For The Record: October 2022

CENTRAL VIRGINIA

Fortune 500 used car online retailer Carvana Co. is more than halfway to its 400-employee hiring goal for its $25 million, 191,000-square-foot Chesterfield County inspection center, General Manager Robert Sheets said in August at the center’s ribbon cutting. Carvana has hired 240 employees and expects to reach 400 workers when it begins full production later this year. The company started training employees in late June. The project, announced in December 2019, was paused during the pandemic, and Carvana announced it would move forward in April 2021. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

Nonprofit drugmaker Civica Rx is investing $27.8 million to establish a new 55,000-square-foot laboratory in Chesterfield County’s Meadowville Technology Park, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced in September. The expansion will add 51 jobs, and the company will also host a scale-up manufacturing facility run by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medicines for All Institute, which will add more jobs. The generic drugmaker is currently building a 140,000-square-foot, $124.5 million manufacturing facility in Petersburg that will become the Utah-based company’s North American headquarters when it opens in 2024. The Chesterfield lab will support that factory through testing and development of new products. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

After a two-year investigation, ongoing federal scrutiny and numerous lawsuits alleging it marketed vaping products to underage users, Washington, D.C.-based Juul Labs Inc. tentatively settled with Virginia, 32 other states and Puerto Rico for $438.5 million in September. Virginia will receive $16.61 million over the next six to 10 years, but the larger impact may be on Henrico County-based Altria Group Inc., which has a 35% ownership stake in Juul. In 2018, Altria invested $12.8 billion in the e-cigarette company, but its investment was valued at $450 million as of June 30. A U.S. District Court judge in Virginia declined to approve a proposed $117 million settlement in August between Altria and shareholders over its investment in Juul. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

A $300 million indoor vertical farm campus — billed as the world’s largest — is coming to Chesterfield County’s Meadowville Technology Park, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced in September. San Francisco-based Plenty Unlimited Inc. is expected to produce 300 jobs over the next six years in a multiphase project. The first farm, expected to be completed in winter 2023-24, will grow Driscoll’s strawberries at scale. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

On Sept. 12, the city of Richmond announced it selected a joint venture including Richmond-based Thalhimer Realty Partners to build a new baseball stadium for the Richmond Flying Squirrels, as well as a mixed-use development surrounding the stadium, in a $2.44 billion effort to revitalize the area into a new neighborhood to be known as the Diamond District. Other partners in RVA Diamond Partners include Washington, D.C.-based Republic Properties Corp., Chicago-based Loop Capital Holdings LLC and San Diego venue developer JMI Sports. The group committed to purchase the first $20 million of bonds needed to finance the stadium, which is required to be completed and open for the 2025 Minor League Baseball season. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

PEOPLE

Glen Allen-based real estate company Capital Square has promoted Whitson Huffman to co-CEO, the developer and sponsor of tax-advantaged real estate investments announced in September. Huffman, 33, is the son-in-law of Louis Rogers, founder and CEO of Capital Square. The company specializes in Delaware Statutory Trust offerings as part of IRS Section 1031 property exchanges, and it has branched out into developing multifamily properties, largely in the Southeastern United States. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

EASTERN VIRGINIA 

Retail and restaurant vacancies in downtown Norfolk reached 23% in 2020 — nearly four times higher than the national average for all retail space at the time, according to a market study commissioned by the Downtown Norfolk Council. There’s too much retail and restaurant space, and not enough residents to fill it, according to Mike Smith, real estate director for Streetsense, the consulting firm that conducted the study. Streetsense presented findings to the Norfolk Planning Commission Aug. 25. It recommended the city redevelop MacArthur Center mall, which has a vacancy rate of about 30%, and tweak its zoning code, which requires 65% of all ground floor space on most downtown streets to be retail.
(The Virginian-Pilot)

Virginia Beach-based DroneUp LLC is adding 655 jobs as part of a $27 million expansion that will include establishing a drone testing, training, and research and development center at Richard Bland College, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Aug. 24. DroneUp specializes in commercial drone delivery and flight services and software and will invest $20 million to establish the college center and $7 million to expand its Virginia Beach headquarters from about 15,000 square feet to about 80,000 square feet. The company will add 510 jobs at its headquarters, and it will create 145 jobs for drone operator trainers at the training center. It will also open three drone hubs at Walmart Inc. locations, likely in Chesterfield County and Chesapeake. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

Virginia Beach City Manager Patrick Duhaney, Deputy City Manager Taylor Adams and City Council members Aaron Rouse and Linwood Branch flew to New York in late August to meet with Virginia Beach native and pop music icon Pharrell Williams. While Branch declined to offer details about the meeting, Rouse said he requested it to “build a relationship” with Williams, who is co-developing the $350 million Atlantic Park mixed-use surf park development at the city’s Oceanfront. “We had a great conversation about moving our city forward,” Rouse said. Last fall, after Williams decided not to bring the Something in the Water Festival back to Virginia Beach, he wrote a scathing letter to city officials, citing the city’s “toxic energy.” (The Virginian-Pilot)

PEOPLE

Newport News-based Riverside Health System CEO Bill Downey will transition to executive vice chairman and special adviser to make way for his successor. He will be replaced by Riverside’s president and chief operating officer, Dr. Michael Dacey, who takes over as CEO on Jan. 1, 2023, the system announced Sept. 7. Downey has spent 40 years with Riverside, the past 12 years as CEO. Dacey will retain his title as president, and Downey will retire in 2024 after the yearlong transition. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

Virginia Beach-based Sentara Health Plans named Colin Drozdowski as the next president of Sentara Healthcare’s health insurance division, effective Sept. 1.
Drozdowski succeeds Dennis Matheis, who was named president and CEO of Norfolk-based Sentara Healthcare in June. Drozdowski served as senior vice president of comprehensive health solutions and was senior vice president of Sentara Health Plans since 2019. He helped bring Virginia Premier into Sentara Health Plans, the largest transaction in Sentara’s history. Drozdowski will also serve as executive vice president of Sentara Healthcare. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

Suffolk-based TowneBank announced Aug. 26 that William “Billy” I. Foster III will become CEO, succeeding J. Morgan Davis. Davis will step down as CEO on Dec. 31 but will remain with the bank until March 31, 2023, to assist with the transition. He will also continue serving on TowneBank’s board of directors and as an executive consultant. Foster, the bank’s market president for Central Virginia and the Carolinas, joined TowneBank as a regional president in 2004. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

NORTHERN VIRGINIA 

The pandemic shrank some tax revenue streams that officials said would grow as Amazon.com Inc. builds its $2.5 billion HQ2 East Coast corporate headquarters in Arlington County. That has meant no cash grants paid out to Amazon. The county projected it would pay $22.7 million in total to the e-tailer in annual payments through 2035. The pay-as-you-go grants are based on Amazon’s commitment to occupy a certain amount of office space and on an expected increase in hotel stays. Arlington had been collecting nearly $25 million annually from its transient occupancy tax — on which the incentives are based — but collected only $15.1 million in revenue from July 2021 through June 2022, millions short of the increase necessary to trigger payments. (The Washington Post)

In September, Google LLC completed its acquisition of Reston-based cybersecurity company Mandiant Inc. in an all-cash transaction valued at $5.4 billion. Google is paying $23 per share for Mandiant, which is joining Google Cloud while retaining its branding. The companies announced the deal in March. Together, Google Cloud and Mandiant will offer customers more capable end-to-end security operations, Mandiant said in a news release. Mandiant was founded in 2004 by CEO Kevin Mandia. In a blog post about the sale, Mandia wrote that by combining Mandiant’s experiences with the scale and resources of Google, “we can make a far greater difference in preventing and countering cyberattacks, while pinpointing new ways to hold adversaries accountable.” (VirginiaBusiness.com)

On Aug. 24, the six-month anniversary of Russia’s war on Ukraine and Ukrainian Independence Day, Reston-based Fortune 500 defense contractor Leidos announced a partnership to support Washington, D.C.-based global health and humanitarian relief organization Project HOPE’s medical relief efforts in Ukraine. Leidos had already funded medicine and medical supplies, mobile clinics and support for refugees since the conflict began. The new, ongoing partnership does not have a particular contribution, budget or time frame attached to it, CEO Roger Krone said. He estimated Leidos’ contributions “will be substantial.” (VirginiaBusiness.com)

Worrying that over-prescriptiveness and other hitches could stymie economic growth, businesses are displeased with Loudoun County’s draft new zoning ordinance, weighty legislation that debuted before the planning commission in late August. Uncertainty about ramifications for properties with previously allowed uses, but which would find those uses disallowed under new zoning provisions, has many worried. The new ordinance could generate “hundreds if not thousands” of such instances, Bill Junda, president of engineering and land planning firm Gordon, speaking for the Commercial Real Estate Development Association’s Northern Virginia chapter, told commissioners. (Washington Business Journal)

ManTech International Corp. stockholders approved the Herndon-based tech contractor’s sale to The Carlyle Group for approximately
$4.2 billion. Stockholders approved the sale during a Sept. 7 special meeting, subject to customary closing conditions. The transaction closed the week of Sept. 12. Under the terms of the transaction, ManTech stockholders received $96 per share in cash. ManTech and Carlyle announced the deal in May. More than 99% of the votes cast at the meeting were in favor of the merger, ManTech said in a news release. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

Maximus Inc. won a contract valued up to as much as $6.6 billion to continue contact center operations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Tysons-based federal contractor announced Sept. 1. The contact center operations contract handles more than 35 million customer inquiries a year for CMS programs like 1-800 MEDICARE and the health insurance marketplace across a range of channels. The company operates 84 contact centers in 28 states and employs more than 20,000 contact center agents. This year, employees in Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi have protested for higher wages. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

SOUTHERN VIRGINIA 

The world’s largest aeroponic smart farm opened in Cane Creek Centre industrial park. Local, state and company officials held a Sept. 12 ribbon-cutting ceremony for AeroFarms’ 138,670-square-foot facility. The company plans to have 48 plant-growing towers, each four-and-half stories high, with the operation entailing the equivalent of a 1,000-acre farm. The vertical-farming facility began production in August and has hired about 80 employees from Danville and the surrounding area; all 158 workers will be hired by the end of the year. (Danville Register & Bee)

After approving two massive solar generation facilities — including the Randolph Solar Project, one of the largest solar farms in the U.S. — the Charlotte County Board Supervisors has hit the pause button on solar power applications in the coming year. Meeting on Aug. 8, Charlotte supervisors voted 4-2 to freeze action on any unapproved solar permit requests until the Charlotte County Planning Commission makes a recommendation on zoning for future solar development in the county, or through January 1, 2024, whichever occurs first. The majority of the board agreed to seek recommendations from the planning commission about solar-related zoning. Until those recommendations are received, the board would halt all solar zoning actions. (SoVaNow)

Danville officials are working with the owners of Danville Mall to find new uses for the commercial site. “We envision that the Danville Mall property can become a lifestyle destination, where community, commercial and residential meet in one location,” Danville Economic Development Director Corrie Bobe said. Possible uses for the site include hospitality, residential, outdoor recreation, food and beverage, public gathering areas, and office space, Bobe said. The mall’s 87,000-square-foot footprint and about 17,000 square feet of outparcel development area could be redeveloped, she said. (Danville Register & Bee)

The Danville Regional Airport will receive $1.26 million in federal funding to rehabilitate its apron and taxiway. The money comes from more than $13 million in federal funding for infrastructure improvements at Virginia airports that were announced on Aug. 25 by U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine. Funded projects include extending runways, rehabilitating aprons and improving taxiway lighting. “Our airports are essential to both our local economies and to helping Virginians get where they need to go,” the senators said. “We are pleased to see the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law continue to upgrade Virginia airports and help ensure they’ll be meet our communities’ needs well into the future.” (WSLS 10 News)

The third cohort of students graduated from the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research’s Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing pilot program on Aug. 5. This 16-week curriculum develops skilled workers with industry recognized credentials for employment in the defense industry. It trains workers in key trades to fill skill gaps in welding, computer numerical control machining, quality control inspection and additive manufacturing. The program was developed as a public-private consortium between the institute and the U.S. Department of Defense, Danville Community College, Phillips Corp. and The Spectrum Group, in coordination with maritime defense industry partners and Navy stakeholders. (News release)

PEOPLE

The United Way of Danville-Pittsylvania County recently selected Telly Tucker, president of the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, as its 2022 campaign chair. Tucker takes over for Danville Otterbots General Manager Austin Scher, who helped United Way navigate fundraising last year. The campaign chair lends visibility and energy to the campaign, providing presentations to employee and community groups, pitching in at events like the Sept. 27 kickoff and generating enthusiasm for the campaign throughout the community. (Danville Register & Bee)

SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA 

The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Bristol’s temporary casino documented guests from 49 states by its sixth week of operation, ending Aug. 19. Alaska is the only state the casino has
not seen guests from. During its first partial month of operation, the casino generated $11.71 million in adjusted gross revenues, with $10.21 million coming from its 870 slot machines and $1.48 million from its 21 table games. Total play created $2.1 million in taxes, including over $703,000 that local governments in Southwest Virginia will divide. (Bristol Herald Courier)

Coronado Global Resources Inc., an Australian producer of metallurgical coal, will invest $169.1 million to expand coal mining operations at its Buchanan Mine Complex, located about 10 miles southeast of Grundy in Buchanan County. The expansion will see the mining operation add 181 jobs, bringing its total workers at the site to 781, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Aug. 23. Coronado will increase capacity at the mine to meet the growing demand for metallurgical coal, which is used in steel production. The company began production at the Buchanan Mine Complex in 1983 and started longwall mining operations on the site in 1987. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

After 15 years, the Damascus Trail Center opened its doors to trail hikers, bird watchers, nature enthusiasts and tourists on Aug. 26. Located at 209 W. Laurel Ave., the center will have a series of exhibits covering the history of the Appalachian Trail, dating back to 1921, and of seven other trails that cross through Damascus, including the Virginia Creeper Trail. The town of Damascus — Trail Town USA — and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy collaborated to open the center, and U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine attended the ceremony. (Bristol Herald Courier)

Girls Inc. of Bristol, Virginia, held a groundbreaking on Aug. 31 for a 7,566-square-foot recreation center that will include a gym, a full kitchen and partitions that will allow Girls Inc. to create up to six different classroom spaces. The nonprofit, which offers educational support programs for girls ages 5-18, has raised about $1.6 million for the center and needs to raise about $300,000 more. The future center will serve about 240 additional children for after-school and summer programming, and Girls Inc.’s eight outreach sites throughout the region will be able to use it. (Bristol Now)

Chesterfield County-based payment and invoice automation company Paymerang LLC will expand its operations to Southwest Virginia, creating 50 jobs in Wise County, the company announced Aug. 25. The move follows a previous expansion of its Chesterfield County headquarters. In Wise County, Paymerang employees will work in software development, cloud engineering and payment operations. Paymerang is the second company to join Project Fuse, an economic development initiative that aims to make Southwest Virginia the location of choice for remote work. Lonesome Pine Regional Industrial Facilities Authority and InvestSWVA launched the project in February. (VirginiaBusiness.com)

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner made stops in Marion and Wytheville on Aug. 23 as part of a three-day tour of Southwest and Southside Virginia to talk with community leaders. Virginia’s Democratic senior senator touted the recent passing of what he called a “once in a generation infrastructure law,” which includes $65 billion to improve broadband access. Local community colleges can offer pop-up training so Virginians can get jobs installing the needed fiber, he said. Warner also discussed the CHIPS Act, then a bill, and said he’d like to see semiconductor undergraduate programs at Virginia universities. (Smyth County News & Messenger)