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Carter Bank vs. Justice family saga continues

‘s says a Feb. 12 federal filed against it by GLAS Trust Co. contains “false and misleading” allegations as part of a complex financial dispute over debt repayments from loans to , his family and their businesses.

GLAS filed suit in the seeking to recoup $226.2 million lent to the Justice family-owned Bluestone Resources, a coal-mining conglomerate. Justice is seeking the Republican nomination to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.

The Justices and Carter Bank had a longstanding business relationship that soured after Worth Harris Carter Jr., the bank’s founder, died in 2017, according to court documents. A May 2021 federal court complaint, which the two sides later agreed to dismiss, acknowledged that the “Justice Entities” had $368 million in outstanding loans with Carter Bank.

In its February suit, GLAS said it represents investors who backed financing that Greensill UK, which filed for insolvency protection in 2021, extended to Bluestone. The lawsuit alleges that Carter Bank pressured Justice and his family to repay debts to the bank, and Bluestone paid “to satisfy the debts of the Justice Family and their other lines of business to Carter Bank.” The lawsuit also claims that “Carter Bank knew that each of these transfers were made by entities that were not obligated for the loans they were repaying.”

Carter Bank refutes these claims, stating it received repayments in good faith and was not party to the financing arrangement between the Justices and Greensill.

Additionally, the bank’s holding company, , stated in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it has an indemnity agreement with the Justices, supported by substantial collateral, to protect itself from such claims. “The Company and Carter Bank intend to pursue vigorously all remedies afforded to Carter Bank under the Justice Indemnity Agreement,” the bank wrote in the February filing.

Jay Justice, president and of the Justice companies, said that in 2023, Carter Bank blocked the Justices’ plan to settle their debts in an “apparent attempt to continue extracting interest payments from the Justices.”

An April 2023 news release from the Justices claimed that “the Justice plan includes the sale or refinancing of assets that would completely retire the remaining Carter Bank loans within four months.”

Deep dive

The has set the stage to offer the widest and deepest harbor on the East Coast by 2025, with the recent widening of Thimble Shoal Channel West allowing for two-way traffic for all vessels, including (ULCVs).

Completed in March, the shipping channel is now as much as 1,400 feet wide in some areas, allowing for two ULCVs to pass at the same time. Previously, the U.S. Coast Guard had one-way restrictions in the area. The widening, which began in 2019, reduces the time large vessels spend on berth by up to 15%.

That’s coupled with the ongoing dredging of the channel and Harbor to 55 feet deep, with an ocean approach to 59 feet deep, the only channel on the East Coast with congressional authorization for that depth. Deeper channels can accommodate vessels with deeper drafts, enabling the port to handle a wider range of ships and cargo types, says Cathie J. Vick, the port’s chief development and public affairs officer.

Shipping companies are putting much larger vessels in their East Coast port rotations. The ULCVs coming through the Port of Virginia, though, don’t need to be concerned about channel width, overhead draft restrictions, capacity or cargo handling infrastructure.

The wider channel allows for consistent vessel flow, contributes to greater berth and container yard efficiencies and further improves harbor safety. In addition, the port is quick to load cargo. The turnaround time to load a truck is about 30 minutes. Loading cargo onto a train takes about 36 hours.

The entire dredging project was initially expected to be finished by the end of 2024. However, federal permits allowing local beach replenishment using the dredged material, had to be renewed, delaying completion until fall 2025. Once work is finished, the Port of Virginia will possess the deepest and widest channels on the East Coast.

This is just one part of the port’s $1.4 billion strategic infrastructure investment package to accommodate larger cargo volumes on ULCVs, which have become more frequent port visitors in recent years. The widening and entire dredging costs $450 million, according to Vick. “It will increase the speed of cargo moving through the gateway,” she adds.

Some $72 million of that $450 million is federal funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure . The federal government and the port agreed to split the cost in 2015 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began evaluating the potential economic value of expanding and upgrading the port.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia’s senior senator, says the project is 20 years in the making and will benefit the port “for years to come. The infrastructure bill is the first big one to happen since the Eisenhower administration, when the interstate system was built. We limped along on making improvements, but the money didn’t allow for big projects like this one.”

The Port of Virginia has also been working on developing Craney Island into a major marine terminal to handle container, bulk, and break-bulk cargo. Upgrades planned for include new ship-to-shore cranes and an expansion of its central rail yard, set for this year, cementing Virginia’s status as home to the East Coast’s largest intermodal rail port.

“The target is for shipping companies to choose to come to Virginia first when coming to the East Coast,” Vick notes.

President Capt. Whiting Chisman says the wider channel will provide container and Navy ships with safer travel conditions. This is an even bigger consideration following the March 26 container ship collision with ‘s , which has led to Baltimore-bound ships being diverted to the Port of Virginia and other East Coast ports.

The short-term environmental impact of the dredging will be minimal, according to Joe Rieger, deputy director of restoration for the nonprofit Elizabeth River Project, which supports the environmental health of the river and its role in the local maritime economy. Rieger evaluated the dredging plan because the Elizabeth River is part of the port’s main shipping channel. Dredging and widening is not taking place in shallow water, six feet or less, where the most productive sea life is found, he notes. Benthic organisms, also known as bottom feeders (like worms and shellfish), are typically found at higher densities in shallow water and are the base of the marine food chain. Since the dredging is deepening waters already at 45 feet to 50 feet deep, there’s limited environmental impact.

 “As long as they are not going into shallow water,” he says, “there is no threat.”

, the David L. Peebles Professor of Business at ‘s Raymond A. Mason School of Business, applauds the port taking action to ensure future growth.

“This is a major and impressive feat and unusual for the government to do something before there’s a problem. The port is being proactive and customer-focused,” Swan says. “They have been for 10 years. … It’s amazing they can pull it off. Saving 15% on their time when a vessel is at berth will save money, making the port a profitable choice.

“It’s a large cost savings for these ultra-large container vessels, making the port a better option than others along the East Coast. No other port on the East Coast will have this combination of width and depth.”

Flying off the glass cliff?

You’ve no doubt heard of the — the barrier above which couldn’t rise professionally — but have you heard about the ?

It’s not as familiar a term as the ceiling, but the glass cliff is real. It’s what happens when a woman or someone from another marginalized group is put in charge of a failing institution.

This can serve a couple of purposes: The corporation can claim its first hire to a top position of a person representing X group, staving off negative headlines a little longer. Also, if the company is truly at the edge of a financial cliff, the stakes are lower than if the leader could actually do something to turn around the company’s fortunes. Maybe the new leader is just a convenient scapegoat.

It isn’t always evident what’s a glass cliff and what isn’t until later on.

Take -based , for example. Ever since a Boeing 737 Jet experienced a midair panel blowout while filled with Alaska Airlines passengers in early January, the aerospace company has come under considerable federal scrutiny over its safety and manufacturing practices. The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation, and the FBI wrote letters to passengers telling them that they may be victims of a crime.

In April came the corporate fallout: Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced he was stepping down by the end of this year, and Stan Deal, head of the Boeing Commercial Airplanes business unit, retired effective immediately. 

Now Stephanie Pope, Boeing’s chief operating officer, has also been put in charge of the commercial planes unit — “the toughest job at Boeing,” according to The Wall Street Journal. 

This may not be a glass cliff situation. This could be Pope’s proving ground. We just don’t know yet. 

A third-generation aerospace employee, Pope led Boeing’s parts and services business  and also held several finance positions. After her promotion to , she was seen as a probable successor to Calhoun, but GE Aerospace Larry Culp and Carrier Global CEO Dave Gitlin are now favored for Boeing’s CEO, Fortune reported in April.

If hired as CEO, Pope would be the century-old Fortune 500 company’s first woman leader. Boeing’s not exactly a pioneer in terms of hiring female aerospace CEOs — in Virginia alone, we have General Dynamics Chairman and CEO Phebe N. Novakovic and Northrop Grumman Chairman, President and CEO Kathy Warden.

But Boeing never hired a woman to lead its company in good times or even less-bad times.

Now it’s in real trouble. In the first quarter of the year, Boeing delivered 83 jets, down from 157 in the previous quarter, and United told Boeing to halt production of the 737 Max 10 jets it ordered. Sales ground to a halt in January, with only three plane orders, and are still down.

Pope, in her new capacity, wrote in an email to employees last month, “This is a pivotal moment for us, and we have serious work ahead to build trust and improve our operations.”

And who’s in charge? Women.

Pope is joined by Katie Ringgold, who previously led 737 airplane deliveries at Boeing, as new head of the Max program, and Elizabeth Lund has been promoted to senior vice president of quality for Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

They’re tasked with fixing the reputation of Boeing, starting with bringing quality control measures up to standard, most experts acknowledge. These are lessons earlier leaders didn’t learn after two Max 8 planes crashed in 2018 and 2019 incidents, claiming hundreds of lives.

Boeing stopped production of the jets and then resumed in late 2020, but C-suite leaders demanded more jets produced faster, according to a March 28 New York Times article based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Boeing employees.

We can’t say this is a glass cliff yet. Maybe Pope and company will succeed where others (mainly men) have failed. But it’s not a job most people would want, unless they’re promised golden parachutes.

Breaking the rules

For , time has always been money, which has made the billable hour standard practice for the profession since the 1960s. But with the rise of artificial intelligence, which already can cut the time required to complete rote tasks from days or hours down to seconds, a once-inconceivable event just might come to pass — the supremacy of the billable hour could come to an end.

Results — not time spent on a project — are being touted as the new metric for evaluating the services that a lawyer can offer, and more firms are at least considering if not experimenting with different payment arrangements, including retainers and flat fees, which could become the norm someday.

That day’s not here yet, though. The billable hour’s death will be a slow one, because the profession is ultra-cautious about taking risks.  

Lawyers are like teenagers at a school dance, says Susan Hackett, an attorney and with a practice management consultancy in Bethesda, Maryland. They line the walls of the gym and wait for someone else to hit the dance floor first before they make any moves themselves.

“Lawyers like to be the first to be second,” she says. Hackett, whose Legal Executive firm has advised big corporate clients such as Mars and Hilton Worldwide Holdings on their legal departments’ business practices, is no fan of the billable hour — particularly from the client’s perspective. 

“Does anyone buy anything else this way?” she asks. “Sure, go ahead and build the house, and we’ll figure out the cost and how many bedrooms it should have after the work gets started. Lawyers have been paid to do their jobs dysfunctionally for a long time. Why not incentivize by giving more money for resolving a case rather than more money for continuing it?” 

But looking at the issue from a law firm’s point of view, why would they change a payment system that saw an average national $370 hourly rate for associate lawyers and a $604 average rate for partners in 2023, according to a National Law Journal survey? That sounds like fixing something that isn’t broken, at least for law firms by the hour, and there wasn’t a good reason to change the practice until arrived on the legal scene with the threat of disrupting how fast legal services and advice could be delivered.

Even without AI in the mix, there have been rumblings of discontent about the prevalent legal billing model, including from in-house corporate legal departments that have expressed frustration over how expensive and unpredictable the costs of outside counsel can be, mainly because of the billable hour, according to a 2023 joint survey of corporate legal departments conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw. Just 38% reported being satisfied with the ability to predict
the costs of outsourced legal work.

And yet, in-house legal departments also are reluctant to try something new, the survey showed. Only 28% of survey respondents said that they were pursuing alternative fee agreements with outside law firms as a cost-cutting strategy, while just 33% were considering tapping into AI for legal work. 

“Billable hours is all they know,” Ken Callander, managing principal of Value Strategies, a legal consulting firm that promotes alternative fee agreements, told Law.com in November 2023. “To move toward something other than that, it’s really foreign to them.”

Colleen Quinn, founder of ‘s Quinn Law Centers, says not calculating hourly billing saves her a lot of time. Photo by Matthew R.O. Brown

Dipping their toes in

Williams Mullen Chairman, President and CEO Calvin W. “Woody” Fowler Jr. has seen it all in his nearly 40 years practicing law.

“Every 10 years, we hear that the billable hour is dead, but it is very resilient,” he says. His Richmond-based law firm — the state’s third largest — has 250 lawyers, 196 of them based in Virginia, and bills most of its clients by the hour. 

Fowler expects that it will take five years or even a decade before the profession sees a significant shift away from the billable hour. First will come the early adopters, he says, who are like those teenagers brave enough to get out on the dance floor first. Then, Fowler expects that most of those hanging out by the gym wall will gradually take to the floor, although a few probably will remain wallflowers and “watch all the way to the end,” he says. Those firms “might look like geniuses — or be left behind.”

Using AI for legal work is another big leap for law firms, many of which have reservations about its security and reliability.

 For now, Williams Mullen is staying off the AI dance floor for the most part. The firm has begun using large language model-based generative AI programs like ChatGPT that can create text for marketing and internal development purposes, and leaders of various practice areas have been reading and studying up on other uses of the technology.

But right now, AI presents too many proprietary and confidentiality issues to be applied to legal matters, Fowler says. “It’s not ready for prime time yet.” 

Iria Giuffrida, assistant dean for academic and faculty affairs at William & Mary Law School, finds such prudence appropriate.

Although Giuffrida thinks that in-house LLM-based tools probably can be trusted with client information, she is less confident about the ability of public AI platforms like ChatGPT to guarantee confidentiality — and “confidentiality is sacrosanct,” she says.

AI’s liability rests with the lawyer, Giuffrida points out, and some attorneys have made well-publicized AI-related errors and paid the price.

Last year, for example, two New York attorneys were sanctioned for filing a brief with AI-generated case citations that turned out to be fake, and in February, a Massachusetts attorney was fined $2,000 for producing a document that also included fake citations caused by an AI tool’s “hallucinations.”

“AI is not a barred attorney,” Giuffrida says, so any malpractice that results from its use is the lawyer’s responsibility — and problem. At the same time, the “incredible efficiencies” that AI offers can’t be ignored, she says, and some attorneys undoubtedly will turn to AI to increase their productivity. That, in turn, will lead clients to question why they should pay a billable hour for a service, such as creating a legal document, that can be performed in less than a minute with AI’s assistance. 

Giuffrida expects that small and medium-sized firms that specialize in areas of the law that are fairly predictable, such as adoptions or real estate, will be among the first to use AI tools like ChatGPT in large numbers because AI is good at repetitive tasks.

By employing the new technology, they could punch above their weight when competing with larger firms for clients, she says. AI can take the place of a paralegal or first-year associate — whom small firms may not be able to afford — and do a lot of the grunt work involved in building some legal cases. 

James K. Cowan Jr. is chairman of CowanPerry, a small commercial law firm that performs work for flat fees, monthly retainers and other alternatives to hourly billing. Photo by Don Petersen

Excitement and caution

Three small Virginia law firms contacted for this story all bear out Giuffrida’s predictions concerning AI. They’re enthusiastic about the technology’s potential, but, just like Fowler at Williams Mullen, they are also in wait-and-see mode. 

James K. Cowan Jr. is chairman of CowanPerry, a six-lawyer Blacksburg-based firm that performs mostly corporate and real estate work for flat fees, monthly retainers and other alternatives to hourly billing. “We do so much work on fee that any efficiencies are great for us,” Cowan says, which is why he expects that his firm will be among the first in Virginia to employ AI technology in legal work. 

“In 10 years, CowanPerry has developed a tremendous amount of work product, but the hardest thing is to find it,” he says. “AI can help. It gives you suggestions and analysis and allows you to focus on the things that matter. You can think more about strategy, the human side.”  

Colleen M. Quinn, founder of Richmond’s Quinn Law Centers, which specializes in personal injury, employment law, estate planning and adoption and surrogacy, uses alternative fee agreements for her more straightforward cases, and she says it’s popular with clients.

“The younger generation really likes to have a set amount,” she says, and it’s a time-saver for her two-attorney firm to not have to calculate hourly billing. 

She also views AI as a potentially huge time-saver for estate planning and other legal areas with recurrent procedures and documentation, although AI tools are less useful for litigation, due to their unpredictability. “Ethically, there still has to be fact-checking behind it,” she says. 

Dunlap Law, a firm based in Richmond and Monterey that serves mostly small businesses, has jettisoned billable hours, says managing partner Tricia Dunlap.

Her five-attorney, all-female practice offers its clients varying levels of service at different price points that are “clear, precise and transparent,” Dunlap says. “We put clients in charge of their budgets, and a level of trust begins to develop.” Like Quinn, she notes that not tracking billable minutes saves her firm time.

Dunlap expects that what she calls “the superpower of AI” will shift focus away from time spent on tasks at many law firms, and that the demise of the billable hour could benefit clients in many ways, including some that are not purely financial. “The time we don’t spend drafting a contract,” she says, “we can spend learning a client’s business and helping them avoid mistakes.”

Although the Virginia State Bar declined to comment on any trends concerning billing practices or the use of AI tools among its members, the marketplace is usually an accurate barometer of change — and the market for AI legal services is hot. 

“I get five calls a day from people trying to sell me AI,” Fowler notes.

The future of law? 

One of those calls might have been from a firm like Henchman. An international legal services company based in New York and Ghent, Belgium, Henchman furnishes AI-assisted contract drafting services to hundreds of law firms in 35 countries, including many in the United States. For a subscription fee, Henchman provides clients “instant access to their previously written clauses and definitions,” making work accessible in seconds.  

Michiel Denis, Henchman’s head of growth, says his company experienced 1,300% revenue growth in the past year and a half, and it now counts among its clients the multinational Boston-based law firm of Goodwin Procter, which has 1,800-plus attorneys. Most of its business, though, as Giuffrida predicted, comes from small and mid-sized law firms.  

“It comes as no surprise that the rollout of a technology platform is slower for bigger firms, as they typically have more practice groups leveraging new technologies,” Denis explains. Key to his company’s success has been what he calls the “bespoke” training it offers on the use of its systems. “Next to privacy and reliability, we notice user-friendliness is a key sticking point for Henchman clients,” he says. 

Hackett would second that. She has seen too many law firms “jump in from doing nothing with technology to the highest level,” she says, dooming such enterprises from the get-go. Firms end up with systems that no one wants to use, which only enforces the profession’s general embrace of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done. 

However, law firms don’t operate in a vacuum, and many have clients who are already using AI in their own businesses, Hackett notes. These corporate clients likely will expect their legal counsel to make use of similar tools that can increase efficiency and, most consequentially, lead to a revamp of how they are billed and how much those services cost.  

“You can’t have one hand clapping,” Hackett says. “You have to do it together. Yes, law firms are slow to change, but market changes are fast, and technology is fast. Law is unpredictable. So is business. Get over it.”

 

Making headway

With recent expansions nearly complete, and a new Southwest Virginia port under consideration, it’s been a busy year for the commonwealth’s .

The industrial market from Hampton Roads to has expanded in terms of industrial space available, says Devon Anders, president of the Harrisonburg-based and chair of the Virginia Maritime Association’s Valley Logistics Chapter. Millions of feet of warehouse space being built near the Virginia Inland Port will allow the Port of Virginia to better compete against other East Coast ports, he says.

The trend of industrial development from Northern states — including Pennsylvania, and Maryland — moving southward into Virginia also holds economic promise for the commonwealth’s inland ports, as new business translates into more potential freight.

Development “[is] encouraging for the region, and bodes well for the ports,” says Joe Harris, spokesperson for the Port of Virginia, which oversees both the Virginia Inland Port in and the on the James River.

Along with capacity for nearby warehouse space, $15 million in structural improvements are nearly finished at the Virginia Inland Port. That includes three new rail sidings and the repurposing of four rubber-tire gantry cranes from to the inland port, allowing the Port of Virginia to retire older, less-efficient equipment. The rail sidings will allow the inland port to handle more freight, and the updated conveyances will make the port more efficient overall, increasing terminal capacity by about 40%.

With completion expected later this year, the improvements also include technological upgrades that will help prepare for any future expansions needed, Harris says.

“The goal is to go ahead and prepare it for the next 20 years to make sure there’s ample capacity,” he adds. “We look at this project just like we do with our multimillion-dollar projects in the harbor. This is about keeping ahead of any demand curve, staying competitive and investing because the overall environment — materials, finances, timing, etc. — is right for such a project.”

Additionally, $3 million in improvements at the RMT, which is owned by the City of Richmond and leased to the Virginia Port Authority, are scheduled to wrap up this year. Changes to the front gate will allow faster processing of trucks exiting and entering the terminal and make way for the installation of two new scales. The fenced, 40-space drop lot will give truckers an after-hours option for leaving containers in a secure area adjacent to the terminal.

Both projects are part of the port’s $1.4 billion Gateway Investment Program to modernize and upgrade port capacity, first announced in April 2022.

Improvements to the port’s maritime terminals, including and widening projects in the Norfolk Harbor, automation at and upgrades at Virginia International Gateway in Portsmouth, also aid the state’s inland ports, Anders says.

Additionally, the Port of Virginia, already the East Coast’s largest intermodal rail port, will be expanding Norfolk International Terminals’ central rail yard, adding capacity to accommodate 455,000 additional twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) by rail each year, bringing the port’s overall rail capacity to more than 1.8 million TEUs.

Adding rail capacity, instead of putting more trucks on the road, is another positive draw for Virginia when companies look to relocate or expand, “especially for those distribution centers coming down out of Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia,” Anders says.

It’s hoped that this extra capacity will translate into a catalyst for development around the inland ports as well. 

While the Richmond and Front Royal inland ports’ construction projects are nearly done, a proposed Southwest Virginia inland port is still under study.

In the 2024-26 state budget, legislators allocated $2.5 million to fund continued feasibility studies on the placement of an inland port at Oak Park in Washington County. While that’s less than the $10 million the General Assembly allocated for planning, and site acquisition in 2023, it represents an important show of good faith in the project, says state Sen. Todd Pillion, R-Washington County, one of the inland port’s proponents.

He views an inland port as not only an economically viable substitute for the region’s former coal-dependent economy, but also as a means to expand Virginia’s reach westward for cargo shipments and rail capacity while creating sorely needed jobs and alleviating some of the heavy truck traffic along the Interstate 81 corridor.

“It’s a huge prospect not only for Southwest Virginia, not only for the industry that’s already there, but for the industry it could bring,” Pillion says. “Having more traffic coming from the Port of Virginia would serve the whole state and could be a total game changer for Southwest Virginia.” 

Cashing in

In 2019, a state study forecast that if the General Assembly allowed five casinos to operate in five economically disadvantaged Virginia cities — Bristol, Danville, , and Richmond — that one-third of the revenue generated would stem from out-of-state visitors.

In other words, if you build it, backers sang out to the commonwealth’s legislators, they will come.

In 2020, local voters overwhelmingly voted to bring casinos to Bristol, Danville, Portsmouth and Norfolk. Richmond referendum voters twice rejected bringing a casino to their city, and now it looks like that casino opportunity may go to Petersburg. Meanwhile, a proposed Norfolk casino has been delayed and may wind up with the city choosing a different operator. However, the three casinos open so far are doing brisk business in Bristol, Danville and Portsmouth.

Bristol’s casino opened in a temporary location in July 2022, and made $157 million in net revenues in its first year of operation. Its replacement, a permanent, $500 million-plus Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, is slated to open its casino floor in July, with the 303-room hotel and indoor entertainment venue following in the fall, according to Allie Evangelista, president of Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Bristol.

Danville’s casino followed, opening a temporary location in May 2023, racking up about $145 million during its first six months. Its permanent location, which will cost more than $650 million, is slated to open late this year and will include a 320-room hotel and over 50,000 square feet of meeting and convention space.

Virginia’s first permanent casino, the $340 million Rivers Casino Portsmouth, opened in January 2023 and made almost $250 million in gaming revenue during its first year. In addition to gaming, it offers restaurants, bars and more than 25,000 square feet of event space.

So, the question is, have the casinos delivered on their promises? Are crowds of gamblers traveling from other towns and states to delight in the thrill of roulette, the rush of slots?

The short answer is, you bet. The longer answer is that tracking Virginia’s casino tourism traffic isn’t the easiest endeavor and remains a work in progress.

Rivers Casino Portsmouth General Manager Roby Corby says the casino has drawn visitors from across the country. Photo by Mark Rhodes

‘Pretty accurate’

The Virginia Tourism Corp., which promotes the state’s tourism industry, purchases “data insights” on casino visitation from Arrivalist, a Colorado-based location intelligence platform for the travel industry that collects location data from millions of mobile devices like smartphones.

It’s a helpful tool, but it’s also still “a little bit early” to build a full picture of casino visitation trends in the commonwealth, says Dan Roberts, VTC’s vice president of research and strategy.

To be identified as tourists, casino visitors must have traveled with their devices at least 40 miles to their destinations, explains Balakumar Raghuraman, vice president of analytics for Arrivalist’s parent company, AirDNA. Devices associated with commuter travel trends were excluded from consideration.

At Rivers Casino Portsmouth, most visitors’ devices (15.8%), as expected, originated from the Hampton Roads region last year. But the top 10 markets of origin last year also included tourists traveling from Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina (13%); Washington, D.C. (9.8%); Richmond and Petersburg (9%); and even areas as far away as Baltimore (3.2%) and New York (5.2%).

For Bristol’s temporary Hard Rock casino, visitors from the Roanoke and Lynchburg regions accounted for 26% of devices in 2023, followed by Knoxville, Tennessee (15%), and the Tri-Cities region (10%). Visitors also hailed from areas in southern like the Bluefield region (5%), but Atlanta (3%) also made the top 10 list of places from which tourists traveled to the .

Of the tourists tracked at Danville’s temporary Caesars Virginia casino last year, most visitors (33.4%) came from North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, encompassing Raleigh and Durham, followed by tourists from Roanoke and Lynchburg (15.4%); and North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad region of Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point (14.2%). Devices originating from Los Angeles (2.6%) and West Palm Beach/Fort Pierce, Florida (1.9%), also made the list.

Mobile location insights, like those from Arrivalist, are commonly used by tourism officials to ensure they are delivering the most successful marketing messages to reach certain audiences, according to Candace Fitch, the Howard Feiertag Endowed Professor of Practice at ‘s Pamplin School of Business, “They want to target those really precious marketing dollars to a very specific target market [to] make sure they’re reaching the right people,” she says.

As far as the accuracy of mobile device tracking data, “it’s hard to evaluate the reliability of it,” says Michael Maness, assistant professor of civil and environmental at the University of South Florida and an affiliated faculty member with the university’s Center for Urban Transportation Research. He added that he hasn’t seen any studies comparing data compiled from mobile locations with traditional sources like casino-tracked visitor data.

Nevertheless, spokesman Raghuraman says, Arrivalist’s data is “pretty accurate.” He points out that Arrivalist compares its lodging data information to numbers compiled by Smith Travel Research, which processes performance data from hotels. “We usually see more than 95% or 96% correlation, which is big when you’re talking about two completely different datasets.”

Rules of attraction

Casinos are “amazing” for attracting tourists, Fitch says. After all, visitors are coming to gamble, she says, and “that’s a big draw for people because you can’t have access to that everywhere in the United States.”

About two dozen states offer commercial casino facilities, according to the American Gaming Association’s 2023 State of the States report. Among Virginia’s bordering neighbors, casinos are legal in Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia, but not in Tennessee, Kentucky or Washington, D.C.

Casinos, Fitch points out, also bring in big-name entertainers and tend to attract development of other tourist-appealing attractions like restaurants and retail opportunities that wouldn’t normally open in smaller markets. “Big chefs like to be in casinos,” she says.

Bob McNab, chair of the economics department at Old Dominion University and director of ODU’s Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy, has a less rosy view of how casinos will impact tourism in Virginia.

“Is this really an inflection point for Virginia tourism?” he says. “One would probably argue it’s not at this point in time.”

McNab speculates that most individuals who visit the state’s casinos are day visitors.

“They’re not destination casinos, right?” McNab says of the commonwealth’s three operating casinos. “They’re not a Macau. They’re not a Las Vegas. They’re not an Atlantic City.”

Evangelista with Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Bristol says casinos usually track visitor data with loyalty rewards programs like Hard Rock’s Unity, Caesars Rewards, or the Rush Rewards program at Rivers Casino Portsmouth.

While Bristol’s temporary casino isn’t an official Hard Rock property, visitors can still use and earn Unity rewards there, according to Evangelista. “And so, when people come to the building, and they actually sign up for a card or they use their card to play, we know how much they [gambled], and we know where they did it from,” she explains.

Bristol’s temporary casino welcomed visitors from all 50 U.S. states during its first six months of operation in 2022, according to Evangelista. Hard Rock would not release specific visitation data for its Bristol casino patrons, but Evangelista says that typically its guests travel from no further than three hours away, with the majority of out-of-state guests hailing from Tennessee and North Carolina.

However, the number of North Carolina visitors fell after Danville’s casino opened in May 2023, Evangelista observes. “Now we see them maybe sharing, you know, coming to visit us a little bit [and] going to visit there as well,” she says. (Caesars Virginia representatives would not comment on tourism trends at the casino.)

As for Rivers Casino in Portsmouth, Roy Corby, the casino’s general manager, provided a statement to Virginia Business magazine noting that more than 2 million guests visited the casino during its first year in business. “Rivers Casino Portsmouth has welcomed guests from all 50 states,” Corby says. “We are pleased with the growing number of out-of-area guests in our first year and expect that trend to continue.”  

Madison Eades, general manager of Danville’s Bee and Holbrook hotels, says that even after the Caesars Virginia resort casino opens, plenty of guests will still seek a boutique hotel experience. Photo by Hannah King

Busy as a Bee

Danville, Portsmouth and Bristol have all seen an increase in local lodging taxes since their respective casinos opened. Lodging taxes in Bristol jumped from about $1.28 million in fiscal 2021 to more than $2.08 million in fiscal 2023, while Danville saw a similar increase during the same time period, rising from around $1.59 million to over $2.71 million. Meanwhile, Portsmouth saw a more modest increase, from $897,134 in fiscal 2022 to more than $1 million in fiscal 2023.

Danville City Manager Ken Larking is careful, however, to note that increases in hotel stays in his city may also have been impacted by construction workers coming to work on the permanent Caesars casino and other projects like the White Mill redevelopment.

Caesars frequently puts up Danville guests at local hotels, according to Corrie Bobe, Danville’s economic development and tourism director. “Currently, they’re averaging between 25 to 40 room nights per week when hosting guests,” she says. “So, our assumption is that these are out-of-town guests coming to visit the temporary facility.”

Two Danville boutique hotels are certainly seeing business from visitors to the temporary casino, according to Madison Eades, dual general manager of the Bee Hotel and the Holbrook Hotel, which opened in late 2023. “Holbrook is gaining traction for sure and getting busier,” she says. “The Bee has been busy.”

Eades doesn’t expect traffic at the hotels to slow after Caesars opens its permanent casino and hotel in Danville. After all, Caesars may sell out its own hotel rooms sometimes, Eades points out, and some visitors may also want to visit a boutique hotel instead. “We will still see a lot of guests coming in [who] want a different type of experience,” she says.

Initially, Caesars planned to build 500 hotels rooms in the permanent hotel, but now the facility has downsized the project to 320 rooms. Rising construction costs were likely behind the change, according to Larking. “Just like every business, they need to stay within some kind of a budget,” he says.

The City of Danville hired Alexandria-based RevPAR International, a hospitality industry advisory firm, to prepare a hospitality market study, which will cost about $21,900, according to Larking. The study, which should be completed over the summer, will allow Danville “to better analyze the current demand for hotel rooms as well as the type of hotel rooms that are needed within the market, and then forecast over the next 10 years what additional rooms need to be attracted or constructed,” Bobe says.

Larking hopes the study will draw developers of high-end hotels to the area. “They just don’t build it because you ask,” he says. “You have to actually show them there’s demand.”

Meanwhile, in Portsmouth, Keith Toler, the city’s assistant director for the department of museums and tourism, feels confident Rivers Casino Portsmouth is drawing big numbers of out-of-state and out-of-town tourists.

“We’re seeing people come from the Outer Banks,” he says. “We’re seeing people come from Virginia Beach. They’re doing their weeklong stay, but they’ll take a night and come up to the casino.”

From October to December 2023, more than 20% of Rivers Casino Portsmouth guests were from out-of-state, according to a presentation made at the Virginia Lottery Board’s January meeting.

That percentage stuck with Brian Donahue, Portsmouth’s director of economic development. “I was pleasantly surprised by the visitors that we’ve got coming from outside of Virginia,” he says. “We think it’s been a really impactful and transformative project for the city of Portsmouth and, really, the Hampton Roads region.”  

The insiders

The new of The , a nationally prominent -based that counts GEICO and UPS among its clients, isn’t so new.

Danny Robinson, who has been with the 400-person agency for 20 years and served as chief creative officer for the last three, succeeded Kristen Cavallo as Martin’s this year, but he took some convincing to accept the role, he says.

“I had to really reflect on what it was I was taking on,” Robinson says. “I wanted to make sure when I said yes that I was ready to do it, because I care too much about this place and the people here to take over something and to not do a great job.”

Two days after the Jan. 30 announcement of Robinson’s ascension to CEO, Martin’s parent company, Interpublic Group of Cos., announced that Jerry Hoak, an executive creative director at Martin, would succeed Robinson as chief creative officer. Hoak, who joined Martin in 2016, says he had been preparing in hopes of eventually succeeding Robinson in the firm’s chief creative job.

Martin’s “new” leadership plans to focus inward for now.

“There wasn’t really a need for a transition because we were always part of the building of the agency,” Robinson says. “And then the rest is, well, how is Jerry going to operate differently than I am? And the same for me … but the fundamental should be the same.”

Martin CEO Robinson and Chief Creative Officer Jerry Hoak are new to their roles but not the ad agency. Photo by Shandell Taylor

In the wake

Martin has racked up awards and accounts in recent years, righting course after a highly publicized #MeToo scandal in 2017 that saw sexual harassment allegations made against Martin’s former chief creative officer, Joe Alexander. (He has denied the allegations and any wrongdoing.) Cavallo entered as CEO less than two weeks after Alexander left Martin and initially promoted Karen Costello as CCO. When Costello returned to ad agency Deutsch LA in 2020, Cavallo promoted Robinson, who became Martin’s first Black CCO and is now the agency’s first Black CEO.

Martin was named industry publication Adweek’s Agency of the Year in 2020 and 2021, as well as Ad Age’s Agency of the Year in 2023. It’s also stacked up a list of notable clients, like Fortune 500 used car retailer CarMax and Fortune 1000 food delivery platform DoorDash.

“We have a really great story to tell, and we tell it well,” Robinson says. “I think the greatest gift Kristen gave us was helping us with our brand story and our mission, and it really guides everything.”

Although Robinson said on a March episode of NPR’s “Full Disclosure” that he tries to fly under the radar, he’s received industry accolades, including Ad Age’s chief creative officer of the year award in 2022. Ad Age said he “revved up the agency’s creative output, turning out great ideas at a quicker pace across multiple categories and brands.”

Before coming to Martin, Robinson was best known for co-founding ad agency Vigilante, part of Leo Burnett, in 1998. Vigilante orchestrated Oprah Winfrey’s famous 2004 car giveaway.

Robinson joined Martin as a senior vice president and group creative director in 2004 and was promoted to chief client officer in 2019 before becoming chief creative officer.

Hoak joined Martin more recently, after holding art director roles at Ogilvy New York, Taxi and Droga5 New York, where he rose through the ranks. At Martin, he was promoted from group creative director to executive creative director in 2017.

Charting the course

Now at Martin’s helm, Robinson says he has four priorities as CEO: Martin’s Cultural Impact Lab; Martin Entertainment; the agency’s design capability; and new business attraction.

“I believe the goal — my goal, at least — the first year is to double down on those things, to hone them, to make them better, to make sure they’re integrated in the right way, to make sure they’re resourced right and to make them stronger,” Robinson says.

Martin launched its Cultural Impact Lab in 2019. The lab, which started as an earned media team and expanded to include social media and influencer work, has “PR and earned specialists who are super culturally minded,” says Alanna Strauss, executive vice president of Martin Entertainment and the Cultural Impact Lab. The team is “seeing what’s happening, cultural trends, kind of creating theses and stories, and building that into our creative development process.”

Among the focuses she and Robinson have discussed, Strauss says, as subcultures and analytics grow in importance, “the focus with the lab will continue to grow, build and carve out its space within our entire agency process.”

In June 2023, Cavallo recruited Strauss to start Martin Entertainment, which focuses on extending brands into entertainment through partnerships that marry brands with existing intellectual property like TV shows or movies and through new content that brands create. One example of Martin Entertainment’s work is a late 2023 ad campaign pairing GEICO and Netflix to market Netflix’s animated children’s movie “Leo.” In the ad, the GEICO gecko advises the lizard Leo, voiced by Adam Sandler, during film shooting.

Robinson and Strauss plan to create an “entertainment room” program, which would be a full-day workshop developing a customized strategy for an existing or new client’s brand to enter the entertainment world.

“The goal is coming out of it, for brands to understand, ‘Here’s how I want to show up in entertainment, here’s where I want to show up in entertainment, and here are the types of stories I want to tell to hit the audience I want to speak to,’” Strauss says.

Eyes on the horizon

Working on Martin’s design capabilities is important because “design is critical to everything we do,” Hoak says.

Hoak says the agency in recent years began partnering designers with creative directors earlier in the pitch process. “I feel like we’re winning pitches in large part because of design and what we’ve done there,” he says. In an early April LinkedIn post, Hoak credited the change as “a huge reason” Martin won the pitch for a Papa Johns rebrand.

He also believes Martin can grow its creative work and win more industry awards, like the Cannes Lions Awards: “Luckily, we have the staff in place to do so. It’s just a matter of pushing, and we have some great new clients and great old clients that are ready to buy great work, and over the last six years, we’ve been pushing them in the direction to now hit the home runs.” 

Two months after Robinson and Hoak assumed their roles, Robinson appointed a new chief operating and culture officer. Adrienne Wright Cleveland is succeeding Carmina Drummond, who retired after 35 years at Martin. Cleveland joined the agency in February 2023 as managing director heading talent and culture.

For now, Hoak says, Martin isn’t planning to fill his previous role as one of three executive creative directors.

Robinson and Hoak stress that their leadership transition was smooth and that they don’t see a need to change course.

“It really does have a lot to do with … how embedded Jerry and I were,” Robinson says. “We were part of the building of … the agency the past five or six years, … and I think it helps that people in the company know that we were part of it and understand that; they know our intentions, and they’re good.” 

Chips ahoy

Finally, the world is catching up with ‘s semiconductor curriculum.

Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering started a chip-scale integration major in 2016, but it wasn’t exactly high profile when Sheena Deivasigamani arrived at Virginia Tech as a first-year engineering student in 2019. Chip-scale integration wasn’t even on Deivasigamani’s radar.

Tech was then an academic year away from graduating its first two students majoring in the discipline, which focuses on improving efficiency of while lowering power consumption and adding functionality.

“I was looking for good programs in engineering, especially in computer science,” Deivasigamani says. “All I knew [at that point] about engineering was that I was good at computer science and that I wanted to go into something where I could use those skills.”

In her sophomore year, Deivasigamani took her first fundamentals of digital systems class — leading her to chip-scale integration. “It just clicked. It was intuitive to me. Everything made sense — it’s the hardware you base the software [on], and it gave me some background for the high-level [work] that we were doing.”

Fast-forward five years, and Deivasigamani has earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Virginia Tech as a chip-scale integration major — one of 19 students in the class of 2023 — and is completing her master’s in engineering. In June, she expects to start working at Micron as an automotive product quality engineer.

Deivasigamani’s experience comes as Virginia Tech positions itself as a key player in the effort to increase domestic manufacturing of advanced semiconductors, or as they’re commonly called, after years of work in that direction.

Domestic demand

In 2019, chips — shorthand for semi- conductors, which process, store and receive information and are needed in everything from automobiles to medical devices to smartphones — were known among engineers but not the general public.

Although transistors and were invented in the United States, Taiwan became the world’s top producer of semiconductors, manufacturing 22% of all chips and more than 90% of the most technologically advanced chips that are most in demand for U.S. military gear and tech devices. As of April 2024, the U.S. produced only about 10% of all semiconductors, although the nation continues to be a leader in designing chips.

Christina DiMarino, an associate professor at Virginia Tech’s Center for Power Electronics Systems, says semiconductor packaging is a burgeoning field. Photo courtesy Virginia Tech

In 2020, increased demand for chips led to a global shortage, slowing car manufacturing and raising vehicle prices, as well as sparking worries that a second pandemic could collapse the global supply chain. Members of Congress began to take action, writing legislation that would allocate funding to grow domestic production of chips, while bolstering competition with China, the globe’s third largest semi-
conductor manufacturer after South Korea.

In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a federal statute authorizing about $280 billion in new funding for domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors, including $39 billion in federal grants going to companies — including the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Intel — to set up new factories in the U.S.

All of the activity in Washington, D.C., delivered more attention to semiconductors and the need for more trained engineers like Deivasigamani and her classmates working in the U.S. Over the past few decades, Taiwan, South Korea and China became leaders in chip manufacturing by luring tech companies with incentives. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s share of chip production slid from 37% in 1990 to about 12% in 2022.

“Semiconductors enable the key technologies driving the future economy and our national security — , 5G/6G, quantum computing, cloud services, etc.,” according to a 2022 report from the Semiconductor Industry Association. “The current shortage of chips highlights the vital role of semiconductors throughout the entire economy — including aerospace, automobiles, communications, defense systems, information technology, manufacturing, medical technology and others.”

The prodigious growth of AI-powered tools like ChatGPT also has increased chip demand. In February, Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, predicted the start of a “10-year cycle” of semiconductor growth fueled by AI — and Goldman Sachs’ trading desk declared Nvidia’s rising stock “the most important stock on Planet Earth.” The company’s annual revenues jumped 265% year-over-year, to $22.1 billion.

While numbers like that tend to get people excited about entering the semiconductor industry, there are still some challenges for the U.S. to fully benefit.

“We have a steep hill to climb in order to get back that 37% market share,” says Luke Lester, department head for ‘s Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-creator of the college’s chip-scale integration major. “We are not going to be able to meet that demand for new chips and manufacturing them in the United States and North America unless we make the investment in the people. Workforce development is a big deal.”

“More complicated software needs better and better hardware to run,” Deivasigamani says. “You can’t keep forcing new technologies on older systems.”

Lester compares this moment in the domestic semiconductor landscape to the Northeast blackout of 2003, which impacted much of the Northeastern and Midwestern U.S. and parts of Canada, highlighting the power grid’s vulnerabilities.

“The marketplace cycles,” Lester explains. “Twenty-five years ago, power systems — the grid — was considered a solved problem. All of the sudden, people realized it’s not just, ‘I flip my switch and the power goes on.’ Because an oak tree fell somewhere in Ohio, it disrupted the whole grid, and that got studied. We are in a similar situation with the CHIPS Act and the investment being made in [semiconductor] manufacturing.”

The CHIPS and Science Act was a tipping point for increased interest in the chip-scale integration program at Virginia Tech, saving the major from potential oblivion.

“The first four years [of the major], I wondered, ‘Are we going to need to sunset this?’” due to lack of interest, Lester recalls. “Now I have students say to me … ‘I am going to major in chip-scale integration,’ and four or five years ago I didn’t hear that at all. I used to hear robotics.”

Yuhao Zhang, a Virginia Tech researcher, is focusing on improving power switches. Photos courtesy Virginia Tech

What’s next

In May 2016, chip-scale integration was just one of 14 new majors in electrical engineering and computer engineering, supported by a $2 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to Virginia Tech in July 2016.

Now, there’s far more interest. So far, 88 students have enrolled in Virginia Tech’s chip-scale integration major, with significant increases since the CHIPS Act became , and 33 students have graduated with chip-scale integration as part of their degree.

Also, Virginia Tech is one of 21 founding members of the Northeast University Semiconductor Network formed by Micron, which was announced in 2023, and the university is the anchor institution for the Virginia Alliance for Semiconductor Technology (VAST), a coalition of universities, government entities and industry partners. VAST began in 2023 when GO Virginia awarded the group $3.3 million to fund its creation.

“We need to establish a cloud-based management systems that connects all of these facilities together,” says Virginia Tech researcher Masoud Agah, VAST’s founding executive director. “Imagine if you have a single point of entry, then you can have access to all of the facilities across the commonwealth.”

Next up for Tech is semiconductor packaging, another essential piece of the domestic production puzzle and an important part of Virginia Tech’s semiconductor workforce development efforts.

Only about 3% of semiconductor packaging is fabricated domestically, a figure the federal government hopes to improve.

“There is a big effort in the CHIPS Act related to packaging, and recognizing that it is also a major kind of supply chain bottleneck when it comes to chips in the U.S.,” says Christina DiMarino, an assistant professor based at Virginia Tech’s Center for Power Electronics Systems in County. “Many of my students are working on packing these power semiconductor devices, and they’re really looking at kind of the next generation of these power semiconductor devices that are more advanced.”

Key to developing modern semiconductor packaging is time in a fabrication lab — also known as the “fab” — where students work with chips and their fragile components in a controlled, dust-free environment.

“There are mechanical considerations, material science consideration, reliability, physics, chemistry, etc.,” DiMarino says. “It’s really a great example of a multidisciplinary research topic. Packaging has largely been developed in industry, and there are very few courses on it, especially in the United States.”

With relevant skills in hand, DiMarino’s students have gone on to secure positions after graduation with Rockwell Automation, BAE Systems, Wolfspeed, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“There’s very high demand for people working on packaging right now,” she says. “I cannot graduate enough students, apparently.”

Another area of increasing demand is manufacturing power switches that are more efficient and less harmful to the environment, and DiMarino and CPES researcher Yuhao Zhang are working with students on that as well.

“Semiconductors are expected to have a market size that will grow very fast, reaching over $10 billion by 2027,” says Zhang, whose work has the potential to provide energy savings in many arenas like data centers, electric vehicles, mobile electronics and the electric grid. “They [also] are the key for carbon neutrality of the entire society.”  

Virginia Tech at a glance

Founded Virginia’s original land-grant university, Virginia Tech was known as Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College when it was founded in 1872. Renamed Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1970, it is the state’s second largest public university by enrollment.

Campus

Virginia Tech’s main campus in stretches over 2,600 acres. Tech also has regional presences statewide and a study-abroad campus in Switzerland, and the university’s Innovation Campus for computer science and computer engineering graduate students will open in Alexandria in 2025.

Enrollment (Fall 2023)

  • Undergraduate: 30,504
  • Graduate and professional: 7,790
  • In-state: 23,587
  • International: 4,011

Student profile

  • Male: 57%
  • Female: 43%
  • Students of color: 12,150

Employees

  • Full-time employees: 8,750
  • Research and teaching faculty: 2,843

Tuition, fees, housing and financial aid*

  • In-state undergraduate: $15,476
  • Out-of-state undergraduate: $36,693
  • Room and board: $11,746
  • Average financial aid awarded to full-time, in-state undergraduates seeking assistance in 2021-22: $8,588

*2023-24 figures, except as noted

Tazewell indoor salmon farm adjusts course

The $228 million facility on 200 acres straddling and Russell counties has hit a snag with construction delays and is pushing back its expected timeline.

Administrator Eric Young says construction progress has not proceeded as anticipated on the Virginia branch of the United Arab Emirates-based Atlantic farming and processing business’ project, which is expected to create about 200 local jobs. Factors contributing to the delay, he says, included supply chain disruptions, labor shortages and inflationary pressures.

But the plan for the indoor fish farm continues making its way upstream.

Pure Salmon graded 100 acres to prep for a foundation in 2022 and is working with to build an access road. The next construction phase, including groundwork, will start in early summer, Karim Ghannam, co-founder and chief investment officer of 8F Asset Management, a Singapore-based private equity firm backing Pure Salmon, said during an April visit to Virginia.

The company now has plans to rework some in the facility’s design to mitigate rising construction costs over the past three years, Young says, and it aims to capitalize on state bank bonds and additional fundraising efforts to address financial challenges stemming from inflation. Pure Salmon declined to disclose its budget.

“That’s one of the reasons they’re here; it’s a very strategic place where the land is cheap, the labor is a little bit less expensive, but you can still access those markets. And in the seafood industry, time is of the essence,” he says.

Says Lala Korall, a consultant for Pure Salmon, “We hope to be complete with construction by the end of 2028.” (When first announced, Pure Salmon had aimed for a 2023-24 delivery.)

Production will occur in phases, with salmon eggs entering the facility and fish being harvested before construction is complete, Korall says.

Pure Salmon Virginia has four employees currently but indirectly employed about 100 workers via earthwork subcontractors and engineering teams earlier.

Young says the project will diversify the region’s economy and provide jobs ranging from aquatic veterinarians to fish filleters, with wages above the local average.

“We’ve been dependent on the coal industry for a long time here, and it has ups and downs … but food is food,” Young says. “People are always going to have food, so this should be recession-resistant as far as jobs.”  

Princess Cruises trades Yorktown stops for Norfolk

On the surface, ‘ decision to abandon plans to stop in historic in favor of would appear to be an economic blow. In reality, it may be only a slight hit, and one many area residents apparently are fine with.

Princess announced last year it would make three port calls in Yorktown during 2024. residents quickly raised concerns over groups of cruise passengers overwhelming their usually peaceful waterfront, and opposition mushroomed. Concerned Citizens of York County claimed more than 70% of 513 petition respondents opposed the stops, fearing crowds of tourists would disrupt the town and that the might have a negative environmental impact.   

In late January, Princess pulled the plug on Yorktown without stating a reason, saying that it would instead add three stops in Norfolk this year. York County officials chose not to comment.

Yorktown residents aren’t alone in their concerns about cruise stops. Bar Harbor, Maine, which also has a reputation as a quaint, tourist-friendly community, recently adopted restrictions on the number of cruise passengers allowed to come ashore. Several European cities, most notably Venice, also are limiting stops and visitors for similar reasons.

York County had estimated the local economic impact of the three Princess stops would have been $148,000, plus $186,000 in city docking fees. 

Stephen Kirkland, executive director of Norfolk’s Nauticus maritime museum, also runs Norfolk’s cruise program and admits the switch is a boost for Norfolk, which will now have 10 stops from Princess this year. “But I’m kind of a regionalist,” he adds, “and I don’t see this as a win for Norfolk and a loss for Yorktown. These are passengers who are not going to Charleston or ; they’re staying in Hampton Roads, and when they tie up here, dozens of buses will be going up to Yorktown, Jamestown and Williamsburg.

“Usually, 40% to 45% of the passengers stopping in town here take a shore excursion, and the No. 1 excursion is the Historic Triangle.”

Meanwhile, sentiment appears mixed among Yorktown business owners. 

Marilyn West owns Auntie M’s American Cottage, an arts and crafts shop in the town’s Riverwalk Landing, and says she’s “not really” disappointed. “Even though I stood to gain from it, it just wouldn’t have been worth it. There was so much discord. And you can’t miss what you never had.”