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Health Care: New facilities for Virginia’s health systems

For ‘s health care landscape, the last 12 months were a time of growth. Some health systems opened new facilities, while others got started on projects designed to serve the patients of tomorrow.

Other big news from last year: the summer opening of the Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at Old Dominion University, which includes the Eastern Virginia Medical School. It’s billed as the largest academic health center in the state and should boost the commonwealth’s health care workforce.

First, let’s don our hard hats.

In September 2024, Falls Church-based Inova Health System broke ground on two new hospitals — one in Alexandria and the other in Springfield. Combined, the two projects are expected to cost more than $2 billion.

Inova Franconia-Springfield will be a 110-bed facility and will offer emergency care, surgical services and inpatient care. Located at the site of the former Landmark Mall, Inova Alexandria will replace the existing Alexandria Hospital, which opened in 1962. In addition to a 192-bed hospital, the new Alexandria campus will include a cancer center, medical office building and a garage. They’re both set to be completed in 2028.

In October 2024, Inova opened the Inova Health Center – Oakville, which is located near Potomac Yard and offers an emergency department, outpatient surgery, imaging and doctors’ offices.

In Hampton Roads, Chesapeake Regional Healthcare, which serves patients in southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina, received a $3.7 million state grant in June 2024 to create an inpatient psychiatric program at its Chesapeake Regional Medical Center. That facility is expected to open in March, according to a spokesperson.

Bon Secours, meanwhile, continues work on its $80 million Harbour View Medical Center in Suffolk, a three-story addition adjoining the existing Bon Secours Health Center at Harbour View campus. It’s slated to open in the second quarter of 2025.

Other Bon Secours developments: the health system completed the $108 million, 55-bed renovation and expansion project at Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center in Chesterfield County in May 2024, and in February announced the $370 million expansion of St. Mary’s Hospital in Henrico County, including a six-story tower.

Lynchburg-based Centra Health and affiliates of Lifepoint Health, a Tennessee-based health care provider, in September 2024 broke ground on the Centra Simons Run Medical Campus. The development, which is part of a $500 million modernization plan by Centra announced in 2023, will house two hospitals: one dedicated to behavioral health and the other to rehabilitation services.

In Southern Virginia, Sentara Health broke ground in October 2024 on a $107 million, 42-bed acute care hospital in South Boston. It will replace the current Sentara Halifax Regional Hospital, which was built in 1953. The new facility is expected to be completed in 2026.

The same month in Roanoke, Carilion Clinic broke ground on the six-story Carilion Taubman Cancer Center. At the time, Carilion had raised $74 million toward the $100 million fundraising goal for the center, which is expected to open in 2027.

The Lewis Gale Hospital Montgomery Christiansburg ER, part of the HCA Health-care network, opened in late October 2024. The freestanding emergency room took a $14 million investment, according to an HCA official.

In September 2024, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia approved the creation of the Joint School of Public Health, a combined effort by ODU and Norfolk State that is housed at ODU.

Meanwhile, Virginia’s medical research organizations, which receive $650 million annually in federal grants, are keeping watch on proposed funding caps by the Trump White House. Virginia Tech President Tim Sands warned in a February letter that NIH cuts could have a $13 million impact on Tech’s annual research budget.

Health care charts:

Virginia’s top hospitals by revenue

Virginia’s top nursing and rehabilitation facilities by revenue

Health and accident insurers in Virginia

Virginia’s life insurers

Editor’s note: This story has been updated. 

Roanoke/New River Year-in-Review: 2024 was about laying groundwork

Not every year can be 2023.

That’s the verdict from economic development watchers in a wide stretch of , ranging from Lynchburg west through Roanoke and Salem to the New River Valley.

In 2023, this region experienced a burst of business announcements with a total investment of at least $387 million and expectations of thousands of new jobs. The annual report for the Roanoke Regional Partnership, a regional economic development organization was titled “The Biggest Year.”

John Hull, executive director of the partnership, thinks it’s unfair to measure last year against its predecessor, which he calls an outlier in the region’s development trends. “It’s more appropriate to compare 2024 to 2022.”

He ran through a list of large and small projects, including new locations and expansions, that landed in 2024 in the areas that the partnership represents: the counties of Alleghany, Botetourt, Franklin and Roanoke; the cities of Roanoke, Covington and Salem and the town of Vinton.

None matched the scope of 2023’s Wells Fargo expansion announcement in Roanoke County, which is projected to bring 1,100 jobs, although as of 2025, both the county and the bank declined to provide an update.

Last year did, however, have a healthy mix of activity that shows a continuing momentum, and a promise of more to come, according to Hull, who calls 2024 “a strong year for the region.”

Tommy Miller, economic development director for the City of Salem, describes last year as “a lot of progress supporting the success stories of the previous years.”

Farther southwest, Katie Boswell, executive director of Onward New River Valley, says 2024 was quieter there, with her office more focused on attracting new businesses and retaining existing ones.

For the region, the biggest project of 2024, in terms of jobs created, was one announced in December 2023. Lynchburg’s Framatome expansion, which commenced construction and hiring in 2024, aims to create a cadre of nuclear power plant technicians ready to service an expected wave of new Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, that are proposed for locations across the country and around the globe.

Marjette Upshur, Lynchburg’s director of economic development, calls the $49.4 million expansion, which has already led to the hiring of 200 workers toward what is expected to be 515 jobs created, “transformational” for the city.

Before the expansion, the company already was the city’s largest commercial employer, Upshur says, with about 1,250 workers at two facilities in Lynchburg.

With nuclear fuel producer BWX Technologies also in and around Lynchburg, “we’re like the nuclear energy hub,” Upshur says.

Other projects announced in 2024 in the Roanoke and New River valleys include:

City of Roanoke

In January 2024, city officials announced that Amazon.com would open a last-mile delivery facility in the Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology. By year’s end, the new 125,000-square-foot building was up and running, supporting about 300 direct and indirect jobs, according to an Amazon spokesperson.

Marc Nelson, Roanoke’s economic development director, says the project stood out in several ways. For one thing, “it puts your city on the map” to have an Amazon facility of this type, according to Nelson.

The site Amazon chose was the former location for a much-ballyhooed Deschutes brewery that the beer company ultimately decided not to build. Nelson had received a phone call from Deschutes saying the company was stepping back from its construction plans — and then within hours he got a call from Amazon officials asking if there were any Roanoke locations that might suit the company’s needs.

So far in his career, this has been the only time when one big plan was dashed and another emerged so swiftly, Nelson says.

Outside of Amazon, 2024 was partly a year of preparation, according to Nelson.

The city received $7.5 million from the state in August 2024 and added $2.5 million of its own money to make the last large site in the Centre for Industry and Technology more attractive to potential tenants. The work involves extending utilities and constructing a pad for a building that’s between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet on the 82-acre site. That project will likely take a couple years, according to Nelson.

Also in 2024, the city continued working with Retail Strategies, an Alabama community development and urban planning firm, on examining corridors connecting Roanoke to Salem and to parts of Roanoke County, with an eye toward identifying areas that seem under-used or ready for new development. The multi-year effort should conclude in 2026, according to Nelson.

Montgomery County

In May, packaging company ESS Technologies announced plans to invest $1.6 million into closing operations at facilities in Pembroke and Blacksburg and consolidating them at a 40,000-square-foot Christiansburg facility, an expansion projected to create 27 jobs.

In January, employees moved into the new facility, according to Brian Hamilton, economic development director for Montgomery County. “The project is ongoing as far as buying equipment and hiring people.”

Hamilton welcomed the expansion news during a year when the county was seeking ways to spur future growth. He notes that Montgomery County is looking for opportunities to buy land for new developments or expansions as it builds out its existing industrial areas.

Like Roanoke with its Centre for Industry and Technology, Montgomery County worked in 2024 to ready the last site in the second phase of its Falling Branch Industrial Park. The county is installing a 20-acre pad on a 35-acre lot and running utilities to it.

Construction is underway, and the $2.81 million project should be completed by June, according to a spokesperson for the county. The preparation means that a new tenant could probably be up and running six to nine months after purchasing the property, according to Hamilton. “It definitely speeds up the process.”

City of Salem

Engaging with downtown businesses was a focus in 2024 for Miller, the city’s economic development director. The effort involved improving streetscapes, refreshing connections with long-time businesses and welcoming a new business spun off from other companies that have operated for years in Salem.

The new business is Shrewd Outdoors, owned by brothers Riley and Laven Newsom, who also operate Shrewd Archery in Salem and are officers of the Salem machine shop Damon Co., which is run by their father.

Located on Main Street, Shrewd Outdoors, which opened in September 2024, combines an archery pro shop and academy, an archery range in the basement and a planned café. It currently employs three full-time and two part-time workers, and the owners have plans to hire more in 2025.

“We’re ecstatic that they put this commitment right downtown, right in their hometown,” Miller says.

Financial Services: Federal policy, tariffs create economic uncertainty

Economists around the state are still speaking positively about ‘s economy — but there’s an elephant in the room.

The University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service expects the state’s gross domestic product will increase 2.4% this year, up from 1.9% anticipated for the nation in a Moody’s forecast delivered at the end of 2024. Old Dominion University’s Bob McNab said in his annual economic forecast in January that he anticipates the state’s GDP to increase by more than 2.5% this year.

Inflation will remain about the same in 2025, Federal Reserve staff predicted in December 2024, and in January, Richmond Fed President and CEO Tom Barkin said the U.S. economy was “in a good place.” Defense spending could grow too, boosting Hampton Roads’ economy and certain government contractors’ bottom lines.

Maybe, but here comes the elephant.

The first weeks of President Donald Trump’s hectic, headline-making second term have thrown much into doubt for Virginians, especially those who work for the federal government or in businesses or organizations that either receive federal funding or are dependent on government agencies as their clients.

More than 140,000 federal employees live in Virginia, and most of them received an email titled “Fork in the Road” in late January sent to more than 2 million federal civilian workers, offering them a seven-month buyout package if they resigned within eight days in February.

A federal judge put an indefinite hold against that deadline, but it’s quite likely a certain percentage of federal workers will be out of their jobs either willingly or unwillingly before the end of the year, experts predict.

Some federal workers were literally locked out of their offices while Trump adviser (and billionaire owner of X, SpaceX and Tesla) Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency aides took charge of the Treasury Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Federal Aviation Administration, among other agencies. DOGE’s mission from Trump: Cut staff and government spending.

Even less predictable is the potential impact of government spending cuts on Virginia’s federal contracting sector. Large defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics are likely to retain and receive more major defense contracts, as experts predict Trump will expand defense spending, but these contractors will need to mind their Ps and Qs. In February, Bloomberg reported that a Booz Allen Hamilton subcontractor warned the Treasury about allowing DOGE access to its payment system. That subcontractor was subsequently fired.

Govcon businesses in other sectors, such as education and foreign aid, may suffer financially as the White House targets spending in those areas. So could women- and minority-owned contracting firms if set-aside contracts end.

Meanwhile, Trump announced large tariffs on products from Mexico, Canada and China, although Canadian and Mexican heads of state worked out 30-day delays in February by promising to increase border security at their ends. Trump still went ahead with a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports in February, and there could be more increases soon, with the likelihood of other countries enacting retaliatory tariffs. Already China has upped tariffs on some U.S. products in response to Trump’s 10% increase on Chinese imports.

That uncertainty over long-term trade wars, McNab said in his state forecast, is driving anticipation of higher inflation in bond markets. Granted, if Trump’s tariff increases are avoided or only stay in place for short periods of time, Virginia will likely be fine economically, state economists say. The Port of Virginia so far has seen minimal impact from tariffs, although “with China, it remains to be seen,” spokesman Joe Harris noted in February.

Barkin said in February that he needed more information to see how tariffs and other policies could affect the nation’s economy and inflation, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in mid-February that he isn’t in a hurry to resume cutting interest rates, no matter what Trump says.

And that may be how it is for Virginia’s economy in this first year of Trump 2.0 — waiting to see what happens.