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Charting growth
As the Virginia Chamber of Commerce marks its 25th year of celebrating the commonwealth’s 50 fastest-growing companies, this unfortunately will be the first year that Virginia’s Fantastic 50 award winners haven’t been recognized with an in-person event. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s Fantastic 50 awards ban[...]
Ballad Health furloughs 200 Virginia workers
Not even health care systems are immune from the effects of COVID-19. Tennessee-based Ballad Health announced in early April it had furloughed between 200 and 250 Southwest Virginia employees to cut administrative costs and ensure it can keep critical frontline medical workers employed during the crisis. Other health systems op[...]
Sorry, we’re CLOSED
“April is the cruelest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote, but for the hospitality and tourism industries, the cruelty began in March. With conferences and conventions canceling reservations amid the pandemic, hotels and convention centers across the commonwealth have temporarily shut down operations, furloughing and laying off wo[...]
Unconventional times
After recent visits to Savannah, Georgia, and St. Louis, Missouri, Pete Kingwill is bringing the annual Police Fleet Expo to Richmond in August. The Chicago-area-based meeting planner has been scouting locations in Virginia and North Carolina for a while now, knowing that the Southern states checked many of the boxes for what’[...]
Pomp and absence
With the rest of the spring semester moved online, her graduation was the only thing Tannah Blair, an accounting major in Virginia Tech’s class of 2020, had to look forward to. “When they made the announcement that graduation was canceled and was being moved online, I was beyond devastated,” Blair says. Due to the COVID-[...]
Leveraging the past
Vernon Green served 20 years, five months and 18 days in the Army, retiring in 2014 as a chief warrant officer after three deployments to Iraq and one to Kuwait. Today he heads his own information technology and cybersecurity business responsible for 10 major government projects. And he hires veterans like himself. During his ti[...]
On deck
There’s massive work underway in the Hampton Roads maritime industry, with much more on the horizon. The region is hiring, big-time. But are there enough qualified candidates to fill the jobs? Regional leaders want to get ahead of the question, they say, considering the window of opportunity and what’s at stake for the area�[...]
Highway projects around Virginia
HAMPTON ROADS Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion The $3.3 billion Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion is the largest construction project in the history of the Virginia Department of Transportation. In February 2019, Hampton Roads Connector Partners, a joint venture led by New York-based Dragados USA, won the design-build c[...]
Smoother flow
Just a year and a half ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a truck at the Virginia International Gateway to spend two to four hours waiting to pick up and drop off cargo. The Port of Virginia would open the gate at 1 a.m. and wouldn’t close until 10 p.m. “It wasn’t a sustainable system,” says […]
‘Don’t let a good crisis go to waste’
In addition to public health concerns, the coronavirus crisis also has left companies dealing with a raft of urgent policy and personnel issues, ranging from telework and child care to paid sick leave. As the virus spread across Virginia, human resources management experts counseled companies to handle coronavirus-related HR iss[...]
Workers cope with impending printing plant closure
Some employees at LSC Communications’ printing plant in Strasburg figured its closure was imminent after financial downturns in recent months, but the loss of nearly 400 jobs is still a heavy blow. “I just started in September,” says Kimberly Carlysle, who drives a forklift in LSC’s shipping department. “This was going[...]
For the Record – April 2020
EASTERN VIRGINIA Amazon.com Inc. will build two operations facilities in Hampton Roads in 2021, creating an expected 1,500 jobs. A multistory robotics fulfillment center in Suffolk will create 1,000 jobs and a 650,000-square-foot processing center in Chesapeake will create 500 jobs. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership worked with the city of Chesapeake, the city of Suffolk, […]
