An Italian rocket manufacturer will bring over $500 million in investment and more than 1,500 jobs to Pittsylvania County, state officials announced Monday.
Avio will build a facility at an industrial park in Hurt where it will manufacture solid rocket motors for defense, propulsion, missile systems and the commercial space sectors, according to a news release from Gov. Abigail Spanberger.
This is the second-largest economic development deal in Southside Virginia history, topped only by the 2024 announcement that Microporous, a lithium-ion battery separator manufacturer, would invest $1.3 billion at the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill and create just over 2,000 jobs.
Avio, which was founded in 1912, designs, manufactures and maintains commercial and military propulsion systems. It’s based in Colleferro, Italy, near Rome.
The Pittsylvania County factory will employ 1,546 jobs, Jason El Koubi, president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, said Monday. Wages will be about $81,400, which is significantly more than the county’s average wage of about $49,000, he said.
The facility will likely open with several hundred employees by 2028, El Koubi said, with the rest of the jobs coming after that.
In December, former Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s office announced that Avio USA Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Avio, had chosen Virginia as the location for a new advanced manufacturing facility. At that time, a final site hadn’t been announced.
In 2022, the company established Avio USA in Arlington to focus on a rapidly growing North American market and has been operating under a Special Security Agreement with the Department of Defense since 2024, according to the release.
On Friday, the Staunton River Regional Industrial Facility Authority, a group tasked with developing the Hurt industrial park, voted to approve a performance agreement ahead of Monday’s announcement.
The performance agreement included incentives for Avio to locate at the park, including a $7.5 million relocation grant, a $1.7 million grading grant and a $1.5 million local enterprise zones jobs grant. The agreement also waives building permits and water and sewer fees for Avio, an estimated value of $1 million, and tax rebates of 70% for 10 consecutive years on property taxes and machine and tool taxes.
All told, the local incentives are worth over $33.6 million, said Gary Hodnett, mayor of Hurt and chairman of the Staunton River RIFA, in the news release.
These incentives are contingent upon Avio meeting “certain minimum performance parameters” required by the governor’s office, the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, or both, according to the RIFA meeting agenda.
Avio will also be eligible to receive a grant of up to $97.7 million from the state’s Major Employment and Investment Commission, which reviews financing for incentive packages for economic development deals.
El Koubi did not say which other sites were under consideration for this project, but he said that the announcement is a testament to Virginia’s investment in developing industrial sites over the past five years.
“The most common reason why Virginia is eliminated from economic development projects, and this is still true today, is because we do not have sites of sufficient readiness and quality for the project. And typically, the sites that we’re competing with are not in Virginia,” he said. “If we have a site that will work for a project, we’re in a really advantageous position.”
As of 2023, Southern Virginia has more shovel-ready industrial sites — those that have all of the necessary grading and infrastructure in place for a developer to build — than anywhere in the state. The region has put a heavy emphasis on developing industrial sites in recent decades, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local funding on this work.
The Southern Virginia Multimodal Park in Hurt, in the northern part of the county, is an industrial area on a former textile mill site.
In January, the county’s board of supervisors voted unanimously to rezone 225 acres around the existing 800-acre park for industrial use, increasing its size to over 1,000 contiguous acres.
The rezoning allowed the properties “to be used for advanced manufacturing,” said County Administrator Dave Arnold at the planning commission meeting.
This zoning change was fast-tracked, coming before both the county’s planning commission and board of supervisors in January. Normally, there is about a month between a planning commission vote and a board of supervisors vote.
Pittsylvania and nearby Danville have been working to attract manufacturers to the region for about two decades. The city and county jointly own several industrial parks in Southside, including the park in Hurt and the Berry Hill megasite.
The Hurt industrial is the former site of Burlington Industries, previously called Klopman Mills, which employed about 1,300 people in the region. It closed in 2007.
“We not only lost industry but families who were forced to relocate for job replacement,” Hodnett said in the release. “Fast forward, and we now get to celebrate the start of a brighter future where an old industrial site is being redeveloped and repurposed with a new mission thanks to Avio USA.”
