A large American flag suspended between two excavators was the backdrop for a Tuesday groundbreaking celebration welcoming Italian rocket manufacturer Avio — and its more than $600 million investment — to Pittsylvania County.
The company announced its decision to locate in Pittsylvania in February, also promising 1,500 jobs, making it one of the largest economic development deals in Southside Virginia’s history.
Avio, which designs, manufactures and maintains commercial and military propulsion systems, plans to open its 900,000-square-foot facility in 2028.
“Today’s celebration demonstrates that communities with proud industrial histories can lead the next generation of advanced manufacturing,” Gov. Abigail Spanberger said at the groundbreaking ceremony in the town of Hurt.
The Avio facility will go in Hurt’s Southern Virginia Multimodal Park that spans 800 acres in the northern part of Pittsylvania. The industrial park is the former site of Burlington Industries, previously called Klopman Mills, which employed about 1,300 people in the region. It closed in 2007.
“This will once again be a place where Virginians come to work, build careers and support their families,” Spanberger said. “We know that when a plant closed nearly 20 years ago, the community lost more than a building. It lost a piece of its identity, and for nearly two decades, the site has been waiting for an opportunity just like this one.”
Spanberger was joined by state and local officials and leaders of Avio USA, the U.S. subsidiary of Avio that was established in 2022.
The facility will likely open with several hundred employees by 2028, with the rest of the jobs coming after that, said Jason El Koubi, president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, in a phone interview when the project was first announced in February.
The annual wage per job will be about $81,000, which is significantly more than the county’s average wage of about $49,000, El Koubi said.
Avio’s expected $500 million in investment and 1,500 jobs make the announcement the second-largest economic development deal in Southside history, topped only by the 2024 announcement that Microporous, a lithium-ion battery separator manufacturer, would invest $1.3 billion and create over 2,000 jobs at the Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill.
These two projects are expected to be eclipsed by an announcement that Stack Infrastructure is bringing an AI data center campus to the Berry Hill site. Stack has signed a local performance agreement with officials in the region, though there has been no formal announcement.
A strong local workforce was one of the reasons Avio chose to locate in Southern Virginia, said James Syring, CEO of Avio USA and retired U.S. Navy vice admiral, at the ceremony.
“We looked carefully at where we wanted to build this factory, and there are many, many states … that reached out,” Syring said. “In the end, we chose Virginia because of this area and what it would bring to us in terms of access to workforce and trade.”
More important than the jobs Avio will bring, Syring said, is the company’s commitment to being part of the community.
“We’re not coming here just to build a manufacturing facility,” he said. “We want to hire here. We want to train here. We want to create opportunities for young people to work at Avio.”
Avio, founded in 1912, is based in Colleferro, Italy, near Rome.
The company received over $33.6 million in local incentives to select the Hurt industrial park, including a $7.5 million relocation grant, a $1.7 million grading grant and a $1.5 million local enterprise zones grant.
These figures were outlined in a performance agreement between Avio and the Staunton River Regional Industrial Facility Authority, the group tasked with developing the industrial park. The agreement also waived 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.
The incentives are contingent upon Avio meeting “certain minimum performance parameters” required by the governor’s office and the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission.
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.
“With Avio’s world-class engineering and Hurt’s unstoppable workforce, we’re going to forge the engines, defy gravity, push past the horizon and redefine what is possible,” Hurt Mayor Gary Hodnett said.
