After almost a year of negotiations, Virginia Beach City Council has struck a deal with Venture Realty Group to develop a mixed-use surf park and entertainment venue covering three city blocks near the oceanfront.
Called Atlantic Park, the $325 million project will be built on the 10-acre site of The Dome, the geodesic concert venue and civic center that was demolished in 1994. Venture Realty Group teamed up with music superstar and Virginia Beach native Pharrell Williams to promote the development as an innovative way to transform the site into a year-round destination for locals and tourists and drive economic development throughout the city.
“We want to be associated with a project that is transformational not only for the oceanfront but for the entire city,” says Michael A. Culpepper, managing partner with the Virginia Beach-based real estate firm.
The project’s centerpiece will be the Wavegarden Lagoon surf park, which will employ innovative wave-making technology from Spain. Similar facilities have opened in Spain, the United Kingdom and Australia, and one is currently under development in California, but this park would be the first on the East Coast. There also will be office space, retail, apartments and parking garages. However, the project’s main focus will be on family-friendly ticketed attractions and a 3,500-seat entertainment venue.
“Very few surf parks are integrated into this type of mixed-use development,” Culpepper says. “It affords us the opportunity to be creative and innovative. Nothing about this project is cookie-cutter.”
Virginia Beach is contributing approximately $95 million to the project for parking, streetscapes and the entertainment center. City Council has approved spending $9 million from the Tourism Improvement Program fund to acquire additional land for the development. Council also would oversee a community development authority to issue and sell bonds and collect real estate taxes inside the park. The city will establish performance grants of up to $5 million annually for 20 years based on tax revenues from Atlantic Park. No general fund tax revenues will be used.
Venture Realty Group will secure financing for $230 million to cover the residential, retail and office sections and the wave lagoon. Under the development agreement, the firm has approximately nine months to obtain the funds.
Construction is expected to begin in a couple of years, with components of the park set to be in operation in four to five years.
If you thought simulators were just for pilots and astronauts, think again. Nursing students at Patrick Henry Community College (PHCC) can now train on complex, real-life patient-care scenarios inside the Clinical Simulation Lab for Nursing Education at Sovah Health’s Martinsville campus.
The Sim Lab, which opens this month, features sophisticated, high-tech “patient simulators” that respond to treatment and care just like a real patient, according to Amy Webster, PHCC’s director of nursing and allied health.
For example, nursing students can deliver a “baby,” stop a massive hemorrhage, care for sick infants and stroke patients, and perform blood transfusions. Educators watch the student in action from within a high-tech control room and use simulation software and a wireless connection to change a patient’s biological response in real time based on the student’s actions.
“The potential scenarios we can simulate really run the gamut,” Webster explains, noting that working nurses can also use the facility for continuing education.
The Sim Lab came about after the Harvest Foundation, a nonprofit foundation established by the sale of Memorial Hospital in 2002, awarded a $5.8 million grant to PHCC in 2018 to help grow the local workforce. More than $1.5 million of that funding is being used to build, equip and operate the Sim Lab and pay the salaries of four employees, including two full-time educators.
PHCC educates an average of 110 students each semester in each of its two nursing programs — a one-year practical nurse program and a two-year registered nurse program. Sovah Health, a major employer of PHCC graduates, partnered on the project by housing the Sim Lab within its Martinsville hospital.
“The Sim Lab is a multiplier factor for us,” says PHCC President Angeline Godwin. “Students get more hands-on practice and perform better in their clinicals and, ultimately, the community benefits because we have higher quality nurses doing patient care.”
Like other areas of the country, Southern Virginia suffers from a severe nursing shortage. Sovah Health, for example, which employs 200 full-time nurses at its Martinsville campus and 600 overall, is presently dealing with a 17 percent vacancy rate and a 23 percent turnover rate for nurses across all of its locations.
PHCC and Sovah Health officials say the Sim Lab will help remedy the shortage by attracting more top students and retaining more nurses already working in the region.
“Students who train in the Sim Lab will have more confidence in their clinical knowledge and skills and be more prepared for the challenges of nursing practice,” says Jacquelyn Wilkerson, market chief nursing officer for Sovah Health. “Additionally, retention data suggests that nurses enjoy growing and developing their skills and are looking for opportunities to help them do that.”
When a new brewery set its sights on the Williamsburg area, it knew William & Mary students would be a key customer base.
To reach them, the business owners decided to tap into a source of unique marketing advice — Agency 1693, an advertising firm run by William & Mary students.
“We offer premium content,” says agency President Erika Marr, a senior business student, “but at a much different price from what a company advertising agency would.”
Clients pay for Agency 1693’s services, and students earn paychecks. This is no unpaid internship, and there’s no college credit. Instead, Agency 1693 is a for-profit, university-sanctioned independent venture formed about three years ago. Students run the show, says its adviser, Jeffrey Rich, William & Mary’s chief marketing officer.
They’ve worked on projects for nonprofits, private companies and on-campus clients, with services such as creating videos, designing logos and devising marketing strategies. The agency won an award for a suicide prevention public-service campaign that ran in Pennsylvania.
In marketing classes, Marr learns conceptual ideas, strategies to target audiences and how to understand the wants and needs of consumers. “But getting real-world experience is really hard on campus,” she says. “This is a perfect way to not jump right into an internship but get your hands on projects — even if you have a busy semester.”
With those projects come responsibility, pressure, client feedback and real-world creative jobs with real consequences.
All of that equates to a unique, hands-on learning environment. The concept, referred to as experiential education, stretches back decades. But business schools across Virginia are embracing it in new ways.
That’s because they realize it’s powerful learning, says Janet Eyler, professor emerita in the practice of education at Vanderbilt University, who studied and has written about experiential education.
“The challenge of education is what we call transfer of learning,” Eyler says. You learn concepts in a classroom, but “people often don’t recognize when they are useful in the community or … business, or know when to apply them.”
Students begin to connect the dots when they’re able to perform real work that makes a difference for real people, she says: “That edge of experiential education is when you learn in context, you understand the subject matter in a more complex and deep way that makes it more useful.”
Not Monopoly money
Context is about to come to life in a serious way for students at the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech, which has launched a program called Credit Corps in partnership with Richmond-based Atlantic Union Bank.
The program allows students to work as commercial loan officers after receiving certification from the Risk Management Association.
The Virginia Tech Foundation has committed $500,000 a year to Credit Corps for the next four years, an investment it hopes will pay off both as an educational experience and in the form of returns on those loans.
“The students will be making those decisions, whether or not to make the loans,” says George Morgan, who holds an endowed finance professorship at Virginia Tech.
Morgan, who helped develop the program, saw things kick off for students in the fall semester with their first deal team. Those students have researched their first loan candidate, visited the company and hope to close on the deal by the beginning of the spring semester.
Morgan has seen the difference such experiences can make as a longtime faculty adviser for BASIS, a student-managed investment group. It offers Tech students across the university the opportunity to have a say in how $5 million of the foundation’s endowment is invested in the bond markets.
“When real money is involved,” Morgan says, “it’s taken quite a bit differently by the students. So they take it much more seriously, they take it as much more responsibility, that they have to make the right decisions.”
Because of the risks and regulatory compliance issues, some banks were reluctant to partner with Credit Corps. Getting involved also requires bank employees to serve as liaisons to the student group and iron out logistics.
“It’s not for every bank,” Morgan says. But as a large regional bank, Atlantic Union was a great fit. It’s offering its time and expertise and provides educational workshops for students.
“We’re trying to build very much in that direction of experiential learning,” he says of Virginia Tech’s efforts. “To us, it means getting real job experience in the curriculum here, within the university.”
The goal is to give world-class job experience to students before they graduate. “In many ways,” he says, “what comes out of our undergraduate programs are people who look a lot more like graduate students.”
Client service
Graduate schools of business often deal with students who already are working in their career fields. Even so, the schools are trying novel approaches that go beyond group projects and classroom lectures.
On a late afternoon in early December, nine graduate students wrapped up an important day at Virginia Commonwealth University’s business school.
They spent the fall semester studying international business opportunities for SingleStone, a Glen Allen-based technology consulting company serving clients from the insurance and financial industries.
“I think SingleStone was very pleased with what we did,” says Van R. Wood, the students’ marketing professor.
Wood serves as director of the VCU School of Business’ Center for International Business Advancement and holds the Philip Morris Endowed Chair in International Business. He’s shepherded 25 of these projects for a state program called VITAL — the Virginia International Trade Alliance.
Then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe started the initiative in 2016, Wood says, to train the next generation of savvy, international marketers while helping Virginia companies export more products. To help make that happen, VCU partners with the international trade division of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.
Wood starts his semester looking for companies that have an interesting product or service and are doing well domestically but haven’t considered international sales. If the company fits with VEDP’s plan, he secures its involvement.
His students, once trained, meet with clients, learn about their products and services, and then go to work analyzing international markets.
“We typically start with every country in the world,” he says, finally narrowing the target group to the top three or five. Students show the company how they might be successful in those markets — as a free service. Students prepare international market analysis, marketing plans and strategic alliances.
“Initially, they’re a little intimidated,” Wood says, but their recommendations have real-world influence. “And that’s what experiential learning is all about.”
Making small talk
Not everything in the business world is learned in a classroom — or comes as naturally as students might imagine.
Something as simple as knowing how to dine in a business setting, for example, is an avenue for learning in a program offered by the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond.
The program, called Q-Camp, is a two-day series of workshops and interactive seminars designed to give students experience in networking, business skills, professional brand building — and the proper way to eat soup.
University of Richmond senior Alex Kohnert recalls her experience as a sophomore at Q-Camp, which included a three-hour etiquette dinner. Students learned about manners and the art of small talk — something not everyone develops growing up.
One of the biggest takeaways, Kohnert says, may seem almost silly — composing a professional email. “It sounds so simple,” she says, especially for a generation accustomed to texting and using technology. But the basics of communication in a business setting can look a lot different than a quick text to a friend.
The workshop also helped her gain insights into her personality style and those of others, she says — and how to best communicate with them.
“I just think you get such a different perspective on what’s going to come next,” Kohnert says, creating a better understanding of the interpersonal dynamics of group projects, or what the real world may bring.
The experience also helped her make the most of a summer internship in New York at UBS Wealth Management, which required her to network and adapt to unfamiliar situations.
A crucial element of experiential education, what brings the subject matter to life, is going back and forth between conceptual learning and hands-on work and community service, Eyler says.
“It’s the reflective process that links the two,” she says. “Doing real work is important. But the critical thing, if you’re talking about learning stuff, is explicitly linking the things you’re learning in the field.”
When the 2020 Virginia General Assembly is gaveled into session at noon on Jan. 8, for the first time in the state legislature’s 401-year history, the person wielding that gavel will be a woman.
The ascension of Del. Eileen Filler-Corn of Fairfax to speaker of the House of Delegates will likely be the most visible of the many changes in store this session for the oldest continuously constituted legislative body in the Americas.
After the pivotal November 2019 elections, voters handed state Democrats control of the General Assembly, placing the party in command of the commonwealth’s executive and legislative branches for the first time in a generation. The election also ushered in the most diverse legislature in the Old Dominion’s history, with a record number of female and minority legislators, including newly elected state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, Virginia’s first female Muslim legislator.
And now, “there is a lot of pent-up demand” for legislation benefiting the interests of the urban and suburban voters who were instrumental in putting that new Democratic majority in power, says Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington.
“Rural interests have dominated the conversation” for the last few decades when the General Assembly was under GOP control, but the shift to Democratic power signals substantial changes in regional control as well, notes Farnsworth.
Spending capital
Fronted by a new cast of leaders from Northern Virginia, Democrats are expected to steer the legislature from its traditionally moderate roots toward a more progressive policy agenda.
Filler-Corn, incoming House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, D-Alexandria, and incoming Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, D-Springfield, all represent the populous inner Northern Virginia suburbs that now lack a single Republican legislator.
Political observers predict Democrats will fail to fully meet the expectations of many progressive voters to substantially rewrite labor laws or adopt comprehensive gun-safety legislation but will nonetheless enact a liberal agenda reflecting a backlog of bills that Republicans have bottled up for years.
Initiatives ranging from an increase in the state minimum wage to caps on carbon emissions and even rolling back Virginia’s right-to-work law are given much better chances for serious debate than in recent years.
Democrats are widely expected to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, expand some gun safety laws, institute new protections of women’s reproductive rights and further decriminalize marijuana. They also may spend their newly bestowed political capital on legislation allowing local governments to move or remove Confederate monuments.
Virginia Business held its 12th annual political roundtable luncheon on Nov. 6 in Richmond, featuring panelists (L to R) Barry DuVal with the Virginia Chamber of Commerce; Deirdre Condit with VCU; Chris Saxman of Virginia FREE; and Tom Walls, who was then with U.Va.’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership. Photo by Rick DeBerry
Many of these topics came up during Virginia Business magazine’s 12th annual political roundtable luncheon, held at the Richmond Omni the day after the election. A panel of four political pundits — Virginia Commonwealth University Professor of Political Science Deirdre Condit, Virginia FREE Executive Director Chris Saxman, Virginia Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Barry DuVal and Tom Walls, executive director of the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership — weighed in on factors that contributed to the Democrats’ extraordinary victory (Trump backlash, suburban demographics) and talked about what’s ahead for the 2020 session.
Easy victories
One of the biggest perks that comes with the Democrats’ historic 2019 win is being in charge of the redistricting process to determine the political makeup of the state’s legislative and congressional districts for the next decade.
It’s unclear whether Democrats will use that power to their own advantage or support a bipartisan reform commission to redraw district lines. Some Democrats who once backed the bipartisan approach have not committed to giving up the power to draw their own district lines.
Saxman, a former Republican delegate from Staunton, says he sees chances of anti-gerrymandering reform at “50/50. I cannot get a handle on that.”
Walls, however, thinks a proposed bipartisan commission can succeed with overwhelming GOP support. “Some Democrats are committed to the reform plan and will not want to abandon it,” he explains, “while some Republicans may now regard the reform amendment as the best deal they can get.”
Two quick and easy victories for Democrats will be passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and elimination of the work requirement for Medicaid recipients, Condit says.
Passage of the Equal Rights Amendment would come at no political cost as it promises to be a largely symbolic victory followed by an anticipated lengthy court battle over its ratification and enactment, Condit says.
As for dropping the Medicaid work requirement, Gov. Ralph Northam paused Virginia’s negotiations with the federal government over approval of a work requirement in early December, saying the state’s voters had made clear “they want more access to health care, not less.”
Gov. Ralph Northam addresses a 2018 rally supporting Medicaid expansion. In December 2019, Northam paused negotiations with the federal government on GOP-backed work requirements for Medicaid recipients in anticipation of Democrats eliminating the stipulation. AP Photo by Bob Brown
Republicans, however, complain that such a move would break the bipartisan pact that led to Medicaid expansion in Virginia. Democrats counter that the work requirement was already falling apart due to lack of federal funding plus uncertainty over potential litigation.
Another top priority for Dems this General Assembly session will be gun safety legislation, which experts say played a big role in November’s elections. The GOP paid a price at the polls for blocking popular gun measures during an aborted special legislative session last July following the workplace mass shooting in Virginia Beach, panelists agreed.
“Overwhelmingly, Americans across the board think universal background checks absolutely make sense,” Condit says. She and other political analysts expect some gun measures to pass this year despite a wave of rural county boards of supervisors passing “Second Amendment sanctuary” resolutions in recent months.
Business concerns
Business issues coming up for legislative debate appear certain to include attempts to repeal Virginia’s right-to-work laws, which unions complain limit their power and organizing ability. However, repeal efforts legislation would likely meet strong resistance from the business community. And even if a repeal bill passed, political experts say, Northam would probably veto it.
Politicos predict much better odds of success for legislation increasing the state’s minimum wage. It currently stands at $7.25 per hour, the federal minimum, and has not been increased in five years.
Progressive Democrats have campaigned on a $15 per hour minimum wage. Democratic bills to increase Virginia’s minimum wage to $8, $10 and $15 an hour died on party-line votes in the 2019 session.
“I think we’ll see a number of wage measures make their way through the General Assembly this year,” says University of Virginia economist and newly elected Delegate Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville. “How they get packaged together is still to be determined. I hope these questions will get the oxygen they deserve in a crowded session.”
“I think the minimum wage is going to be increased,” says Saxman, who says he thinks a compromise with Republicans on the issue is likely.
“Whatever deal is struck on minimum wage, I hope the business community will get behind … and tag it to inflation going forward and just set it and forget it,” he says.
Business support is also expected to boost education and health care legislation.
A moderating influence
DuVal says the Virginia Chamber’s top business priority for the state budget this session is education, including early childhood education and increasing teacher pay. “We think we’re going to work well with the majority on that. We had over 1,000 teacher [job] openings when schools started this year; it’s hard to believe.”
Saxman predicts legislation raising teacher pay and reforming the state’s Standards of Learning will make it to the governor’s desk. Tech talent pipeline legislation also is a top bipartisan issue. Two days after the election, Northam announced that Virginia will invest money to create 31,000 new computer-science graduates over 20 years under agreements he signed with 11 universities.
The new Democratic majorities are slim, and the party’s leadership is sensitive to the concerns of business leaders, so Virginians shouldn’t expect major changes, Walls says.
“Democrats will have nearly two decades of pent-up demand for legislation that they could not pass before, but their margins in both houses of the General Assembly are still not very large, and they now have many members in evenly divided districts, who may hesitate to embrace the most progressive proposals in their purest form,” he says.
Conservative resistance on issues such as eliminating right-to-work will be strong, especially from the business community, but the panelists agreed that the moderate Northam probably will temper and scale back the most progressive legislative priorities.
“I think Governor Northam may be a check on some of the most progressive goals of the Democratic Caucus. But it’s a new General Assembly and the progressive voters who delivered the Democratic victory will demand, and probably get, some significant legislative results,” Walls says.
Real change
Northam has made a remarkable political turnaround, which has been aided by the new Democratic majority.
In February 2019, he was facing widespread calls for his resignation after admitting he had worn blackface in a 1980s Michael Jackson dance contest.
Yet, he has not only survived that political scandal but has re-emerged as a strong party leader.
Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Public Policy, says the center’s latest polling shows that Northam “has weathered the storm. He was at 51% approval in our state legislative poll of likely voters in October.” Given his party’s new legislative majority and a variety of projects he has since undertaken to correct past racial injustices in Virginia, she predicts that the rejuvenated governor is “about to become one of the most impactful and legislatively successful governors in the state’s history. That will ultimately be his legacy.”
“Virginia is essentially a mid-Atlantic blue state” now, says Quentin Kidd, director of Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Public Policy. Photo by Mark Rhodes
Bitecofer and Wason Center director Quentin Kidd point to Virginia’s growing suburban demographics and the voting trends of college-educated women as the forces powering the new Democratic legislative majorities and bolstering Northam’s position as a comeback leader.
“What has driven the blue wave in the last couple of election cycles is college-educated women,” Kidd told a group of Virginia high- and middle-school civics teachers at the annual Virginia Civics Summit in Jamestown. “Virginia is essentially a mid-Atlantic blue state” now, he noted.
And as a result, political analysts say, Democrats will be under pressure from those voters to deliver real change this session.
“If they are smart, they’ll deliver it,” Bitecofer says. “A gun purchase background check bill and minimum wage hikes are going to be key deliverables that would cause major backlash effects if Democrats fail to deliver. I think they can get away with not passing the assault weapons ban and the right-to-work repeal, but these other two are must haves.”
Nonetheless, like Northam, the Virginia Senate is likely to limit the flow of more progressive bills, in part because the Senate has its own priorities, a very narrow (21-19) Democratic majority and more experienced leadership. About 30% of Democratic House members have little legislative experience and most have never been part of a governing majority so that dynamic may also prove problematic to advancing their agenda.
But if voters aren’t happy with the speed of reform, there’s always another election just around the corner.
Bob Gibson is the communications director and senior researcher at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
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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.”
Five proposed casinos, sports wagering and online casino gaming would directly create about 7,600 jobs, according to projections released in late November by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.
However, the five casinos combined would generate $367 million in net annual state tax revenue — less than the Virginia Lottery, which produced $606 million to support local public education in 2018. JLARC also estimated that casinos would reduce lottery proceeds by $30 million per year.
JLARC research found that building an additional casino in Northern Virginia would add 4,400 jobs and attract $311 million in gaming revenue currently spent outside Virginia.
The General Assembly is expected to vote on legislation this session that would pave the way for casinos to be built in Portsmouth, Norfolk, Richmond, Danville and Bristol.
From governments to corporations, cybersecurity has become a major focus in protecting customer privacy and assets — but a small group at James Madison University is also thinking about the hackers who commit crimes and what motivates them.
In February, three students will be the first to finish the university’s graduate cyber intelligence certificate program, launched last March by Edna Reid, a former FBI analyst who also started JMU’s undergraduate cyber intelligence courses in 2014. A second cohort began the yearlong program in August 2019, and a third will begin this August.
“It’s a certificate program to inform longtime professionals both within the cyber world and outside of it how they can apply cyber intelligence to their specific work,” says Reid, an adjunct faculty member who conducts research in cyber intelligence tradecraft. “I want to challenge the status quo that cybersecurity is just a random thing — it is done by people with their own motivations.”
Cybersecurity, Reid explains, focuses on the tangible measures put in place to target hackers and various forms of malevolent hardware. However, she says, cyber intelligence is the study of what motivates the people behind the attacks. Students learn about behavioral, cultural and geopolitical factors that impact hackers and the ethical and legal issues that companies, governments and other organizations must consider when protecting their systems from cyber threats.
Mary Lou Bourne, JMU’s director of technology innovation and economic development, signed up immediately for the certificate program when she heard it was being offered. She expects to graduate in February.
“It’s easy to forget that behind every single major ransomware attack or a smaller-scale hack is a person or people who need to be understood,” Bourne says. “I didn’t expect to love studying how ethics and philosophy impact our cyber decisions or my career.”
Only six universities nationwide have cyber intelligence programs, and JMU’s is entirely online. The 18-credit program can be finished in a year, but students also can take up to three years if needed. This flexibility is key to attracting professionals and underrepresented groups to the field, Reid says. Her hope is that the certificate program will grow into a full-fledged master’s degree program.
At Massanutten Technical Center in Rockingham County, high school students now have a cybersecurity lab that resembles a command center for monitoring cyberattacks, an idea by Reid to expand the local training pipeline.
“We don’t have many millennials or women or people of color in the realm of cybersecurity, let alone cyber intelligence,” Reid says. “This program is a way to bridge that gap.”
Virginia’s overall patient satisfaction rate dipped in a recently released nationwide survey, but a consistent group of hospitals in the commonwealth continues to receive high marks.
The patient satisfaction scores come from the annual Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The Virginia results of the latest survey, conducted in 2018, are shown on Pages 46-47. The results are provided by Virginia Health Information, a Richmond-based nonprofit organization offering a wide range of data on hospitals, nursing facilities, physicians and health insurers in the commonwealth.
In addition to the patient satisfaction survey, VHI annually provides Virginia Business with service line reports showing patient discharge volume by region for a wide variety of hospital procedures.
The national satisfaction survey asks patients two questions:
How do they rate their hospitals overall?
Would they recommend the hospital to friends and family?
The highest rating in answer to the first question is: “9 or 10” on a 10-point scale. The highest recommendation in response to the second question is: “Yes, definitely.”
In answering both questions in 2018, 80% or more of respondents gave top ratings to six of 82 Virginia acute-care hospitals: Carilion Giles Community Hospital in Pearisburg, Novant Health UVA Haymarket, Riverside Doctors’ Hospital Williamsburg, Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Sentara Princess Anne Hospital in Virginia Beach and Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington. All also had high scores on both questions in the 2017 survey.
In addition, another six hospitals scored 80% or better on one of the two questions in the 2018 survey: Inova Fair Oaks Hospital in Fairfax, Russell County Medical Center in Lebanon, Sentara Leigh Hospital in Norfolk, Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, Smyth Community Hospital in Marion and University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville.
The Virginia average percentages for top ratings in the latest survey were 71% percent for the first question (down from 72% in the 2017 survey) and 70% for the second question (unchanged from the previous year). The national averages for the 2018 survey were 73% for the first question and 72% percent for the second.
In the 2018 survey, data was unavailable from four hospitals, and an insufficient number of patients took the survey at four other facilities.
The service line reports on Pages 48-54 show consumers which hospitals are the market leaders in their regions in terms of patient discharges for a variety of procedures. VHI suggests that patients seek additional information about their options and needs from health-care providers. Not all hospitals provide the same types of care.
VHI also publishes regional and statewide costs for dozens of services to help consumers compare expected costs. These and other details about Virginia hospitals and other health providers are available at www.vhi.org.
Henrico County-based insurance broker The Hilb Group LLC (THG) has acquired Rhode Island-based Wickford Insurance Agency Inc. (WIA) in a deal that closed on Dec. 1, THG announced Tuesday.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
WIA is a property and casualty insurance agency and its associates will join THG’s Rhode Island operations under the management of Chris Schneider and Derek Schneider.
“WIA has provided excellent customer service since 1984,” Joe Padula, New England Property & Casualty Practice Leader said in a statement. “By joining THG, WIA’s customers will continue to receive the same degree of service that they have come to expect, plus the additional capabilities and expertise available through THG.”
THG has completed more than 60 acquisitions since 2015. Since July, THG has acquired insurance companies including Pennsylvania-based Greenwald Berk Agency LLC, Massachusetts-based The Incentive Group LLC, New York-based Avanti Associated Ltd., Massachusetts-based Gould & Naimoli Partners LLC and North Carolina-based Employee Benefit Advisors of the Carolinas LLC.
The Carlyle Group, a Washington, D.C.,-based global investment firm, announced in late October that it will acquire a majority interest in THG by the end of the year.
Founded in 2009, THG now has more than 90 offices in 21 states employing more than 900 people. THG has been a portfolio company of Abry Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm, since 2015.
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Saxman predicts legislation raising teacher pay and reforming the state’s Standards of Learning will make it to the governor’s desk. Tech talent pipeline legislation also is a top bipartisan issue. Two days after the election, Northam announced that Virginia will invest money to create 31,000 new computer-science graduates over 20 years under agreements he signed with 11 universities.
