Virginia Beach on Another Wild Goose Chase

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by James A. Bacon

Virginia Beach City Council voted yesterday to give 155 acres to build a biomedical park, reports the Virginian-Pilot. The Virginia Beach Development Authority will oversee the design and promotion of the property.

Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms justified the initiative to lure health care and biotech companies as a way to diversify the city’s economy away from the military and tourism sectors. “You’ve got to look around the country and see what is really growing. As you know, health care numbers continue to increase,” Sessoms said earlier. “We saw that as an opportunity.”

Economic Development Director Warren Harris said the city has identified some prospective tenants, including a regenerative medicine/cancer research firm and a stem cell research firm. MedImmune, a research and development arm of British drugmaker AstraZeneca, met with city officials last month and “left very impressed,” Harris said.

Bacon’s bottom line: This cannot end well. In its pursuit of “economic development” Sessoms seems to be chasing every shiny object that someone dangles in front of him. Last night City Council also voted to sign two agreements with the state that keeps on track plans to extend Norfolk’s light rail system into Virginia Beach on the promise of the most nebulous of benefits. The mayor also supports a mega-convention complex (committing the city more deeply to a tourism-oriented economic development policy). And he supported city subsidies to jump-start redevelopment of the old Cavalier Hotel into a resort complex (another tourism-oriented initiative). As if all these city-backed projects were not enough, now he wants a biotech park.

Well, get in line. Everybody sees high-tech medicine as the next big thing, and everyone wants a piece of it. Bacon’s Rebellion has highlighted the plans of Inova and George Mason University to build a Center for Personalized Health in Fairfax County, and the ambition of Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic to build a biotech cluster around neuroscience in Roanoke. While both those initiatives face major challenges, they at least have resources that Virginia Beach doesn’t have. The Inova-GMU project is located in the Washington metropolitan area, one of the largest biotech clusters in the country, and Inova has publicly stated its willingess to put $200 million into the project. Meanwhile, Virginia Tech is the largest research university in the state, and it is partnering with western Virginia’s largest health care system.

There is no indication in the Virginian-Pilot reporting that Virginia Beach has forced an alliance with either the Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) or the Sentara Health System. Despite the fact that the Virginia Beach site is not located anywhere near EVMS or Sentara General Hospital, the region’s flagship hospital, Harris sees the park focusing on diabetes, cardiovascular disease, neuroscience and traumatic brain injury. As for supporting assets, Harris cites a branch of Tidewater Community College and the Sentara Princess Anne Hospital, which opened in 2011. Virginia Beach also has donated $1 million to fund the initiative. Really? Is this serious?

The city has many assets. Biotech is not one of them. The chances of building a high-end biomedical cluster are just about nil. For biomedical projects lower down the value-added scale, a run-of-the-mill office park will likely do. If Virginia Beach wants economic development, maybe it should persuade Governor Terry McAuliffe to stop subsidizing the relocation of Virginia Beach businesses to Norfolk. In the meantime, the city should focus on providing core government services of the best possible quality at the lowest possible cost. It’s that simple.