High-tech bonanza. Virginia has captured almost $16 billion in capital investment through economic development since Governor Ralph Northam took office 16 months ago, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “It’s probably the biggest 16-month period in state history,” said Stephen Moret, who came on board as CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership in early 2017. The investment includes two massive projects — Amazon’s $2.5 billion HQ2 project and Micron’s $3 billion expansion — which the state began pursuing during the McAuliffe administration. Another $7.4 billion came from projects, mostly data centers, that companies did not want to announce.
Rejuvenate rural areas by investing in cities. “Micropolitan areas” — rural communities with small urban centers, have rebounded to near pre-recession employment levels, observe Amy Liu and Nathan Arnosti with the Brookings Institution in a New York Times op-ed. They write: “In an economy where private investment flows to places with dense clusters of prized assets, the best rural policy may be supporting the development of small and midsize cities across the country, improving rural residents’ access to jobs, customers, training programs and small-business financing.”
Here in Virginia, what might such a policy look like? Outside the Golden Crescent, focus investment in Roanoke, Charlottesville, Blacksburg, Danville, Bristol/Abingdon, Winchester, Harrisonburg, Staunton (and perhaps Lexington and Farmville) in the hope that they can build enough critical mass to compete in the knowledge economy. That’s hard news for Virginia’s lagging small mill towns, but no one wins from squandering scarce resources.
Virginia Tech regroups after biocomplexity raid. Virginia Tech is closing its Biocomplexity Institute about nine months after the University of Virginia recruited its executive director with a 15% pay increase and a $30 million startup package, reports the Daily Progress. Tech’s biocomplexity chief took 37 million full-time research faculty with him to found a similar initiative at UVa. The researchers generated a total of $102.5 million in research contracts at Tech. Of that amount, $26.9 million is being transferred to UVa. Tech will reconstitute its biocomplexity program under the umbrella of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.
