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Growing your own

When a trendy new company comes to town, there’s often a lot of hoopla and ballyhoo. Think of the announcements that Deschutes Brewery was coming to Roanoke and Ballast Point Brewing Co. was setting up shop in Botetourt County.

The celebration of existing businesses’ expansions can be more muted, but the impact of those expansions can be even more important. “This is true not just among Virginia, but really nationwide,” says Stephen Moret, president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. “Most job growth, at least among larger firms, comes from existing firms. It’s not new companies coming into a state.”

Existing businesses create more than 70 percent of Virginia’s new jobs, according to Todd Haymore, Virginia’s former secretary of commerce and trade. When established companies invest in expansions, Moret says, they not only create more jobs, they deepen their commitment to stay and maintain those jobs.

That’s one reason Altec’s announcement in October to expand its Botetourt manufacturing plant by 65,000 square feet was such a big deal. Altec is a major provider of products and services to the electric utility, telecommunications, tree-care, lights-and-signs, and contractor markets.

“It’s an endorsement of your business environment,” Beth Doughty, executive director of the Roanoke Regional Partnership, says of any existing business’s expansion. “To me, what the Altec story is … a business that was recruited here and their ability to continue to grow here. That’s an endorsement of the business climate, the market advantages. That’s the story on Altec.”

Doughty’s words echo what Altec plant manager John Herrig said in a statement when the expansion was announced. “We are able to grow in Virginia and in Botetourt County because this is a pro-business environment with the logistics and infrastructure to help Altec succeed,” he said.

Altec’s Botetourt plant engineers, manufactures and assembles telescopic boom truck cranes, large transmission derricks and 55-foot aerial devices. This is the fifth expansion at the plant since it opened in 2001. Altec announced it would invest $30.2 million and add 180 jobs. Moret says the expansion will generate more than 290 jobs outside the plant in Botetourt and the surrounding region.

“That’s significant job growth and significant investment,” Doughty says. “That’s exactly how you want it, how you want the whole process of business investment attraction to play out.”

Moret agrees. “This, to me, is just a great example of the benefits that come from attracting a company and then making sure that the community really supports them and meets all their needs as they grow.”

That support includes attention from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, Botetourt and the Roanoke Regional Partnership. It also includes financial support, funding for worker training from the Virginia Jobs Investment Program, a $300,000 performance-based grant from the Virginia Investment Partnership program and $400,000 from the Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund.

“The Board of Supervisors and Botetourt County staff are committed to supporting our existing businesses and helping them grow and prosper here,” Todd Dodson, then vice chairman of the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement when the expansion was announced. Dodson said that Altec’s expansion “reaffirms that Botetourt Center at Greenfield is an excellent location for high-value, advanced manufacturing.”

Doughty says Altec’s expansion demonstrates that the region’s strengths — a strong labor force, market access and a low cost of doing business — align with what Altec and other manufacturers need to flourish. “Their profile is similar to the profile of the Roanoke region’s advantages,” she says. The availability of a well-trained, dependable labor force seems particularly important to Altec, she says. “Their employment continues to grow, and that’s the fuel to continue their growth.”

Founded in 1929, privately held Altec is based in Birmingham, Ala. It delivers goods and services in more 100 countries.

An Altec AN67 Aerial Device — people outside the industry would call it a bucket truck — was parked at the front entrance of the White House last July. Products from each of the 50 states were on display to mark the beginning of “Made in America Week.” Altec was Alabama’s representative at the event, but the company has long established itself as an important part of the Roanoke region’s economy.

“This has become a great success story for Botetourt,” Moret says. “It is, in fact, one of Virginia’s most important employers.” 

A stellar year

Companies large and small, established and new, invested more than $425 million in the Shenandoah Valley last year, resulting in the promise of 3,300 new jobs.

Frederick County achieved historic levels of capital investment and job creation, anchored by Navy Federal’s $100 million expansion of its local call center operations and Amazon’s new 1-million-square-foot, e-commerce facility. Together, the two projects will yield more than 2,400 new jobs.

“Certainly, the Navy Federal and Amazon announcements stand out for the sheer number of jobs, but we’re very grateful for all of our business expansions and locations,” says Patrick Barker, executive director of the Frederick County Economic Development Authority.

Other announcements in the top-of-Virginia region included building materials supplier 84 Lumber’s decision to open a $3.9 million production facility in the Stephenson area, adding 100 jobs; Winchester Metals’ $870,000 investment to add precision metal fabrication equipment, a third shift and 17 jobs; and Thermo Fisher Scientific’s expansion of its line of medical diagnostic equipment in Middletown, creating 57 jobs.

“We’re proud of the growth of our existing businesses,” Barker says. “They’re our bread and butter.”

Elsewhere in the valley, economic development was steady last year, officials say.

Retail giant Walmart is expanding its distribution center in Rockingham County, a $6 million investment expected to create 123 jobs.

Munters Corp., a maker of air-handling equipment for the data-center, food and pharmaceutical industries, has invested $2.5 million to expand and upgrade equipment at its plant in Buena Vista, a project expected to add 100 jobs by the end of this year.

A food-and-beverage ‘star’
“On the whole, we’re seeing projects with much higher capital investment, especially in the food-and-beverage sector,” says Courtland Robinson, director of business development for the Shenandoah Valley Partnership, which serves Augusta, Bath, Highland, Rockbridge, Rockingham and Shenandoah counties and the cities of Buena Vista, Harrisonburg, Lexington, Staunton and Waynesboro.

Examples include Shamrock Farms, which is more than doubling its production of dairy products in Augusta County while adding 70 jobs, and The Hershey Co., which is adding 69 jobs and spending millions on new machinery in Stuarts Draft, the company’s second-largest U.S. facility.

Also, DanoneWave has announced a $60 million expansion of its warehouse in Mount Crawford that is expected to create about 50 jobs. The company’s brands include Activia, Dannon and Horizon Organic dairy products, International Delight coffee creamers and iced coffee, Oikos Greek yogurt, and Silk foods and beverages.

Virginia Economic Development Partnership made a biannual tour of the region in 2016, during which state officials impressed upon Carrie Chenery, the partnership’s executive director, that the valley is a “star” in the food-and-beverage industry and that “we weren’t giving ourselves enough credit,” she says. The partnership took the advice to heart. The VEDP’s visit to the valley this fall will be focused entirely on food-and-beverage companies.

From manufacturing to cold storage to agri-tourism, “our food-and-beverage industry is very strong,” Chenery says.

The industry is the region’s largest private employment sector, accounting for approximately 9,100 workers, according to the partnership. The second-largest sector is transportation and warehousing, in large part because of the valley’s location along the Interstate 81 corridor. Employment in those two sectors has jumped 8.2 percent in the last five years, according to the partnership.

Business-ready
Increasingly, prospective companies are looking for sites where they can move in and begin operations quickly. As a result, valley localities are taking steps to develop their existing inventory of industrial and commercial sites to a higher degree of readiness. “These companies’ needs are very specific,” Robinson says. “It makes economic developers have to think outside of the box in order to be competitive.”

Helping with the task is the Virginia Business Ready Sites Program, a public-private partnership that provides funding to identify marketable properties with greater than 100 contiguous acres. Beneficiaries of the grant program last year were Innovation Village @ Rockingham in Rockingham County, Turkey Knob Road in Mount Jackson, Staunton Crossing in Staunton, Mill Place Commerce Park in Augusta County and Nature’s Crossing Technology Center in Waynesboro.

Robinson says the partnership’s member jurisdictions competed for about 5 million square feet of industrial and commercial space and an estimated $600 million in investment. Inquiries were up 70 percent in 2017 over the previous year.

Looking ahead
In addition to business-ready sites, prospects are looking for a skilled workforce. Addressing that issue, Blue Ridge Community College will break ground this spring on a $15 million Biosciences Building.

BRCC President John Downey says the 40,000-square-foot building on the southern end of the Weyers Cave campus will house a modern nursing lab as well as a new EMT-paramedic certification program. The facility also will serve the local food-and-beverage industry by providing instruction in safe food handling as well as the fermentation process for making wine and beer, Downey says.

Pharmaceutical manufacturer   Merck’s plant in Elkton recently switched from pill production to vaccine production and retrained all of its 700 employees. In conjunction with SRI’s drug research facility outside Harrisonburg, Blue Ridge’s new biosciences building will help ensure that these companies maintain a well-trained workforce, Downey says.

Meanwhile, site development finally is underway for the FBI’s Central Records Complex in Frederick County.

At the time of its initial announcement in 2004, the federal government expected the facility would be operational by 2010. But Congress’ failure to fund the project allowed those plans to lie dormant until 2014, when Virginia’s congressional delegation secured $97.8 million for its construction.

In June 2016, the General Services Administration selected a 60-acre site along Millwood Pike (U.S. 50), east of Winchester. The complex will consolidate the bureau’s paper records currently dispersed in hundreds of locations across the country.

Virginia’s U.S. senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, have advocated for the facility after the retirement of longtime Rep. Frank Wolf, R-10th. “Projects like this continue to display Northwestern Virginia’s appeal and proven track record of sustaining critical federal projects,” Warner said in a statement.

Hospitality and tourism
Another project that will be coming on line in 2018 is the new Hotel Madison and Shenandoah Valley Conference Center in Harrisonburg, a partnership between the city and James Madison University.

Chenery, the partnership’s leader, says the hotel and conference center will be significant, not only for its 230 guest rooms, but also its more than 21,000 square feet of event space and breakout rooms for corporate retreats, meetings, weddings and other events. The facility is scheduled to open in May.

In addition, Shenandoah Valley Regional Airport has a new carrier, SkyWest Airlines, with daily flights to Washington Dulles International and Chicago O’Hare airports beginning April 3. The airline will provide business and leisure travelers in the region with access to United’s network of destinations.

SkyWest has a track record for “consistent, on-time transportation,” Chenery says, adding that the deal also has the potential to increase the number of tourists who visit the region.

In 2016, valley tourism officials launched the Shenandoah Beerwerks Trail, which linked about a dozen local craft beer producers in the central and southern valley. Last year saw the opening of the Shenandoah Spirits Trail, which connects more than 40 local wineries, craft breweries, cideries and distilleries from Harrisonburg to Winchester-Frederick County.

Both trails allow travelers to “sip” their way through the region while also taking in the area’s natural scenery, farm-to-table dining and outdoor recreational opportunities. “It’s a good branding opportunity for the valley,” Chenery says.

 

Shenandoah Valley’s recent deals

Company Location #Jobs
Navy Federal Credit Union Frederick County 1,400
Amazon.com Inc. Frederick County 1,000
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Rockingham County 123
84 Lumber Frederick County 100
Munters Corp.1 Buena Vista 100
Shamrock Farms Augusta County 78
Hershey Chocolate of Virginia Inc. Augusta County 69
TruckVault Shenandoah County 60
Thermo Fisher Scientific Frederick County 57
Friendship Industries Inc. Harrisonburg 50
1 Company has headquarters in another country.
Source: Frederick County Economic Development Authority, Shenandoah Valley Partnership, 2017

Timing was ‘critical’

Helping a company create a 1-million-square-foot e-commerce facility in nine months is no small feat. But that’s exactly what Frederick County officials did last year in landing Amazon, the online retail giant.

“Both the developer and Amazon were very focused and upfront as far as when they needed the facility,” says Patrick Barker, executive director of the Frederick County Economic Development Authority.  “Clearly, timing was the critical aspect of the deal — finding a property and getting it up and running.”

Amazon is involved in a major expansion of its warehouse and distribution network in the U.S. The company was looking for a site that could enhance service to the Washington-Baltimore market.

Dallas-based Amazon developer Hillwood first inquired about available sites in Frederick in spring 2016. Only a handful of available properties in the county EDA’s inventory were large enough to handle the facility Amazon wanted to build. “Large-scale industrial sites are at a premium, not only in Frederick County but across the state,” Barker says.

By the fall, however, one tract had emerged as a viable option. In 2004, land owned by real estate developer George M. Sempeles in the White Hall area near the West Virginia line was chosen for the FBI’s proposed Central Records Complex. After that project dried up because of a lack of federal funding, Sempeles sold the 101-acre property last year to Hillwood for just under $7 million. A portion of the property extends into neighboring Berkeley County, W.Va.

The deal for Amazon’s e-commerce center in Frederick was announced in spring 2017. All of the pieces of the project came together quickly, Barker says. The permitting process for what would become known as the White Hall Commerce Center involved site plan approval and two separate building permits.

The first building opened in late September; the second was completed about two months later. “The county and the developer did a great job of working with Amazon to make this deal happen,” Barker says.

Since taking occupancy of the facility, the company has been busy building its information technology infrastructure. “Amazon is very mechanized with their logistics operations,” Barker says. “They wanted time to allow them to install all of that technology. They’ve been putting in racking operations and their preferred IT.”

When the $105 million facility is completed this year, it will employ more than 1,000 people. According to Amazon, employees at the Frederick center will pick, pack and ship large customer items such as big-screen televisions, kayaks and patio furniture.

Amazon is known for offering good employee benefits, Barker adds, and “for many in our community, this will be the first time that they have seen those sorts of benefits.”

Barker says the Amazon deal is shaping up to be one of the more significant corporate investments during his tenure with the Frederick County EDA.

“When you consider the size, the time frame and the potential that lies in providing our area with good-paying jobs, it’s probably in the upper tier,” he says. “The Amazon name is something that catches people’s eye, and hopefully that will lead to other investments in Frederick County in the coming months and years. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”

A tech play

Facebook. Amazon. Google. Those big-name technology companies are putting operations in Virginia. And everyone is buzzing about Northern Virginia making the final cut as one of 20 sites for Amazon’s $5 billion second corporate headquarters, a project that could bring 50,000 jobs during the next 15 to 17 years.  

In the past year, these technology players and their data centers have led the way in terms of investments. Facebook is at the top of the list with plans to build a $1 billion data center in Henrico County. While Facebook chose the Richmond region, West Coast-based Vantage Data Centers looked to Loudoun County, Virginia’s data center hub, for another $1 billion project: a 1-million-square-foot data center campus in Ashburn.

As a sector, data centers, with their processing, hosting and related services, brought more investment to Virginia than any other industry last year. Yet its cousin, computer programming services, created the most overall jobs.

Amazon Web Services Inc. plans to hire 1,500 workers for a new East Coast corporate campus that the cloud computing services provider is locating in Fairfax County. Amazon.com also is building an e-commerce and distribution center in Frederick County that’s expected to create 1,100 jobs.

Virginia continues to draw corporate headquarters expansions. Navy Federal Credit Union is building a $100 million service and support facility in Frederick that will create 1,400 jobs, while Capital One Financial Corp. is making news with a new headquarters complex at Tysons that will include a Wegmans on the ground floor.

Overall in 2017, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership announced 237 projects, with an investment value of $4.2 billion, and a total 22,614 jobs.  That’s slightly below 2016 numbers, which saw $4.6 billion in investment and 24, 116 jobs. 

There’s always HQ2, the nickname for Amazon’s second headquarters.  That prize would vault Virginia into job heaven. An announcement is expected later this year.

Economic development charts

Projects galore

The mood in construction these days is upbeat. A growing economy and President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure plan has contractors confident about sales growth, profits and staffing levels in the near future. 

Plus, some companies are planning major expansions in response to the recently enacted federal corporate tax cut — paving the way for new projects.

By all measures, a construction boom could be in the making. In December, Virginia had the fourth-lowest construction unemployment rate, 4 percent, in the country, proof of how busy the industry has become.

There are billions of dollars in new construction in the pipeline in the Old Dominion. Senior-living facilities, data centers, hotels, industrial warehouses and large mixed-use projects are going up. Mixed-use projects are particularly prominent in Northern Virginia where an extended Metro system has sparked new development.

Sometimes even a single major capital investment, like Facebook’s plans to build a $1 billion, 970,000-square-foot data center in Henrico County, can create thousands of construction jobs.

Virginia’s real estate industry, which is closely tied to construction, has come roaring back since the Great Recession. The industry generated $67 billion in economic activity in 2016, the second-largest generator of direct economic activity in the state, according to a report commissioned by Virginia Realtors, the state’s largest real estate trade group.  The report looked not only at housing, but the broad sector including housing, offices, retail and other commercial buildings, and industrial projects.

Yet even with so much activity, “contractors are advised to remain wary,” ABC chief economist Anirban Basu said after the trade group released the industry’s low unemployment figures earlier this year.

“The combination of extraordinary confidence and capital can fuel excess financial leverage and spur asset-price bubbles,” he said. “The implication is that as contractors remain busy, there should be an ongoing stockpiling of defensive cash. That recommendation will be difficult for many contractors to implement, however, with labor shortages and materials costs rising more rapidly and slender profit margins in many construction segments.”

 

Construction & development charts

 

A surge in the urge to merge

Virginia’s largest companies have been in a merging mood in recent years.

In mid-February, General Dynamics, Virginia’s second-largest publicly traded company announced plans to acquire CSRA, a government IT services company, in a cash deal worth $9.6 billion including the assumption of debt.

Both companies are based in Falls Church. If all goes as planned, the deal will be completed by the middle of the year.

CSRA itself is the result of another deal in 2015. Falls Church-based Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) combined its North American public-sector business with SRA International to create CSRA.

CSC wasn’t done.  Last year, it merged with the Enterprise Services division of Hewlett Packard Enterprise to create DXC Technology, a Tysons-based information technology and consulting services company with $26 billion in revenue.

Other big public companies have been involved either in mergers or the spin-off of subsidiaries. Reston-based Leidos Holdings combined with Lockheed Martin’s information systems business in 2016, a deal that made Leidos the biggest IT provider to the federal government.

Leidos was created in 2013 when Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) split into two separate, publicly traded companies. The spun-off company kept the SAIC name.

A similar name-swapping split occurred in 2015 when the Gannett Co. separated its publishing and broadcasting divisions. The spun-off publishing business kept the Gannett name while the broadcast business became Tegna Inc. It owns or operates 46 television stations in 38 U.S. markets. Like CSC and Leidos, Tegna wasn’t through. It spun off its automotive marketing site, Cars.com, as a separate company in May.

One of the most dramatic mergers involving a Virginia company occurred in 2015 when Chesapeake-based Dollar Tree Inc. won a bidding battle with rival Dollar General to acquire Family Dollar for $9.1 billion. Dollar Tree now operates more than 14,000 stores and has annual revenue of more than $20 billion.

Some deals, however, seem to be plagued with delays. Henrico County-based Genworth Financial announced in October 2016 that China Oceanwide Holdings would acquire it for $2.7 billion. Originally expected to be completed last year, the deal has been delayed repeatedly.

The problem has been the companies’ inability so far to win approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which screens foreign takeovers of American companies for national security issues. Genworth and Oceanwide refiled their CFIUS application for a third time in February.

Largest companies charts

 

Studying student patterns

Total enrollment at Virginia’s colleges continues to grow, but the rate of growth has slowed since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.

The enrollment pattern may be the result of declining growth in the number of high school graduates. According to a recent report by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), the pool of potential college students is expected to remain relatively flat for the next few years.

That demographic trend is one of the challenges Virginia faces as it aims to become the nation’s best-educated state by 2030. That goal would require the portion of adult Virginians with a postsecondary credential, certificate or degree to increase from 51 percent to 70 percent. According to the SCHEV report, almost all the jobs created since the Great Recession will require workers to have more than a high school diploma.

The charts in this section provide an in-depth look at enrollment at Virginia’s public and private, nonprofit colleges last fall. Compared with fall 2016, all but three of the state’s 15 public, four-year colleges saw their enrollments rise. On the other hand, about half of the commonwealth’s private, nonprofit schools saw enrollment decline. A majority of the state’s 23 community colleges also saw enrollments decline during that time period. Community colleges typically experience an upswing in students during recessions as laid-off workers go back to school to retrain.

Looking at total enrollment at public, four-year colleges, Longwood University had the biggest percentage increase, up nearly 4 percent from the previous year. The Farmville-based school added 189 students. Fairfax-based George Mason University had the largest total enrollment among public, four-year schools in the commonwealth with almost 36,300 full- and part-time students.

Regent University led the pack in total enrollment percentage growth at the state’s private, nonprofit universities. The Virginia Beach-based school added 1,860 students from fall 2016 to fall 2017, a 21.2 percent increase. Lynchburg-based Liberty remains the largest college in the commonwealth with 75,044 full- and part-time students.

In addition to seeing fluctuations in enrollment, several colleges are undergoing leadership changes. The University of Virginia president, Teresa A. Sullivan, is retiring. She will be succeeded by James E. Ryan, the dean of Harvard Graduate School of Education.  His term starts Oct. 1, but the transition will begin this summer.

The College of William & Mary also named its first woman president.  Katherine A. Rowe will succeed retiring president W. Taylor Reveley III on July 1. She currently is provost at Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the largest women’s colleges in the United States. 

Norfolk State University also is looking for a new president after Eddie N. Moore stepped down for health reasons last year. Melvin T. Stith is serving as the college’s interim president.

Education charts

Nurturing an inclusive environment

It’s not uncommon to hear dozens of languages spoken on Old Dominion University’s campus in Norfolk.

With 24,375 students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries, ODU has become a regional melting pot of academic and cultural diversity. Nearly 90 years after its founding in 1930 as the Norfolk division of the College of William and Mary, ODU has evolved from a two-year commuter school into a major doctoral research institution offering more than 270 academic programs.

“As many as 50 languages are spoken on campus,” says ODU President John R. Broderick, the university’s leader since 2008. “I hear all the time from students who say that one of the critical deciding points for coming to ODU was they wanted to come to a diverse campus that is committed to welcoming all. That has always been a genuine edge for us.”

The university’s commitment to nurturing an inclusive environment sets it apart from other schools, Broderick adds. “It’s a very diverse place, but what makes it special is the inclusivity you see on campus, in the library, in the dining hall and as students walk around,” he says. “We talk about students having to compete in the world, but they also will have to partner with others. How can you partner in the world if you have never been around people from all kinds of points of view?”

Encouraging diversity and inclusivity is an ongoing objective at ODU. “We have to commit to efforts to always take a look at how we can make the campus more welcoming to students, staff and faculty,” Broderick says. “We have to realize that not everybody here is between the ages of 18 and 22, and not everybody here has even been in this country before visiting campus for the first time. There are always opportunities to do some things better.”

Broderick and his wife, Kate, have been driving forces behind making ODU a more welcoming community. In recognition of their efforts, student leaders asked to name the university’s dining hall Broderick Commons in their honor. The facility, which features a variety of cuisines, opened in 2016. 

Kate Broderick, formerly Old Dominion’s director of educational accessibility, joined forces with Pam Kirk, an ODU alumna and member of the board of visitors, to found the university’s Women Initiative Network (WIN) in 2014. The mentorship program pairs women executives with first-generation female students. Mentors regularly meet with students to discuss concerns ranging from preparing for job interviews to managing finances. The network also funds an annual scholarship for a female student with financial needs.  This year, 20 mentors are counseling 23 students. Meeting for lunch, a cup of coffee or dinner, they discuss everything from preparing for job interviews to managing finances.

Kirk says that students who have graduated continue to check in with their mentors for advice and encouragement as they navigate their careers.
“The unique thing about this program is it’s very individualized to each student,” Kirk says. “Students can ask professionals all kinds of questions about anything they need to chart their career path.”

$250 million campaign
One of ODU’s longtime priorities has been supporting students who need extra encouragement to complete their education. More than 33 percent of the university’s students are eligible for Pell grants, and about 70 percent receive some form of financial aid. Broderick notes that the typical ODU student comes up short by $1,700 in paying college expenses.

“We have students who make a choice between books and a week’s worth of food,” he says. “Those are the kind of decisions we don’t think our students should have to make. We want to continue to attract the best and brightest and make sure they have the same opportunities to succeed that they would have at any other institution in the commonwealth.”

Providing support for student scholarships and academic opportunities such as study abroad programs is a primary objective of the university’s $250 million fundraising campaign, which Broderick announced during his State of the University address in August. At least $100 million will be earmarked for scholarships.

“We have been fortunate in the last five to seven years to have made great inroads in philanthropy,” Broderick says. “The time is certainly right for us to do this. It’s another step in our maturation as an institution to go out and do something at this level.”

The campaign’s original goal was set at $200 million, but university officials upped the ante after raising $78 million by December. Previously, the university’s most successful fund-raising campaign, from 2001 to 2006, netted $115 million.

“This is an open-ended campaign, but we want to get it done in five years or less if we can,” says Alonzo Brandon, ODU’s vice president for university advancement. “This whole thing is about giving students opportunities to excel and graduate with less debt and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.”

Money raised through the campaign also will support special projects such as ODU’s research in resiliency. Through its Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flooding Resilience, the university has become one of the nation’s leading research institutions in sea-level rise.

“Most of the research has been done with state funds,” Brandon notes, “but what we really want to do is take it nationally and raise money to establish an institute … to cover things outside Virginia.”

Football boost
ODU’s athletics program also will benefit from the campaign. The Old Dominion Athletic Foundation is raising $40 million, including $20 million for athletic scholarships and $20 million toward the $55 million renovation of the school’s football stadium, Foreman Field at S.B. Ballard Stadium.

The university revived its football program in 2009, nearly 70 years after dropping it. Bringing football back to ODU and Foreman Field, which opened in 1936, has benefited the university and Hampton Roads. “Football has been a rallying point for the region and certainly for the campus,” Broderick says, noting that 20,000 people converge on campus for home games six Saturdays each fall. “Football brings people to campus who may not have seen the successful transformation we’ve had here.”

Football also has brought to ODU students who previously might have gone elsewhere. “Football led us to start a marching band [with 165 students],” Broderick notes. “A lot of those students are here because of the ability to participate in a band. We used to lose a lot of students to other schools because we didn’t have a band.”

Barry Art Museum
A growing number of students also are taking advantage of ODU’s burgeoning arts programs showcased in a variety of galleries, theaters and museums on campus. ODU’s role in the region’s arts scene has expanded over the years and will be further magnified with this fall’s opening of the Barry Art Museum. The 24,000-square-foot museum now under construction on Hampton Boulevard is the result of a donation by Hampton Roads philanthropists Richard and Carolyn Barry. The gift is valued over time at more than $35 million, the largest gift in the school’s history. 

Focusing on the American glass art movement, the museum is being heralded as a significant player in Hampton Roads’ fine-arts scene. It will feature items from the Barrys’ personal collection, including glass sculptures and paintings. The collection also includes automatons, 19th-century dolls wound by a clockwork mechanism to perform movements. The museum will be free and open to the public.

“This is going to be a very active place,” says Jutta-Annette Page, the museum’s executive director, who came to ODU last year after serving as senior curator of glass and decorative arts at the Toledo Museum of Art. “It’s a very exciting prospect to be involved on the ground floor of a new museum. It’s a rare opportunity to start out a museum from scratch.”

Page is enthusiastic about the opportunities for the museum to partner with ODU academic programs, including areas such as engineering and science. “There are so many different tie-ins that we can create through the collections,” she says. “The more we can involve other departments, the richer the cultural life of ODU will be. This will be a laboratory of ideas for the future.”

Already, the museum has collaborated with ODU’s Virginia Modeling, Analysis & Simulation Center to develop visualization slides using automatons. “We see a lot more tie-ins with robotics,” Page adds. “We think it will be one of the highlights of the museum’s collection.”

The interaction between the arts and other disciplines is just one of the opportunities ODU plans to take advantage of. “I feel very good about the steps forward we’ve taken,” Broderick says of his decade-long tenure as president. “We’ve remained true to our mission and have become not only a leader in Hampton Roads but in the commonwealth.”

Old Dominion University at a glance

Location: Norfolk

History:

1930 – Norfolk Division of The College of William and Mary
1962 – Independent institution
1969 – University status

Enrollment: 24,375 total

Undergraduate: 19,540
Graduate: 4,835
International: 1,013 from 108 countries

Faculty:

Full time: 835
Part time: 676

Student-to-faculty ratio: 18 to 1

Colleges: 7 academic colleges, honors college and graduate school

Degree programs:

70 bachelor's degrees
41 master's degrees
22 doctoral degrees
2 educational specialist degrees


Distance learning: More than 100 online programs available through ODUOnline.


Research: Total external research expenditures in FY2016 were $50.4 million.

 

New crackdown on immigrant workforce

Since the Trump administration announced in January that it was terminating a federal program benefiting immigrants from El Salvador, the decision has raised concern about its effect on economic growth in Virginia.

Signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush to provide relief to nations recovering from war and natural disasters, the federal government’s Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, was first extended to Salvadorans fleeing the Central American nation’s 12-year civil war that ended officially in 1992. 

Two massive earthquakes in 2001 that devastated the capital, San Salvador, permitted another wave of legal immigration from El Salvador in the years that followed. This year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ruled that reconstruction from those disasters was complete and the 190,000 to 200,000 TPS beneficiaries now living across the U.S. will have to return home by September of next year.

Most Salvadoran TPS families live among their countrymen in and around a handful of large U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. The City Data real estate website, using what it calls a proprietary combination of data sets, reports that Maryland is home to five of the top 10 population clusters of U.S. residents born in El Salvador; Virginia is home to 23 of the top 100 clusters.

The Center for Migration Studies and other demographers report that construction companies, landscapers, restaurants, day-care providers and grocery stores are the U.S. businesses employing the highest numbers of TPS holders from the 10 countries that now benefit from that program. 

The DHS ruling on El Salvador followed last year’s decision to terminate the TPS program extended to Sudan, Nicaragua and Haiti. The TPS program for Honduras is under review. No decision has yet been made regarding the other nations still in the program, including Yemen, Nepal, South Sudan and Syria.

In his successful 2016 campaign for the White House, Donald Trump  promised to cut the flow of refugees to enhance national security against terrorism and to reduce immigration — both legal and undocumented — to protect jobs and raise wages for U.S. citizens. As this issue of Virginia Business went to press, the White House was supporting two immigration bills being evaluated in the Republican-controlled Congress.

The Senate’s RAISE Act (SB1720) and the House of Representatives’ Securing America’s Future Act (HB4760) call for cutting legal immigration by more than 400,000 people by next year, ending the nation’s decades-old diversity lottery visa system and limiting to spouses and minor children the family members that U.S. citizens can sponsor for future citizenship.

Virginia’s Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-6th District), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced HB4760, which has more than 70 Republican co-sponsors. Privacy advocates and deficit hawks give it little chance of passing in its original form. It would mandate the use of a national ID card by all citizens and legal immigrants while calling for $130 billion in funding for the Border Patrol over the course of five years — with no budget cuts to pay for it.

However, if HB4760 passes the House and the Senate, the new law would require biometric identifiers for all legal visitors to the country to help the Border Patrol and DHS agents determine who has overstayed their tourism, student- or temporary-work visas. The law would also mandate that all U.S. employers use the free, E-Verify online screening tool to determine whether potential employees can legally work in the United States.

Last October, the American Immigration Council released a report claiming that 12 percent of Virginia’s residents are foreign born, 17 percent of the commonwealth’s workers are immigrants, and foreign-born entrepreneurs account for more than 20 percent of the state’s self-employed business owners. The report also said immigrants “represent more than a fifth of Virginians working in the computer and math sciences.”

In a letter to the DHS co-signed by 23 Democratic U.S. senators, Virginia’s Mark Warner and Tim Kaine said that ending the TPS benefit for tax-paying, business-owning Salvadorans would not only hurt current U.S. foreign and economic development policy in Central America aimed at reducing illegal immigration to the United States but also cut more than $100 billion from the U.S. economy during the next 10 years as well as “billions of dollars in Social Security and Medicare contributions.”

“The renewal of El Salvador’s TPS designation has received strong support from leaders in both business and labor, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and the SEIU [Service Employees International Union],” the senators wrote. “Ending TPS protections for El Salvador will needlessly push nearly 200,000 hardworking immigrants into the shadows, hurting employers in industries across our economy.”

Estimates of how much the U.S. economy may be hurt by ending the TPS program for just three countries — El Salvador, Haiti and Honduras — vary widely. The Center for American Progress says the loss will be more than $160 billion over the course of 10 years.

Another group, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), says the U.S. economy might shrink by just $45 billion in that same period without the economic contributions from those workers and business owners.

The ILRC also estimates that ending TPS protections for Haiti, El Salvador and Honduras will cost the Social Security and Medicare trust funds almost $7 billion in the next decade. U.S. business owners who employ them would pay about $1 billion in routine employee turnover costs, and U.S. taxpayers would pay more than $3 billion to arrest, process and send home all those former TPS holders who are expected to remain in the country and continue working without legal authorization.

For its part, the NumbersUSA organization, which advocates numerous revisions in U.S. immigration policy to benefit “both U.S.-born and foreign-born citizens,” says it supports the end of automatic annual renewals of the TPS program for nations like El Salvador.

“By ending the Salvadoran TPS,” the Trump administration “has taken a major step toward saving the TPS so it can be used for future emergencies,” said Roy Beck, the group’s president, in a statement.

“The past practice of allowing foreign nationals to remain in the United States long after an initial emergency in their home countries has ended has undermined the integrity of the program,” he added.

The Trump administration also has begun to fulfill the president’s repeated campaign promises to eliminate “the magnet” of American jobs for undocumented workers.

In early January, signaling a return to the workplace raids used heavily during the George W. Bush administration, agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency paid a visit to dozens of 7-Eleven convenience stores in many U.S. states, arresting more than 20 undocumented workers and serving store managers and owners with notices that they would be subject to follow-up audits of their human-resources records for possible violations of federal immigration law.

Last October, ICE director Thomas D. Homan said in a speech that “not only are we going to prosecute the employers who knowingly hire the illegal aliens, we are going to detain and remove the illegal alien workers.”

 

Immigrant workers in Virginia

According to the American Immigration Council, 17 percent of workers in Virginia are immigrants. Immigrant workers were most numerous in the following industries:

Industry Number of Immigrant Workers
Professional, Scientific and Technical Services 89,022
Accommodation and Food Services 84,071
Retail Trade 82,410
Health Care and Social Assistance 81,905
Construction 77,417
Analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey 1-year PUMS data by the American Immigration Council.

Virginia banks on a growth spurt

Virginia banks that once were small have gotten a lot bigger in recent months.

The most dramatic example is Richmond-based Union Bankshares Corp. At one time a small financial institution based in Bowling Green, Union grew through a series of mergers to become Virginia’s largest community bank.

In January, the company completed its acquisition of Richmond-based Xenith Bank, which had total assets of about $3 billion. The stock deal, valued at $701 million when announced in April, increased Union’s assets to a total of $12.3 billion, a level that redefined its identity. 

“Today marks the start of something remarkable for businesses and consumers in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina — an independent regional bank headquartered in the commonwealth,” John C. Asbury, president and chief executive officer of Union, said in a statement when the deal closed.

By becoming a regional bank, Union joins the ranks of companies such as Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks Inc., Winston-Salem, N.C.-based BB&T Corp. and Birmingham, Ala.-based Regions Financial Corp.
Union points out that no regional bank has been based in Virginia for nearly 20 years. That situation is a stark change from the days when the Old Dominion was home to Crestar, Signet, Central Fidelity, Sovran, Jefferson National, Dominion and First Virginia banks.

With the completion of the Xenith deal, Union now has 151 banking offices and about 220 ATMs throughout Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina.  Union will operate the former Xenith branches as Xenith Bank, a division of Union Bank & Trust until all systems are integrated in late May.

Another community bank that has just finished a big deal is Portsmouth-based TowneBank.

In early February, it acquired Raleigh, N.C.-based Paragon Commercial Corp. in a transaction valued at $323.7 million when it was announced last year. TowneBank now has total assets of about $10.5 billion.

The company will operate in the Raleigh, Charlotte, and Cary markets in North Carolina as Paragon Bank, a division of TowneBank.  TowneBank previously had offices in Hampton Roads, the Richmond area and northeastern North Carolina.

Big community banks aren’t the only ones doing deals. In April, the $450 million Kilmarnock-based Bank of Lancaster completed a merger with Petersburg-based Virginia Bancorp Inc. The combined bank operates as Virginia Commonwealth Bank (VCB), an 18-branch, $960 million financial institution based in Henrico County.

How big can small banks become? There used to be a regional bank in Charlotte, N.C., called North Carolina National Bank (NCNB). It’s now known as Bank of America.  

 

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