The Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission has completed the sale of bonds backed by a portion of the state’s tobacco-settlement money. The sale will raise $448 million, of which $390 million will be placed in an endowment to finance economic development in Virginia’s Southside and Southwest Virginia tobacco-growing communities.
The bond sale comes on the heels of the recently announced sale of the Danville Regional Medical Center. About $200 million from that transaction will endow a community foundation for the Danville-Pittsylvania area. And let us not forget the Harvest Foundation, endowed with $150 million in 2002 from the sale of the old Martinsville Memorial Hospital.
Virginia’s southern piedmont is well endowed, it seems, to reinvent itself for the 21st century.
