Category: Economic development
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Virginia Falling Behind in R&D
Virginia universities are slowly gaining ground compared to their peers in R&D, but Virginia businesses are falling behind. Academia and industry need to cultivate closer ties, says strategic consultant Mitch Horowitz. As a principal of TEConomy Partners LLC, a Bethesda, Md.-based research firm specializing in technology-driven economy development, Mitch Horowitz has had the opportunity to…
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Polar Vortex II Brings Gas Curtailments, Price Spikes
Virginia’s climate has been setting record low temperatures in the past few days, and state newspapers have been full of stories about poor people shivering in the cold, traffic accidents caused by black ice, and the defects of Virginia Department of Transportation snow removal. But I have seen nothing about the impact of the deep…
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A Fresh Take on Workforce Development
Once a national leader in economic growth and surveys of best states to do business, Virginia has lagged most other states in economic performance in recent years, Stephen Moret, president of the Virginia Department of Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) told the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) at its monthly board meeting today. Last…
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No Subsidies for Football Billionaires
Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, reportedly worth $2.3 billion, has said that he wants to build a new football stadium for his team by 2027. Del. Michael J. Webert, R-Marshall, says he would love for the NFL team to move from Maryland to Virginia… as long as taxpayers aren’t asked to share the cost. Webert,…
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What’s the Matter with Hampton Roads? It’s Name.
Around the time I joined the start-up staff of Virginia Business magazine in 1986, the civic leaders of Norfolk, Virginia Beach and nearby jurisdictions decided that the name “Tidewater” did not properly describe their metropolitan area. The term also referred to the lowlands of Virginia below the fall lines and carried a rural connotation. The…
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Virginia’s Income Drain: $1.5 Billion Last Year
Last week I noted that more people left Virginian between 2015 and 2016 than moved into the state — the fourth year in a row the Old Dominion suffered more out-migration than in-migration. From a taxpayer’s perspective, that wouldn’t be so bad if poor people were leaving and rich people were coming in. Sadly, that…
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Reinventing Roanoke
Thirty years ago when I worked for the Roanoke Times, the City of Roanoke was obsessed with revitalizing its sleepy downtown. Roanokers were fiercely loyal to their central business district and celebrated every small success. But the odds seemed stacked against them. Midsized cities lacking a major university presence have fared poorly economically in the…
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More Miscellaneous Morsels…
Luxury apartments for research park. The Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, which has more than one million square feet of office space, is joining forces with a local real estate developer to add luxury apartments to the mix, reports the Roanoke Times. The company had previously added amenities to play soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, basketball, and…
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Bacon Bits: Film Flam, State Workers, Fun & Games with Chicago Debt
Film incentives a money loser for state. Incentives for producing films in Virginia doubled under the McAuliffe administration, reaching $14.3 million in 2015-2016 and totaling $43 million over five fiscal years. But Virginia’s film industry has returned about 20 cents for every dollar it received in tax credits and 30 cents for every dollar in grants over…
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Former Apostle of Sprawl Now Touts Walkable Urbanism
Fairly or unfairly, I’ve always thought of Stephen S. Fuller, the George Mason University professor and expert on the Washington regional economy, as a guy who made his living providing the intellectual justification for the business-as-usual pattern of real estate development in Northern Virginia. The real estate lobby hired him to conduct innumerable studies and…
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Amazon, Incentives, and Virginia’s Best Sales Pitch
The odds that Virginia can snag the Amazon HQ2 project strike me as exceedingly long. Not because our communities don’t measure up well against Amazon’s location criteria but because we don’t have the stomach in Virginia to assemble massive enough subsidies and tax giveaways to compete with metropolitan regions willing to stroke blank checks. New…
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Explaining Virginia’s Economic Growth
Every time I’ve seen Governor Terry McAuliffe give a speech, he’s warmed up the audience by touting all the jobs Virginia has created on his watch. And the one time I saw gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie speak, he emphasized that the rate of job creation has been one of the slowest in the country. Both…
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What Happened to Jerry Peng, and Other Questions about Tranlin Inc.
Tranlin Inc., a Chinese paper manufacturing company that promised to invest $2 billion and hire 2000 employees in Chesterfield County, has failed to meet a deadline for repaying a $5 million incentive grant from the state. The company informed the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) that the company could not fully repay the loan, instead…
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Marohn to Bring Strong Towns Insights to Virginia
I have written about Chuck Marohn, founder and chief evangelist of the Strong Towns movement, many times. Not long ago I urged elected officials and citizen activists wanting to revitalize Virginia’s small towns to read his blog. Marohn is, hands down, the leading thinker today about building more prosperous, livable, and sustainable communities” in America’s small…
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Chesterfield Debates Matoaca Mega-Site
In August Governor Terry McAuliffe joined legislators and local government officials to announce plans to build an industrial “mega-site” in the Matoaca area of Chesterfield County. The county anticipates spending $9 million for preliminary engineering and right-of-way-acquisition and $70 million on road improvements, according to the Progress-Index, and that’s just the expenditures noted in the…