More than a dozen Southside and Southwest Virginia localities have been awarded over $48 million to help make large industrial sites ready for potential new businesses.
The awards were part of $126 million in grants announced Thursday for nearly two dozen places across the commonwealth as part of the Virginia Business Ready Sites Program, according to a news release from Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
The program helps cities and counties assess and develop industrial sites that have at least 100 contiguous, developable acres, or 50 acres in Western Virginia and in other qualifying areas. Typical development work includes grading a site to reshape the land and building out infrastructure.
Individual awards announced Thursday for Southside and Southwest localities begin at $100,000, which multiple locations will receive, and range up to a $9 million grant to Danville for the Coleman site, a 158-acre industrial property off Gypsum Road. The largest single award in Virginia of $35 million went to Chesapeake.
“It’s really exciting because these kinds of opportunities don’t come along very often and this type of work is expensive,” said David Manley, executive director of the Wythe County Joint Industrial Development Authority.
Wythe County will receive about $5.1 million toward developing Lot 10, a 60-acre portion of its 1,200-acre Progress Park.
The county will put up a 25% match, or about $1.7 million, to complement the state grant. It will use the money to perform an environmental assessment on Lot 10 and eventually undertake the necessary construction work to make the site attractive to a prospective company.
Manley said a lot that size could support a business that would bring hundreds of jobs to the county, and he hopes the location will be ready within two years. Progress Park already is home to a Gatorade bottling and distribution plant, an Amcor plastic bottle manufacturing facility, a Somic America automotive component manufacturing plant, and the Blue Star NBR rubber glove factory, which has yet to begin operations.
Danville will put its $9 million toward site planning and engineering at the Coleman site, grading an 80-acre pad and extending rail service to that pad, said Corrie Teague Bobe, the city’s director of economic development and tourism.
The work, Bobe said, will “help increase the attractiveness of the site to prospective industry by reducing risk and increasing their speed to begin operations.”
“This site is currently undeveloped, but offers utility and transportation infrastructure that is conducive to large-scale manufacturing,” she said.
The city of Roanoke will get $7.5 million, which it will combine with a $2.5 million local match to help develop an 82-acre tract adjacent to its 440-acre Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology. Businesses already in the park include Advance Auto Parts, FedEx Ground and Amazon, which earlier this year bought property to set up a distribution center.
“It’ll be grading, it’ll be putting in utilities, it’ll be the full-blown creation of a site to get it up to a point where someone can purchase it or lease it and build on it,” Marc Nelson, the city’s director of economic development, said of the work that the state and local money will pay for.
Franklin County was awarded a $5.5 million grant, which it will use to upgrade sewer capacity at its Summit View Business Park in partnership with the Western Virginia Water Authority. The 550-acre park has two occupants: Stik-Pak, which makes food packaging, and ValleyStar Credit Union.
“This improvement will make the site more attractive to potential businesses by supporting larger operations and ensuring the infrastructure is capable of handling increased demand,” said Dani Poe, Franklin County’s director of economic development.
Investing in industrial sites is important for Virginia localities to stay globally competitive, Manley said.
“Without ready sites, you cannot compete,” he said.
Youngkin has been pushing for more state spending to develop industrial sites — the current state budget allocates $20 million per year over the next two years for future projects under the Virginia Business Ready Sites Program, compared to the $200 million that Youngkin had proposed.
“Virginia has only invested in site development at substantial levels for the last two years,” Youngkin said in his news release Thursday.
The governor said that having a growing inventory of such sites is a “huge competitive advantage.”
“Business-ready sites drive and accelerate economic growth, and our continued investments in site development position the Commonwealth to compete to win transformative projects that will bring hundreds and thousands of jobs to Virginia,” he said.
Other locations in Southside and Southwest Virginia that received business-ready site grants included:
- Pittsylvania County: $6 million toward the 3,528-acre Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill;
- Radford: $3.5 million to help develop the 80-acre Virginia Casting Industries brownfield site; and
- Bedford County: $1.5 million toward the 500-acre New London Business and Technology Park.
A complete list of awards is available from the Virginia Economic Development Partnership.
