

While the program is built around young professionals, it’s also meant to help develop understanding between baby boomer bosses and millennial employees.

Becher is among the mentors offering advice to millennials. It’s natural, particularly in an occupation such as public relations, he says, for young professionals to want to be in Chicago, New York or D.C.

“Then you realize you’re going to have four roommates in a shoebox apartment,” Becher says. “You’re going to be stuck in traffic or commuting every day. It’s only later in life that you realize that things like quality of life and short commutes and raising a family do come into play.
So part of bridging the gap between mentors and young professionals is offering them life experience, what they can expect.”

Millennials can expect more than a better quality of life in Roanoke, Becher says, “The nice thing about Roanoke is you can make a difference in a hurry.”

Some millennials are learning that lesson firsthand as part of eXperience YP. Taylor Ricotta, public relations manager at Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge, is a co-chair of the project. She’s one of about a dozen people who keep the organization going. Those volunteers, Ricotta says, are passionate. “The people kind of steering the ship are doing it because they love it,” she says.

Ricotta echoes Becher’s observation about making a difference. “The thing I love about this area is there is so much opportunity here, and it’s so easy, if you go about it in the right way … for young professionals to kind of exert themselves anywhere and excel,” she says.
The area looked very different to Ricotta when her family moved to Botetourt County in 2001. “They plopped us in the middle of a field,” she says. “I couldn’t wait to leave. I couldn’t wait to get out of here.”

As a student at Radford University, she dreamed of marketing a NASCAR team. An internship required by Radford, however, sent her in a different direction.

Ricotta interned with Sam Steidle, the creator of what would become the CoLab, a co-working space. There Ricotta encountered some of the area’s most engaging entrepreneurs and their infectious energy. She fell in love with the Roanoke region and wanted to find a way to promote it.

Grace Boardwine grew up in Blue Ridge, just outside of Roanoke, and says she saw something similar in her Virginia Tech classmates. “They come down here,” she says. “They fall in love with the mountains. They fall in love with the area.”

The problem, she says, has been a lack of affordable housing and a lack of jobs — at least, a lack of the kind of jobs that attract young people. “That’s changing now,” Boardwine says. She credits what she calls the area’s “outdoor revamping” and the businesses that has attracted.

Boardwine grew up wanting to stay in the area but assumed there would be no way for her to do that. But the day after she graduated with a degree in environmental resource management and forestry, she got a job as a naturalist with the Mountain Lake Conservancy.  While working there, she’s also pursuing an online master’s degree in parks and resource management. She will start a new job soon, helping to market the Deschutes brewery that’s coming to Roanoke.

While that job is not directly related to her education, Boardwine says Deschutes shares her values. Saying it takes good water to make good beer, she talks about the company’s environmental consciousness.

“It would be awesome to end up with a sustainability-related job” with Deschutes, she says, but the marketing job means Boardwine and her fiancé won’t have to leave. “Both our families are in Botetourt County,” she says, “and we absolutely adore this area.”

‘Exosuit’ experiment aimed at reducing workers’ fatigue

Five Lowe’s employees are wearing the future.

They’re stocking shelves while wearing exosuits — strap-on contraptions that may make the employees’ life better by making it easier for them to lift the buckets, bags and other things that fill the company’s Christiansburg store.

The exosuit is part of a collaboration between Lowe’s and Virginia Tech’s Assistive Robotics Laboratory that’s testing the suit in real life and in the lab.

“There are lots of things which are wearable that work fine for the first 15 minutes,” says Alan Asbeck, a professor who’s leading the project. “But after that,  you’re like, ‘It’s bugging me here’ or something like that. So we’ve worked really hard to make it comfortable for the long run.”

While they’re checking in with the Lowe’s workers regularly, Asbeck and the eight students working on the project also are conducting tests in the lab. People wear the suits and lift things while motion-capture sensors and an apparatus that measures muscle activation record how their bodies perform in the exosuit. That’s useful information, Asbeck says, but no more important than the steady feedback from the Lowe’s workers that Asbeck’s team uses to adjust the suit’s design.

The exosuit looks like a series of rods. They’re essentially leaf springs. Asbeck compares lifting without the suit to jumping off a ladder and climbing back up. Lifting with the suit, he says, is like jumping off a ladder onto a trampoline and bouncing back up.

“When you’re lowering your torso, in the act of bending forward, you are sort of using up energy,” Asbeck explains. “If you don’t have a trampoline at the bottom, your back will have to do the work of lifting yourself back up again. What we do is basically put a spring in there, which is the exosuit, so that it stores the energy from you bending forward and gives it back to you so you can stand up with very little effort.”

The idea is to reduce fatigue, which may reduce injuries. Lowe’s hopes eventually to use the exosuits in all of its stores.

“My goal is to get things to the real world,” Asbeck says. “Lowe’s wants to get things to the real world.”

Renewables seen as way to stay in the energy business

Former coal strip mines in Virginia now are the sites of shopping centers, golf courses, airports, prisons and even a winery. Now there’s a push to draw a different kind of energy from old strip mines — solar energy.

Jack Kennedy, Wise County’s clerk of court, has been promoting the idea of putting solar arrays on former mine sites for decades.  At first, he saw solar energy as a way to offset concern about mountaintop removal mines. Now he sees it as a way to revitalize the coalfields’ economy. “It was just an idea [that was] years before its time,” Kennedy says. “Now it’s become more a necessity.”

Virginia’s coal production peaked in 1990 at more than 46 million tons. In 2015, production fell to a little more than 13 million tons. Meanwhile, production per miner increased dramatically, so the need for mine employees dwindled. In May, mining provided just 416 of Wise County’s 11,443 jobs.

The county could use an economic boost.  Its median household income, $37,407, is less than 58 percent of the state median of about $65,000. Wise County’s April unemployment rate, 6.8 percent, also was three percentage points higher than Virginia’s rate of 3.6 percent, and its poverty rate, 22.7 percent of its population, was more than double the state average of 11.2 percent. The county’s population, estimated at about 39,000 last year, has fallen more than 5 percent since 2010.

Wise is a long way from Richmond — six other state capitals are closer — but Kennedy argues that’s no reason to disconnect Southwest Virginia from the Digital Dominion. “Just because we’re out here doesn’t mean we can’t engage in these modern technologies,” he says.

Indeed, Wise already is home to data centers, and Kennedy sees “a groundswell of grassroots support” for renewable energy, which might attract more data centers.

“It’s quaint to me that we develop an internet that is supposed to be widely distributed and then put all the data centers in Loudoun County on I-66,” he says. “I want to help correct that.”

Energix Renewable Energies, an Israeli company, is exploring possibilities in Wise. The advocacy group Appalachian Voices has determined more than 400 acres of former mines near Lonesome Pine Airport (which sits on a former mine site) are suitable for solar energy development. Wise County is cataloging appropriate sites.

Kennedy is convinced renewables — solar on old strip mines, wind on ridge tops, hydroelectric from water in abandoned underground mines — can make Wise County a 21st-century energy producer.

“If the Germans and the Chinese and the Indians can do it,” he says, “hopefully Virginians can do it.”

Hotel expected to contribute to downtown Bristol’s revival

Bristol’s Executive Plaza building was 2 years old when producer Ralph Peer conducted the 1927 recording sessions often called the “Big Bang” of country music.

The former office building now is being renovated to become the Bristol Hotel, a boutique hotel adjacent to the Birthplace of Country Music Museum. The museum commemorates the legacy of Peer’s initial recordings of legendary performers such as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.

For most of its existence, the Executive Plaza housed offices for doctors, lawyers and other professionals. “Over the past few years it’s become a little bit blighted,” Bristol, Va., Mayor Bill Hartley says. “One of the things I appreciate is they’re taking an older structure and doing an adaptive reuse.”

In addition to investments by McCall Capital, a South Carolina equity firm, the Bristol Hotel is being transformed with the help of city economic development incentives, support from the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, and state and federal historic preservation tax credits.

“It’s really trying to bring that structure back to its former glory,” Hartley says. Or perhaps well beyond the building’s former glory.

The hotel plans to offer a farm-to-table restaurant, spa services and up to 3,000 square feet of meeting space to complement 56 guest rooms, seven junior suites, one executive suite and a 1,200-square-foot penthouse. The hotel’s roof-top bar will offer a view of the city and nearby mountains.

“You can look one way and you can see the historic train station that was renovated and look out the other way and see the historic Bristol sign that says it is ‘a good place to live,’” Hartley says.

If the mayor gets his way, the train station one block from the hotel once again will serve rail passengers.  With Amtrak trains to arrive in Roanoke this fall, city officials are working to extend passenger service through Bristol all the way to Chattanooga, Tenn.

Hartley says the Birthplace of Country Music Museum, music festivals and events such as the NASCAR races at Bristol Motor Speedway have brought the city’s downtown back to life. The mayor says the city is simply “trying to build on what makes Bristol unique.”

The Bristol Hotel, which is scheduled to open early next year, apparently won’t be the sole boutique hotel in town. Hartley says The Sessions Hotel already is planned for another part of downtown.

Metis Holdings buys the former Allstate building

About 900 workers for Allstate, the country’s second-largest property and casualty insurer, used to fill a 165,000-square-foot office building in Roanoke County.

Then Allstate reduced its Roanoke Valley workforce with several rounds of layoffs. In 2015, the company’s remaining Roanoke Valley workers — it’s not entirely clear how many there were by then — moved out of that building. Some of them set up in a new, smaller building in Roanoke County.  Some went to work in a former Norfolk Southern office in Roanoke. Since then, the big office building has been empty.

But not for much longer.

Metis Holdings, a Roanoke-based insurance and insurance-service provider that has grown from 25 to more than 125 employees in the past 10 years, bought the 47-year-old building for $4 million in April. Since 2015, Metis has been based in the 26,666-square-foot building in Roanoke.  The company plans to occupy up to 75,000 square feet of the former Allstate building.

“We are fortunate to have the support of the Roanoke Valley region and are very pleased to expand and remain in the Roanoke area,” Metis President Chris Carey said in a statement.

Carey also says it may be a year before Metis announces the tenants who will occupy roughly 90,000 square feet of the building that Metis won’t be using. According to a Cushman & Wakefield|Thalhimer listing for the old Allstate building, it “includes a full-service cafeteria, gym, large open office space, training rooms and classrooms, and much more.”

Jill Loope, Roanoke County’s economic development director, calls Metis’ plan “an ideal scenario” and its purchase the “successful completion of a lengthy and complex real estate transaction.”

She sees Metis’ plans as a chance to create jobs and increase the county’s tax base. “Creating an environment for businesses to grow and prosper is a priority of Roanoke County’s economic development program, and we are especially pleased that a well-known company has purchased the building,” Loope says.