Collecting and interpreting data has always been important in science, but Tom Woteki is at the start of a process that will teach Virginia Tech students how to make better use of information in scientific fields and possibly receive lucrative job offers.
Director of the university’s data analysis and applied statistics program, the Arlington-based Woteki took on another job in July as founding director of the university’s Academy of Data Science, a program that will be based in Blacksburg, although not yet in its own facility.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a growth rate in the data science field six times higher than general job growth, with a median salary of $92,030.
The difference between normal data collection and data science can be summed up in three words: volume, variety and velocity. “It’s not just numbers,” Woteki says. “There are vast amounts of textual information and there are vast amounts of image data. You’ve got more data than you’ve ever imagined, so how do you leverage it to accomplish your goals? How do you make it an asset?”
The phenomenon goes far beyond campuses and laboratories.
“An organization like Facebook does its work with data,” Woteki says. “An organization like Amazon does its work with data. … All those fancy algorithms we talk about, that’s data science.”
In addition to teaching scientists in other fields how to make better use of data science, the academy plans to offer a plus-one degree — undergraduate training in a scientific field and, after another year of study, a master’s in data science. The degree will have to be reviewed by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and preparation will take until the end of the academic year, Woteki says.
The program will give students a chance to work with businesses and government agencies, examining their real-world data challenges while potential employers see students’ work. The academy also plans to launch a distinguished speakers series as soon as this spring, Woteki says.
“One of the external aspirations of the academy is to establish Virginia Tech as a thought leader in this discipline called data science, which hopefully then would attract industry to come to Virginia Tech and say, ‘I’ve got a really hard problem we’re working on. I need an expert,’” Woteki says. “That’s going to be down the road, but that’s the goal.”
Luiz DaSilva became the inaugural executive director of Virginia’s Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) in March, returning to Virginia Tech after two years in Ireland, where he served as the director of CONNECT, a telecommunications research center at Trinity College Dublin involving 35 companies and 250 researchers from 10 Irish universities.
CONNECT’s goal is to produce research and intellectual property that could lead to commercial enterprises, while preparing students to work with innovative technology. And as the head of CCI, DaSilva will lead more than 320 researchers at 21 universities and 16 community colleges across Virginia, along with 87 industry partners, in a similar pursuit.
Located in the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington, CCI is a state initiative aimed at making Virginia a global leader in the field of secure cyberphysical systems, linking computing power to sensors and controls in the physical world. CCI will foster partnerships between industry, higher education and government. It’s also focused on promoting research at the intersection of data, autonomy and security, as well as promoting technology commercialization and entrepreneurship.
Born in Brazil, DaSilva studied and taught at the University of Kansas, worked at IBM Brazil and was a professor for 17 years in Virginia Tech’s Bradley Department of Computer and Electric Engineering.
“When I was a boy in Brazil, I really wanted to see the world, so this was part of what I really dreamt about,” DaSilva says. “At the time, it was difficult to do it. People didn’t travel that much. Brazil was under a dictatorship. We were very closed as a country and so on, but I ended up having the opportunity to do that, to actually see the world and also live on these three different continents.”
DaSilva thinks that experience helps him bring different perspectives and approaches to his work. “Brazil is this very lively place, very vibrant, very happy place, in a way, but with all of the challenges of a developing country,” he says. “Europe has this huge sense of history and social responsibility, but maybe not as dynamic as the U.S. The U.S. has this sense of everything is possible. It tends to inspire people’s dreams because there’s this huge sense of possibility. They all bring different things to the table, and by being exposed to these different ways of thinking, I think you end up being able to take the best from each of the three continents.”
The work he did on those three continents helped him convince the CCI search committee that he was their man.
“During the search process, Luiz showed he had the experience and insight needed to bring together multiple institutions towards a common goal,” says Brian Payne, vice provost for academic affairs at Old Dominion University, director of a regional node of CCI and a member of the search committee. “When asked about how to promote collaboration, Luiz didn’t just talk about principles of collaboration or ideals. He gave very specific examples of how he led collaborative efforts in his prior position. These experiences made him a perfect fit for this position.”
DaSilva heard about the CCI job by chance, when a friend at Virginia Tech was catching him up on what was happening at the university. It appealed to him right away.
“I felt it was a really unique opportunity,” DaSilva says, “a really different kind of institute or initiative involving so many universities, community colleges, and the entire ecosystem … where the real challenge is to translate all this excellent research that takes place in the universities into some economic impact.”
Virginia Business spoke with DaSilva in July, four months and a week into his new job.
Virginia Business:Talk a little bit about the CCI’s mission: creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem; developing talent; promoting and facilitating research and collaboration. Why is that important for the commonwealth? What does it mean for us?
Luiz DaSilva: I think what it means is that there’s a huge ambition on the part of the commonwealth to have a more diversified economy and to be able to attract in a lot of the new technology and all of the industry that’s going to form around some of the hot areas in technology like cybersecurity or autonomous systems and so on. To do that, you have to have a number of components to make it all work. One is definitely to have the workforce that is ready for these companies to recruit. If we can generate students who are well-versed in all of these topics and who can navigate these new technologies that are just emerging, that’s a big attractor for the new companies.
The other way that you generate some of this entrepreneurial ecosystem is, of course, taking some of the innovations that come out of the university system and translating those into new companies, startups and intellectual property that gets then incorporated into startups or licensed to larger companies. You need all of these pieces to come together. Probably we don’t have a single university who can spark all of that. Bringing together all of these universities around the state is a way to do it.
VB:CCI has lofty goals and a commitment of $20 million a year from the state. What is your work going to mean to a typical Virginian or the typical Virginia business? What are we going to get for our money?
DaSilva: I think what we will all get is a more vibrant economy, an economy that’s more diversified and that establishes leadership in some of these areas that are just getting started, like autonomous systems. If we can have this sort of impact, this will already be huge, and it will be, I think, visible to citizens in different ways. Hopefully, they’ll see it in a way that they don’t associate with CCI specifically, but they’ll see an economy that is strong, that has jobs, and especially some high-value jobs. They will see Virginia recognized for leadership in technology, just like Silicon Valley is in California, for example. I think that is going to be the mark of success.
VB: CCI awarded its first round of grants in June. Why were those programs chosen?
DaSilva: We issued a call for proposals for experiential learning opportunities. What we wanted to do is complement the opportunities that students already had in the programs that they follow in the community colleges and universities. Virginia actually has a very rich ecosystem of cybersecurity programs at the undergraduate level, at the graduate level, certificates. It’s very impressive how many different programs and with different flavors the students can choose from. While we don’t want to replicate any of that, we just want to give something on top of what already exists.
The big consideration … in terms of, does this add to the existing programs in cybersecurity, … is [is this] open to as many students as possible around Virginia? … We wanted to increase the diversity of the students involved. … We ended up picking six projects, and they all have different characteristics, and they all do something a little bit different. Two of them are centered on internships, one specifically for startups and one broader for all kinds and sizes of companies.
There’s one that establishes a drone racing competition for all Virginia students. … They can program the drone, and they’ll do a drone race sometime in 2021. There’s one that brings students to work with machine learning algorithms, using a particular dataset from satellite data. Each of them has a different opportunity, but they all give students the opportunity to be involved in a really hands-on manner in something that is relevant to industry and … that’s not typically part of their academic programs.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology for teleworking and autonomous systems by a decade or more, DaSilva says. Photo by Will Schermerhorn
VB: Drone racing sounds like it would be too much fun to be useful!
DaSilva: That’s how you get people involved! You need to create programs that spark people’s imaginations and that sound fun because technology is not drudgery. It’s not just programming and sitting behind a computer. Increasingly, I think that technology has to do with connecting to the cyberphysical systems. These are things like drones or robots who move around in the environment but they require connectivity at all times. … The ultimate competition is fun, but for you to compete, you actually need to think about the strategy; you need to think about the solution. How do you program these drones to move? How do you keep them connected and so on?
VB: The vision is that someday there’ll also be students who are trying to hack into drones. That’s part of it too, right?
DaSilva: Right. The initial competition, as envisioned by the researchers who were working on it, has more to do with the autonomous operation of the drone, this idea that you don’t have to have a joystick but the drone can fly on its own and so on. [But] every time that you enable this sort of technology, the flip side is that you also potentially open up a new vulnerability and with very serious consequences, of course, especially when you’re dealing with these cyberphysical systems, which usually have some physical embodiment. If you hack into them, then you can cause a lot of damage. You can cause a drone to crash, you can cause a car to speed up and so on and so forth. … Yes, we want to advance the programmability of these systems, but also in a way that is secure, that cannot be easily hacked into and cause a serious accident.
VB: There’s a history of when we develop things on the internet, somebody breaks into them and then after the fact, we figure out some sort of security measure. But you can’t afford to do that with something like a car, right?
DaSilva: Right. I think you’re totally right that security sometimes is an afterthought. You do something and then people hack into it and then you patch the problem, etc., but I don’t think we can afford to do that with many of these new systems. I think we need to make sure that security is part of the design process in these systems, and we need to find ways to certify some of these systems as being secure enough to deploy.
VB:The day you became the CCI’s executive director, the United States had 30 COVID-19 cases; now we’re approaching 5.5 million [as of mid-August]. What kind of challenges has that presented to your initiative, which is predicated on getting 320 researchers, 87 companies and students, ranging from high schools to graduate schools, all working together?
DaSilva: Within this initial phase … what I would have wanted to do is bring everyone together physically and actually get to know people, not just in seminars and so on, but also during the coffee breaks and do all the networking. That is the part that we haven’t been able to do. That’s a bit challenging. Like everyone else, we have been finding ways to work around it.
I think we’re still in that phase where we take the technology that was out there and then we make do with the needs that we are facing right now. … It’s a huge challenge to start a new initiative like this, but I think it’s also the right time to be thinking about innovation in this phase because we need more innovation more than ever.
We’re already talking about things like contact tracing and how to do that in a way that respects people’s privacy. There needs to be a lot of new invention and innovation in that space, and that’s exactly the space of CCI. I think that’s the opportunity side of things. We have also been a bit fortunate that our research is, of course, the very use of technology, so people can do a lot of things remotely. Of course, there are jobs that really require physical presence, but for us, at least, in a short period of time, there’s a lot that we can do, given the current teleworking moments that we’re in.
VB:In a column for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, you wrote that COVID-19 may have accelerated the adoption of technology for teleworking and autonomous systems by a decade or more. How has that happened?
DaSilva: I think we’re still in the making-do part, but [teleworking] has been incorporated into professions that really were not thinking about [it] for a long time. I have two brothers. They’re both in the health care profession. I’ve started to see them start to use telemedicine a bit modestly, but it’s something that certainly was not on their radar for the short term. They’ve been forced to start doing it as a way to continue, at least, doing first contact with the patient and initial triage of symptoms. I see people start coming up with new ways to do physical therapy, to do personal training. For example, I’ve seen personal trainers working on Zoom and so on.
[There’s] not much innovation in technology yet, but [there’s] innovation in starting to adopt the technology that exists for new purposes. I think once that happens, that creates a market that will then accelerate new technologies being developed specifically. There may be something that’s very specific for telemedicine or something that’s very specific for personal trainers … whereas, six months ago, [that] was really a thing of the future.
The other example that I can give you that I think is very impressive and is Virginia-based is the use of drones for delivery. When people started talking about using drones for delivery, it was kind of science fiction, at least to me. I didn’t fully believe it. Then about three years ago, Virginia Tech had a program with Chipotle for delivery of burritos on campus, in specific locations. It was not everywhere, you had to go to a particular location, but it was great to test things out.
In Christiansburg, of course, there’s a commercial service now [using] drone delivery. [Editor’s note: Wing Aviation, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.] They keep expanding the businesses that choose it. I think Walgreen uses it. There’s two coffee shops that now deliver coffee. This is something that is happening much faster than I expected. I think we’ll keep seeing that because now there’s more of a need. There’s a lot more delivery of goods than there used to be during this time.
No-contact delivery also has a lot of interest, so [there’s an advantage to] having a drone [deliver goods] rather than having to have contact with a person. I think we’ll keep seeing that. We’ll keep seeing that in the autonomous vehicles space, in the manufacturing space, where the technology was evolving, but now it’s going to evolve faster and reach the market faster than it would have otherwise.
On the town of Wise’s website, information about the University of Virginia’s College at Wise sits behind an appropriately labeled tab: “Our College.”
When U.Va. Wise was founded in 1954, it was called Clinch Valley College of the University of Virginia, and it was the commonwealth’s first public college west of Radford. More than a decade before the General Assembly voted Virginia’s community college system into existence, the legislature gave the college a $5,000 operating budget its first year, with the promise of another $5,000 in its second year if the college lasted that long.
Clinch Valley College began classes on a campus that had been a farm, with 109 students, most of whom were Korean War veterans. The college offered only two-year degrees at first. It awarded its first bachelor degrees in 1970, the year after its name changed to University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
This fall, U.Va. Wise will offer its first graduate degree, in teaching. The college expects to add a graduate nursing program in fall 2022.
Small town, big impact
“First and foremost,” says the college’s chancellor, Donna Price Henry, “U.Va. Wise is here to serve Southwest Virginia.” Photo by Earl Neikirk
“First and foremost,” says the college’s chancellor, Donna Henry, “U.Va. Wise is here to serve Southwest Virginia. Access and affordability are two of our biggest central components of our mission.”
More than half of the college’s 2,021 students are the first in their family to attend college. More than 80% get financial assistance. A third of them, Henry says, get no contribution from their families to help pay their college costs.
“They’re coming to us with real needs,” Henry says, “and with a family that can’t support them getting a higher education degree.”
Starting this fall, U.Va. Wise’s Within Reach initiative will allow in-state students from families making $40,000 or less to attend the college for free, paying no tuition or fees.
“It’s one of the best colleges to be able to go in and graduate with less debt than you would anywhere else,” says Wise Mayor Jeff Dotson. His son, Kevin, graduated from U.Va. Wise in 2018 and plans to start law school this fall.
Dotson has been on Town Council since 2012, just days after he retired from the town’s police force. Altogether, he’s served Wise for nearly 40 years, so he knows something about the town and the area that surrounds it.
“Down this way’s all coal country, just about, and that’s declined,” he says. “Nearly everyone in the region used to work at a mine or for a company that supported mines or somehow served mine workers. As those jobs went away, so did many of the people who filled them. “Our population has declined quite a bit [also],” he says.
Wise County has lost nearly 9% of its population since the 2010 census, according to U.Va.’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. According to Census Bureau estimates, nearly 10% of the 3,286 people living in Wise in 2010 had left town by 2018.
Little towns that depended on mining are suffering all through the coalfields, Dotson says, but “in Wise we seem to be doing better than most of them.”
Wise is certainly doing better than some. The nearby town of Appalachia, which lost nearly 11% of its population over the same period, has a median household income more than $22,000 less than Wise’s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Coeburn, another Wise County town, lost more than 12% of its population and has a median household income more than $23,000 lower than Wise’s. Neighboring Dickenson County has lost more than 10% of its population since the last census and has an unemployment rate a point and a half higher than Wise County’s. The median income in Clinchco, a little town in the middle of Dickenson County, is more than $39,000 below Wise’s.
One big reason, Dotson says, is U.Va. Wise.
“It’s been tough on us, but we realize we’re fortunate to have the college here,” Dotson says. “It’s a big asset to us, I think, to know that we have it.”
Supporting role
In a town as small as Wise, anything that provides 300 jobs and 2,000 potential customers would be an asset. “The college itself has always been an economic engine for this region,” says Shannon Blevins, associate vice chancellor for economic development and strategic initiatives. That’s just the beginning of U.Va. Wise’s economic contributions, however.
U.Va. Wise “has always been an economic engine for this region,” says Shannon Blevins, associate vice chancellor for economic development and strategic initiatives. Photo by Earl Neikirk
Education is any college’s primary purpose, but Henry says, “The other part of our mission, which I think is really important, is service to the region. One of the areas that we help to serve the region is through our support of economic development.”
The college created its office of economic development in 2007, and Blevins was promoted to vice chancellor four years ago. The elevation, she says, shows how seriously U.Va. Wise takes its role in the region’s economy.
“That department’s really doing good. They’re doing lots of things to try to improve the region, which would improve their college, too … I think they’re doing great work,” Dotson says.
Blevins isn’t actively recruiting companies, Henry says, but “her role is really to partner with the economic developers in the region to ask, ‘How can the college help with what you’re doing?’”
While the economic development pros market the area, Blevins says, U.Va. Wise invites prospective employers onto campus, hosting presentations and making sure companies are familiar with the expertise and resources available through the college. The college also reassures companies that the community can fill their workforce requirements. That includes offering pre-employment training in cooperation with community colleges.
U.Va. Wise’s economic development office works with companies that are already in the region, offering training and programs on campus and at company sites, working with businesses such as global technology firm CGI Inc., which has a facility in the Russell County town of Lebanon. U.Va. Wise has helped manufacturing companies such as Bristol Metals, just across the state line in Tennessee, with training around soft skills and organization development skills. Bristol Metals was combining divisions, Blevins says, and “wanted to intentionally develop a certain culture.” U.Va. Wise helped the company do that. The college has traveled across seven states to support companies with a footprint in Southwest Virginia, Blevins says.
“We’re trying to connect the resources and assets of the college with what the region needs,” she says. When no one at U.Va. Wise has the expertise that companies in the region need, the school also acts as a gateway to experts at the University of Virginia.
Much of the time, Blevins says, the college works as a convener and facilitator, bringing stakeholders across the region together, sometimes connecting them to resources and people outside the region, to discuss issues such as health care, economic development and advanced manufacturing.
Sometimes the college does that in formal ways, such as with the Healthy Appalachia Institute, through which Blevins’ office brings together organizations as disparate as the Appalachian Regional Commission, The Health Wagon and the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service to promote better health throughout the region. The goal, according to the institute’s website, is “to transform Central Appalachia into a leading model for rural community health throughout the world.”
U.Va. Wise also works on economic development as GO Virginia’s Region 1 support organization, focusing on advanced manufacturing, agriculture, information and emerging technologies and energy and minerals. GO Virginia is a business-led economic development initiative that promotes private sector job growth by offering grants from the Virginia Growth and Opportunity Fund and local governments. Each of the nine GO Virginia regions has a support organization that, with the advice and consent of the regional council, provides fiduciary oversight and administrative services.
Wise Works
“In parallel to building an ecosystem to support small business across the region,” Blevins says, “we’re also developing an ecosystem to really create a culture of entrepreneurship on the college campus.”
The college offers a minor in entrepreneurship as well as spaces for student entrepreneurs to develop their own businesses in Wise, within walking distance of the campus. U.Va. Wise opened the coalfields’ first coworking space at its Oxbow Center in St. Paul, a town straddling the line separating Wise and Russell counties. Amenities include broadband service that may not be available at local entrepreneurs’ homes. Kevin McGrail, founder and CEO emeritus of Fairfax-based Peregrine Computer Consultants Corp., visited an Oxbow open house in November, Blevins says. By January, Peregrine had four U.Va. Wise students as interns.
U.Va. Wise’s Oxbow Center in nearby St. Paul is the area’s first coworking space.
Internships can be a problem for students at U.Va. Wise, since not all of them are paid and most of the college’s students can’t afford to go a summer without earning some money, no matter how useful the experience might be. “We’ve had students who had to forgo a really meaningful [unpaid] internship … to be able to go and work in retail or fast food,” Blevins explains.
That’s why the college developed Wise Works, a program that pays up to 50% of an intern’s wages. Northern Virginia IT firm Atomicorp took advantage of the program, Blevins says, offering internships to seven students. Four of those interns were hired as full-time employees. “Companies are finding this is a good place where they can find talent, and they’re not having to compete in just a wild kind of market in those more urban spaces,” Blevins says. “And they offer very attractive wages for our graduates.”
The college’s software engineering and computer science graduates have a 100% employment rate after graduation, Henry says. “Those students are snapped up,” she says, in part because an advisory group that includes people working in the field helps keep the program’s curriculum and skills current. “They help us make sure that we’re cranking out students with the skills they need,” she says.
But U.Va. Wise is doing more than keeping current. In addition to plans to add graduate programs, the college is beginning its latest strategic planning process, expanding its outreach — and discounted tuition — to potential students throughout Appalachia and it’s midway through its largest fundraising campaign ever, announcing last October that it aims to raise $100 million.
Meanwhile, the little town just off campus hangs U.Va. Wise banners from its lampposts, paints U.Va. Wise logos on its streets and hangs “Welcome Home” banners for students each fall.
“We try,” Dotson says, “to make it feel like when you come into Wise, you’re coming into a college town.”
Last June, Volvo Group announced plans to invest nearly $400 million, add 350,000 square feet to its Dublin complex in Pulaski County — already the largest Volvo truck plant in the world — and hire 777 new workers over the next six years. Five months after that announcement, though, Volvo said it would lay off 700 workers, starting in January.
“We regret having to take this action, but we operate in a cyclical market, and after two years of extremely high volumes, we have to adapt to reduced market demand,” John Mies, Volvo’s senior vice president of corporate communications, said in a November email.
Pulaski County Administrator Jonathan Sweet compares the rise and fall of Volvo’s employment to the stock market. “It ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows,” he says, “but if you look at the straight-line trend, it’s on an increase.”
In late January, there was another incline, when Volvo Group’s Mack Trucks company announced it would hire 250 people later this year for a new medium-duty truck assembly plant in Roanoke County, in the former LSC Communications book plant, which closed in 2017. Mack Trucks plans to invest $13 million in the project, according to the governor’s office.
With the layoffs, Sweet says, “They just shed the additional workers they need for that peak volume they experience due to cyclicalities.”
Matt Blondino, president of United Auto Workers’ Local 2069 in Dublin, says Volvo workers expect layoffs. “We’ve all been through it here. I mean, I’ve been through three myself,” he says. “It’s just something everyone knows when you come to work here.”
It’s the plant’s two-tiered wage system that bothers workers, according to Blondino. New hires start at $16.77 an hour, he says. Wages top out at $26.77 — except for anyone hired after 2006. Their raises stop at $21. The benefit packages are different, too.
Volvo will receive up to $16.5 million in state-funded economic development incentives over 10 years if the company adds 777 jobs to the 3,219 already in the plant when expansion negotiations began in 2018. After the January layoffs, Blondino says, that will mean adding nearly 1,500 jobs.
Franky Marchand, vice president and general manager of the Dublin plant, says, “It’s going to take us a few years to get there, but we see the potential, and that’s part of the fun of our business.”
The physical expansion will be quick. One new building is already finished. A second building should be outfitted by summer. The expansion will enable the plant to build more trucks, help it to prepare to build electric trucks and allow Volvo to bring more of its truck manufacturing process in-house. As of late January the company had not said which suppliers will be displaced. However, Marchand says Volvo will still depend on other companies to provide parts for its trucks, even though the plant temporarily laid off about 3,000 workers in October 2019 because of a UAW strike at the Mack Trucks plant that supplies Dublin with engines and transmissions.
“Manufacturing is about doing things very well,” Marchand says. “It’s not about doing everything. Nobody is good enough to do everything.”
Flexibility, such as having more than a dozen union workers qualified to operate heavy machinery helping to prepare the building site for the current expansion, works to everyone’s advantage, Marchand says.
“Some companies look at a union contract as a very dogmatic, legal way of managing a relationship,” he adds. “In reality, all of that is just a framework that defines the minimum of our relationship. … You can do things if you’ve got people with skills, as long as you agree to work for the overall benefit for everybody.”
Blondino has a different take. “It’s not a framework,” he says. “We just want them to follow the contract. That’s why we have a contract.”
Marchand realizes his plant’s importance to the local economy. “If I were in a big town, I would be one of many,” he says. “Now, here, we are a big industrial tool, a financial engine for the community. Everyone understands the good of Volvo is the good of our employees and is the good of our community. Once you’ve got that alignment, I think it’s good in general. I’m proud of it.”
Sweet, the county administrator, agrees.
“They are a vital part of our business community and larger community. They are the county’s largest taxpayer, the largest employer,” he says. “We’re super proud of Volvo. We don’t know what we would do without Volvo in our community. Who would step up and fill those big shoes?”
Roanoke County’s main street — Electric Road (state Route 419) — is getting a big boost from the region’s largest employer. Carilion Clinic announced in September it had leased 150,000 square feet at Tanglewood Mall to accommodate Carilion’s growing children’s outpatient practices.
Carilion, the Roanoke nonprofit that operates seven hospitals and more than 200 practice sites from the Shenandoah Valley to Galax, plans to spend about $30 million and18 months preparing the space.
“We’re going to assimilate all of the children’s outpatient services there,” says Nancy Agee, Carilion’s president and CEO. “We really want it to be technologically advanced and be a cool place for kids to come, really paying attention to what motivates children and moms and dads to have their children there.
“What we’re going to do is step back [and] design this for children, bring all of these services together. Especially for sick children or children with chronic needs, you don’t want them to have to go to multiple places.”
The new center will occupy the space that used to house JCPenney and Miller Motte Technical College. “That whole end [of the mall],” Agee says, “is pretty shuttered.”
Tanglewood began as a popular shopping area, an attraction that drew people to the edge of Roanoke County. But, like many malls across the country, the mall has hit hard times in the era of online shopping, losing anchor stores and searching for ways to attract customers. Jill Loope, Roanoke County’s economic development director, says the Carilion project, an economic boon on its own, will also help draw customers to Tanglewood’s remaining retail businesses.
Agee agrees.
“What we expect, and what the owners of Tanglewood expect, and what the county is excited about as well, is that other businesses then will grow around it,” Agee says, citing Carilion’s Institute for Orthopaedics and Neurosciences in Roanoke city as an example. Where an abandoned grocery store once stood, there’s now a health care center with four restaurants for neighbors and a need for more parking spaces.
“I think at Tanglewood you’re going to see that same kind of synergy,” Agee says.
The Tanglewood project will have 200 to 300 employees and generate 500 to 600 patient trips per day. “That’s a lot of new infusion of activity along the [Route] 419 corridor,” Loope says. “This will be a catalyst for more to come.”
The county plans about $30 million in transportation projects along Electric Road/Route 419. The road will be widened and an improved divergent diamond interchange will replace its existing intersection with U.S. 220, adjacent to the mall. It’s part of the 419 Town Center Plan to revitalize about 390 acres, including Tanglewood Mall, along the road.
All this is going on just a short drive from Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, where Carilion has announced a $300 million expansion. That’s within easy walking distance of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, which will open 150,000 square feet of new research space in June, enough to accommodate 25 new research teams.
Carilion Clinic contributed more than $3.2 billion to Virginia’s economy in 2018, according to a Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service study released in January. That doesn’t include the $1 billion Carilion plans to spend on capital projects in its service area over the next seven years.
“Carilion Clinic is incredibly important to this community — way beyond the numbers that are in the economic impact statement,” says Beth Doughty, executive director of the Roanoke Regional Partnership.
The average Carilion wage, excluding physicians, is more than $11,000 higher than average for the Roanoke MSA.
Norfolk Southern Corp. dominated the area’s economy for more than a century, and the railroad’s decision to move its headquarters from Norfolk to Atlanta, combined with its continued reduction of Roanoke-area jobs — the latest round was in February — has been a blow to Roanoke’s identity and the region’s economy. Doughty doesn’t think Carilion will follow the railroad’s path.
“Norfolk Southern, they weren’t making their money here,” she says. “They were making their money throughout the country,” so the company’s regional effect depended on what was going on across the nation. Carilion, Doughty says, makes its money in the region, and Carilion’s money stays in the region.
“Our mission,” Agee says, “is to improve the health of the communities we serve, and that mission includes the economic health because that makes us all stronger and more healthy.”
While Agee heads the Roanoke regions’s largest employer, she also says she knows economic diversity is crucial to building and maintaining a strong and healthy economy.
Tea, tech and trucks
Traditional Medicinals, a California-based wellness tea company that plans to invest $29.7 million to establish its East Coast operation in Franklin County, is an example of that diversity.
The company, which announced in January it would set up shop in Summit View Business Park, has been in business since 1974 and sells its 50 teas at Kroger grocery stores and 70,000 other retail stores worldwide.
According to Doughty, Traditional Medicinals’ 56 jobs will have wages about $10,000 higher than Franklin County’s average salary of nearly $34,000.
“We’re seeing our community and our economic development efforts move more strongly, definitively toward those higher paying jobs,” Doughty says. “This is not necessarily influenced by the work that Roanoke Regional Partnership or regional governments do, but I think that in general this sets a standard for how we want our community to move forward in terms of prosperity.”
More traditional industries have also announced plans to add to the region’s prosperity. Software developer Ozmo plans to create 40 new jobs in Blacksburg. The four-year-old startup, which spun out of local digital consulting company Modea, made the announcement last May.
“Our Blacksburg location provides Ozmo with unique access to incredible talent from Virginia Tech and surrounding universities across technology, engineering and business fields,” Ozmo CEO David Catalano says. “Blacksburg is one of the best places in the country to raise a family, which helps us not only hire stellar employees but also retain them and keep them in the area. Ozmonauts can take advantage of the amazing outdoor activities the area offers, including hiking, biking and tubing down the river, while also being a part of a burgeoning technology community.”
The truck manufacturing sector also made several big moves in the region. The Volvo Group announced plans last June to invest $400 million and add 777 jobs in its Dublin plant in Pulaski County, before saying last November that it would lay off 700 workers beginning in January. (Read story here.)
In late January, Mack Trucks Inc., part of the Volvo Group, announced it would turn a former Roanoke County book printing plant into a truck plant later this year, investing $13 million and bringing 250 jobs.
In Roanoke County’s Center for Research and Technology, American Electric Power (AEP) bought 53 acres, where it plans to build a 75,000-square-foot transmission operations center, a $60 million investment that will create about 50 jobs.
Harris Corp. created about 100 new jobs in its night vision division before selling the division to Israel-based Elbit Systems Ltd. last April for $350 million in cash. The company got a $249 million contract last September to supply night vision goggles to the U.S. Marines.
The Patton Logistics Group, which employs 560 people nationwide, plans to invest $12 million to establish a logistics and warehousing operation in the New River Valley Commerce Park in Pulaski County, creating 33 jobs, it announced in January.
Richfield Living, a nonprofit retirement community in Salem, began construction of a $93 million expansion that includes 140 new living spaces and a town center with a wellness and education center and a new chapel.
Pratt Industries, a recycled paper and packaging company, opened a packaging and shipping materials manufacturing operation in a Botetourt County shell building last summer, with plans to invest more than $20 million. The facility, the company’s second in Virginia, employs about 50 people.
Many of the companies coming to the region will receive state funding and support in training new employees.
“There’s been a lot,” Loope says of the region’s recent economic activity, “and there’s more to come.”
In 1923, the number of people earning a living mining coal in the United States peaked at 862,536. Now, that number is around 52,000, and many people and companies who relied on coal for income have fallen on hard times. That’s one reason the 2019 expansions of Paul’s Fan Co., which has been tied to coal mining for more than 60 years, seem particularly important, particularly to Virginia’s coalfields.
In November, Paul’s Fans announced plans to move from Big Rock in Buchanan County into a shell building at the Southern Gap Industrial Park in Grundy, nearly doubling its number of employees to 40 during the next decade. With a loan of up to $5.6 million from the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority and $1.3 million of its own funding, the company plans to expand the shell building, buy equipment and move machinery from its old location.
A few days later, the company announced another expansion, the establishment of a new division in another shell building, this one in the Constitutional Oaks Industrial Park in Lee County. Paul’s Automation and Control will eventually bring 15 new jobs. VCEDA offered a loan of up to $1.025 million for the project. The company plans to invest at least$2.41 million.
Paul Elswick founded Paul’s Fan Co. in 1958 and, according to the company, he “repaired underground mine equipment, trucks and anything else he could get his hands on.” In the ’60s, he developed a roof bolting machine. Later, Elswick concentrated on mine ventilation systems, working on more than 5,000 custom systems in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Elswick died in 2016.
“That was the year the coal mining crunch started catching up with us,” says Paul’s son, Todd Elswick, the company’s president. “Basically, I said, ‘We’re going to have to do something different.’That’s when our major efforts of diversification started.”
The company took a big step toward change last year, when it acquired Illinois-based Champion Fan Corp., a 100-plus-year-old industrial fan company.
When Elswick saw an internet notice that the company and its equipment were to be auctioned, Paul’s Fans bought it all and hauled it home from Elgin, Illinois.
“We took six trucks and 14 people,” Elswick says. “After we got there, we rented two U-Hauls.”
Though coal mining companies are still the company’s largest customer, Paul’s Fans also works with the textile, chemical and automotive industries, as well as welding, heating and air.
“As we are breaking into the industrial ventilation market, it has really helped fill in the gaps for the downturn in the coal market,” says sales and marketing manager Jackie Estep.
Now the company is diversifying again, creating a control division to work with electric motors connected to pumps, compressors, “any type of rotating equipment,” Elswick says. The new control division was going to Tennessee until some folks from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and VCEDA came to visit. Elswick shared his plans with them, and they convinced him Lee County was a better spot.
One attraction is Lee County’s nearly new airport in Jonesville, and an airport being built in Buchanan County about a mile from the company’s building. Paul’s Fans often flies parts and technicians to its far-flung customers, and Elswick takes planes to consult with customers and potential customers.
It also didn’t hurt that Elswick’s wife had spent time with her grandparents in Lee County while she was growing up. Some of the Lee County officials at the announcement were among his wife’s distant kin.
“They basically stood up and said, ‘Hello, cousin,’” Elswick recalls.
Paul’s Fans is a family business — Elswick has three sons working there — and says he’s determined to maintain the company his father founded 62 years ago. “I would like to think,” he says, “we’re just now getting started.”
Catching the big one matters, but a lot of little successes can mean a lot, too. In Southwest Virginia, small triumphs have accumulated over the past year, in addition to larger announcements.
Last April, Polycap LLC, a Toronto-based manufacturer of specialty caps and closures, announced it would invest$7.7 million in Lebanon, establishing its first U.S. facility. Paul’s Fan Co., a fan manufacturer based in Buchanan County, is expanding its operations and establishing a new operation in Lee County, it announced last November. (Read story here.)
“In terms of traditional, industrial type of announcements … Polycap and Paul’s Fan Co. were probably the two largest this year, so they’re certainly going to have an impact,” says Jonathan Belcher, executive director of the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority (VCEDA).
Polycap and Paul’s Fans expect to add a total of 103 jobs, and Lawrence Brothers, a heavy metal fabricator in Bluefield, added a new laser and announced plans to hire 28 more workers.
The Sykes Wise-Intuit facility, a customer service call center for the maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax, and for the managed health care corporation Centene, added 300 workers, growing its local workforce to 937 employees.
Farther from the coalfields, Scholle IPN, which manufactures plastic bags in box containers, announced plans last March to add 42 jobs and invest $10.29 million in Smyth County.
Some new ventures seem nearer the cutting edge. Appalachian Biomass Processing, expected to open this spring in Wythe County, is the state’s first commercial hemp-processing facility. Carbon Research and Development Co., in Wise County, manufactures commercial-grade graphene, a carbon sheet 200 times stronger than steel that’s an efficient conductor of electricity. The company also has opened a Graphene Research Center in the Lonesome Pine Regional Business and Technology Park.
VCEDA is also seeing a bigger-than-expected impact from its seed capital grants, which provide up to $10,000 to startups no more than a year old with fewer than 10 full-time employees. VCEDA approved 35 grants in 2019, and the companies that received them plan to create 104 full-time jobs and 105 part-time jobs. “That’s a pretty big impact, when you add it all up,” Belcher says.
The grants program began in 2017. So far, out of the 70 companies that have received seed capital funding, only two have failed.
“I think that’s probably because we make them work pretty closely with the small business development office and really do their homework before they ever even apply,” Belcher says. “It’s a very good return investment. It’s been a much better return on investment than you would have on a lot of larger projects.”
Finding workers
The tight labor market is a common challenge for employers across the commonwealth right now, but it’s a fairly new problem for Southwest Virginia, which has been no stranger to double-digit unemployment after massive coal mining layoffs.
Wise County, for instance, had more than 17% unemployment in 1995, and it was above 10% as recently as 2013. However, the current unemployment rate across the region is between 3% and 4%, says Rachel Patton, business services director with the Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board. “As we’ve gotten into a tighter labor market, we’re looking for those pockets of workers that we can train to help regional businesses fill those needs.”
Companies are hiring students just out of high school and people fresh out of prison, helping them adjust or readjust to the working world, Patton says.
Layoffs of miners — seen with the 2019 closures of Blackjewel LLC’s mines in Wise and Lee counties, as well as others in adjoining states — still affect the region, but today local workers have more opportunities for new jobs.
Despite the low unemployment rate, some employers, such as manufacturers paying higher salaries, seem to have no problem finding workers, in part because some residents are underemployed or have low-paying jobs, Patton notes.
Jackie Estep, sales and marketing manager for Paul’s Fan Co., says her company hasn’t had any trouble finding applicants for its new Lee County facility.
While the Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board is focused on building the workforce that’s already in Southwest Virginia, InvestSWVA is a public-private marketing initiative that’s all about attracting investment from outside the region and transforming abandoned coal fields.
“Our plan is simple: Market the region, attract new business investment and bring the jobs of the future to Southwest Virginia,” says Will Payne, InvestSWVA’s project lead and managing partner of Coalfield Strategies, a marketing consulting firm.
With funding from sources including the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission and Georgia-based internet provider Point Broadband, InvestSWVA is working to promote the region as a tech hub with room for data centers.
Small-to-medium employers seem to be the region’s sweet spot, Belcher says. It’s a lesson Southwest Virginia may have learned the hard way.
“I think if we could get enough quantity of those,” he says, “that kind of spreads the risk out more than if you put all your eggs in one basket with one employer that, if it went out of business or had a massive layoff or something like that, would have a devastating impact — not unlike [when] you had a major closing in the coal mine industry.”
“St. Paul was a coal town, so the railroad would run in and drop people off there,” says Kimberly Christner, president and CEO of Williamsburg-based Cornerstone Hospitality. “One side of the railroad was dry and … the other side was wet with alcohol, and that was the St. Paul side.”The St. Paul side of the tracks, she says, featured bordellos, bars and bar fights. “People who are still living say it was bloodier than the Western Front in World War II.”
So Christner and her partners named their boutique hotel the Western Front.
The 30-room hotel, which opened in 2018, is part of a renaissance in the little town that straddles the border of Wise and Russell counties. Along with the hotel and its restaurant, Ina + Forbes, led by Torrece “Chef T” Gregoire, who appeared on two seasons of Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” the town of 1,000 people also boasts a new high-tech co-working space and a local craft brewery.
The downtown Lyric Theater, built about 1950, is being reborn as a performance space and conference center. Phase one of that project is complete, says Kathy Stewart, Main Street manager for St. Paul Tomorrow, the organization that’s resurrecting the Lyric. If the $2 million phase two goes as planned, the Lyric could be hosting shows and meetings in 2021.
Stewart hopes the Lyric will become an affiliate of the Crooked Road, Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, but St. Paul’s main draw remains outdoor activities. Biking, hiking and ATV trails run through the town.
The Clinch River does, too.
In 2019, Virginia’s Department of Conservation and Recreation acquired three parcels along the river to create the commonwealth’s first “blueway” — or water-based — state park, with master planning scheduled to start this fall. It will offer a series of camping and boat launch sites for paddlers on the Clinch.
Just a block from the river, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise’s new Oxbow Center gives entrepreneurs broadband access and co-working space, as well as connections to the Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon, says Josh Sawyers, U.Va.-Wise’s innovation center manager.
“If they want to stay here and connect with those jobs,” Sawyers says, “the technology now allows them to be able to do that.”
It’s also attractive, he says, to entrepreneurs tired of big-city headaches.
“It’s off the beaten path,” Stewart says of her town, “but it’s up and coming.”
Lynchburg is cool, and people are starting to notice.
The Hill City still has its big, well-established players, such as Liberty University and BWX Technologies. Liberty, with its 7,000-acre campus and its online programs, has more than 2,500 faculty teaching more than 111,000 students. Its operations are estimated to generate more than $1 billion in economic activity each year. Nuclear power company BWX Technologies has a $2.1 billion contract to supply nuclear reactor components for the U.S. Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers.
“BWX is killing it,” says Marjette Upshur, the city’s director of economic development and tourism. “They fly under the radar because they are a defense contractor, but I definitely think they are looking at expanding ways they can help their customers.”
Upshur counts Liberty and BWX among the city’s anchors, businesses and organizations “not at the whim of the market, where they’re not going to pick up and move in the middle of the night. They’re committed to the community.”
But while those anchors are critical to the region’s economic health, what’s really marking Lynchburg today is the transformation of downtown and the accolades it’s receiving.
Winning good reviews
Outsiders may be surprised to learn that Lynchburg has a “young and growing” urban center, says Anna Bentson, the city’s assistant director of economic development and tourism. Photo by Meridith De Avila Khan
A Lynchburg restaurant is Virginia’s 2019 restaurant of the year. The readers of Condé Nast Traveler named a Lynchburg hotel No. 6 on a list of top hotels in the mid-Atlantic region. Virginia’s largest craft brewer announced it’s opening a taproom and brewery downtown. All that happened in one eight-day stretch of October. A week later, a young tech company led by Microsoft veterans announced plans to move its headquarters into a historic downtown building.
“I think we surprise people sometimes both by being a rapidly revitalizing urban center but young and growing,” says Anna Bentson, Lynchburg’s assistant director of economic development and tourism, “which is just not what most people think of when they hear Lynchburg.”
Some people apparently do. Reviews.org, which concentrates on reviewing tech products and services, put Lynchburg at the top of its list of Best Places for Millennials to Move in 2019. Forbes named Lynchburg among its most recent Top 100 Best Small Places for Business and Careers. Last fall, when Microsoft News named one city or town in each state that’s “set to boom,” Lynchburg was Virginia’s city on the list.
Dave Henderson says “downtown Lynchburg was starting to show signs of true promise” when he opened The Water Dog bar and grill with his brother Chris in 2016. Henderson had spent most of his working life with Wachovia Bank (now Wells Fargo) before he decided to come home to Lynchburg and start a business.
“I had a really good role, a really good job and was successful there,” he says. “But success isn’t measured just in promotions and salary, obviously. It has to do with some other things.”
Henderson was looking for “that beautiful space in between work and play where you sort of don’t know the difference.”
Three years after opening, The Water Dog received the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association’s Restaurant of the Year Award. Across the street from The Water Dog, the Hendersons have created The Glass House, a music venue with a full bar and kitchen. That’s where Starr Hill Brewery, based in Crozet, decided to celebrate its announcement of Starr Hill on Main. It’s a move the company has been considering for a couple of years, according to Josh Cromwell, Starr Hill’s finance manager.
“We’re excited about Lynchburg for a lot of reasons,” Cromwell says. “It’s a town that doesn’t get a lot of press about being an up-and-coming developing area in Virginia. … It’s got a young, really vibrant population base.”
Cromwell says he’s excited about the city’s plans for downtown and about the people and organizations implementing those plans.
“It’s a really young and energetic group,” he says, “and they’re really passionate about taking Lynchburg a little further from where it currently is.”
Historic spaces
The city already has spent more than $50 million in public spaces and infrastructure downtown, and the process continues. Downtown has more than 1,000 loft apartments and a series of walkways, stairs and terraces called the Bluff Walk. The renovated 700-seat Academy of Music Theater, built in 1905, rebuilt in 1912 after a fire and closed since 1958, reopened in December 2018. The Virginian Lynchburg, one of Hilton’s Curio Collection of hotels, opened in 2017 in a renovated building constructed in 1913. The Craddock Terry Hotel, housed in a former shoe factory constructed in 1905, opened in 2007. That’s the hotel Condé Nast readers praised.
“In every corner, there is a nod to the Craddock Terry shoe factory,” says hotel director Becky Jo Aleman. “I think it’s those little touches that really make it a special experience for our guests.”
Becky Jo Aleman is hotel director for the Craddock Terry Hotel. Opened in 2007 in a former shoe factory, it was ranked No. 6 on Condé Nast Traveler’s 2019 list of top hotels in the mid-Atlantic region. Photo by Meridith De Avila Khan
Tools and equipment from the factory are part of the hotel’s décor. Shoes made there also are on display. The door to each of the 44 rooms is decorated with a wooden cutout of some kind of footwear — from hiking boots to swim fins — and guests order continental breakfasts by placing a shoe box outside their rooms at night. In the morning, the shoe boxes are returned, loaded with muffins, fruit, yogurt and orange juice.
One of the hotel’s most popular features for some guests isn’t connected to the building’s history. It’s a wire-haired terrier named Penny Loafer. The first question from many guests, Aleman says, is “Where’s Penny Loafer?” The terrier is a sign the hotel is pet friendly, and Aleman says many guests take advantage of that. “Penny doesn’t care how big they are,” Aleman says of guests’ pets, “she loves company.”
Tech company moves in
The same year the Craddock Terry Hotel opened, city offices moved from the Carter Glass Building, leaving another historic Lynchburg building empty. It was built by the publisher of The News and The Daily Advance newspapers, Carter Glass, who would become a U.S. senator and treasury secretary under President Woodrow Wilson. (He is best remembered for the Glass-Steagal Act, the 1933 law that separated
The Virginian Lynchburg hotel, one of Hilton’s Curio Collection, opened in 2017. Photo courtesy Hilton
investment banking from retail banking.)
CloudFit Software, founded just under two years ago, is moving into the building and plans to add 139 jobs during the next three years. CloudFit, which works with Fortune 500 companies and the Department of Defense, helps its customers leverage cloud technology to “empower every business on the planet to successfully transform at maximum velocity,” according to the company. Four of the company’s five highest ranking executives spent more than a decade at Microsoft.
Carroll Moon, CloudFit’s co-founder and chief technology officer, grew up in the area. “Having grown up here, I am an enormous fan of the people of our region — brain power, work ethic, service to customers and teammates. I call it blue collar brilliance.”
While all that is happening downtown, Liberty University is beginning what it says will be a $20 million makeover at River Ridge Mall. Opened in 1980, River Ridge, like so many shopping malls, has lost anchor stores as major retailers downsized. Now the former Sears store has been torn down, reportedly to make way for a big box sporting goods store. The former Macy’s is set to become something like a park, with concerts, a farmers market and movies.
“It’s fantastic,” Upshur says of the mall plans. “Downtowns have their own personality and character and all that type of thing. A mall can, too. It’s exactly what the market is clamoring for or chooses to support.”
Lynchburg is the urban hub of four rural counties: Amherst, Appomattox, Bedford and Campbell. And with more than 260,000 people in the Lynchburg MSA, Upshur says, there are lots of customers to go around.
Folks in Lynchburg seem very optimistic.
“I see bustling streets,” Henderson says. “I see people smiling and remarking on how beautiful the city is and how much energy there is, and I’m just glad to be a part of it.”
The Mountain Valley Pipeline is three years behind schedule, $2 billion over budget and has lost four required permits it needs to continue construction. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stopped work on the pipeline to review a lawsuit over one of those permits, and another suit over environmental violations ended with MVP paying a $2.15 million civil penalty.
Nevertheless, the proposed 303-mile, 42-inch natural gas pipeline, which would begin in northern West Virginia and cross Virginia’s Giles, Montgomery, Franklin and Pittsylvania counties, will likely be completed — eventually — according to analyst Roger Conrad, founder and editor of Conrad’s Utility Investor.
“The economics of the pipeline for the developers is still pretty good,” Conrad says. “The pipeline is primarily, like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, to feed utilities. … Those are pretty solid customers to have.”
Those utilities are affiliated with some of the pipeline’s owners — NextEra Capital Holdings, Con Edison Transmission, WGL Midstream, EQM Midstream Partners and RGC Midstream. Pittsburgh-based natural gas limited partnership EQM is set to operate the pipeline.
The original cost estimate for the pipeline, which was supposed to begin service last year, was $3.5 billion. The most recent estimates have it opening in 2021 and costing up to $5.5 billion.
“The weak link of the MVP is probably EQM Midstream,” Conrad says. “It’s possible that if they were not able to keep up their end of funding it, that you’d see NextEra or one of the other partners step up and put more money in.”
Consolidated Edison capped its funding in November, and EQM, which reported a $10.5 million loss in the third quarter of 2019, plans to cover $86 million of the shortfall, increasing its investment in the pipeline to $2.7 billion.
Diana Christopulos, a member of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy President’s Leadership Council and president of the Blue Ridge Land Conservancy, questions the need for the MVP and has fought the pipeline for years. She admits the odds favor the MVP, but she doesn’t think its completion is inevitable.
“The question becomes how long do they want to keep throwing this money around and how long do the investors want to keep loaning them money?” she says. “It is death by a thousand cuts. You never know when you’ve got to the thousandth one because they’re little.”
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