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Life
After NAFTA — Lake Country regroups
by
Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli and Robert Burke
Virginia Business
November 2003
What
Lake Country has to offer, of course, is the lakes.
The big one is the Buggs Island Lake — 50,000 acres
and a couple of miles wide in places, with the rest
long-flooded creeks that finger out across lower Mecklenburg
County and into North Carolina. Just to the east is
Lake Gaston, fed by the same river but less than half
as big, and most of it is below the state line.
The
lakes, both man-made, support a nice tourism business
in this rural three-county region. Anglers and boaters
and other visitors spend about $80 million a year in
Mecklenburg alone. And increasingly, they find the lakes
so appealing they buy land and build. Lakefront lots
at Buggs Island have doubled in price in the past 18
months to $200,000, says Frank Malone, director of the
chamber of commerce in the town of South Hill. “The
lakes are a big drawing card.”
Lake
Country could use a few more cards. The 1993 North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been especially tough
on textile and manufacturing businesses here, which
have made up a large share of the job market for years.
“It was devastating,” says Rickey Reese, town
manager in Chase City, a town of 3,000 in Mecklenburg.
“When NAFTA came about ... the shirt factory, the
jean manufacturer, the shoe factory — we lost it
all.”
In
the past year, unemployment in Mecklenburg and Halifax
counties has topped 12 percent in some months. And a
ripple effect of those lost jobs was the impact on the
many small farms, whose owners often depended on income
from those jobs to keep their farms afloat. “It
would have been easy for us to say, ‘It’s
over,’ and give up,” Reese says. “But
we didn’t.”
Instead
they have focused on rebuilding. Economic development
efforts include new industrial parks — the region
now has 17 — and more work force training. The
recently opened Lake Country Advanced Knowledge Center,
for example, has courses in manufacturing-related fields.
It also hosts career-planning workshops, has degree
and non-degree programs and a distance-learning center.
“We’re laying the foundation,” says Randolph
Jones, director of Mecklenburg’s Office of Economic
Development. “We’re trying to prepare for
a time when the economy turns around.”
When
that day comes the region’s marketing pitch to
businesses will need to be persuasive. There are a lot
of half-empty business parks out there and standing
out will be difficult. “Frankly the biggest challenge
is getting business to give us a chance,” says
Jones. It’s even tough, he says, to convince leaders
at the state’s economic development office that
the region can compete for new businesses.
There are plenty of people here willing to take on skeptics.
“We aren’t bumpkins any more,” says Joyce
French, director of the Southside Planning District
Commission. “We are progressive, we are preparing
for the future and making certain the infrastructure
is in place.” Randi Dikeman agrees. He’s vice
president and general manager of Rex Roto of Virginia,
a manufacturer of ceramic fiber products in South Hill.
“They’ve done a nice job of growing the employment
base in advance of business getting here,” he says.
Regional
developers believe, if you build it they will come,
so they are building. Brunswick used a $786,000 grant
from the Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization
Commission to prepare the new I-85 Business Center Park
in Brunswick. In conjunction with the state’s Virtual
Building Program, Brunswick and Mecklenburg were among
the first in Virginia to offer a “virtual”
building in the Roanoke River Regional Business Park.
Under that program, building plans and permits are ready
and waiting for a new business willing to relocate.
And a recently completed comprehensive economic development
plan points to several new target industries: Distribution,
pharmaceutical, food processing and wood products (in
2001, the county ranked third in timber harvest for
the commonwealth). “We are being very aggressive
in developing land and parks,” says Sherry Ramsey,
executive director of the Brunswick County Industrial
Development Authority.
The
leading 2002 investment announcement was the $49.9 million
expansion of Star Scientific Inc.’s smokeless tobacco
plant in Mecklenburg, adding 315 jobs. Other expansions
included Brick and Tile in Brunswick, Sunshine Mills
in Halifax and DRS Group in Mecklenburg. Downtown revitalization
efforts are attracting a number of businesses, including
a new Food Lion and Goodwill in Chase City. In March
a SONET ring around the town of Alberta was completed.
Short for synchronous optical network, SONET technology
can serve multiple users and when placed in a ring shape
give users a higher level of system reliability. Right
now, only Southside Virginia Community College is on
the ring, but Ramsey says it will be available for business
and other users.
Of
the region’s 17 industrial parks, four are filled.
Of particular note are several new facilities along
U.S. 58, a main highway that parallels the North Carolina
line from Virginia Beach west to the Cumberland Gap:
The 265-acre campus-style, fiber-ready Lakeside Commerce
Park near Clarksville, the 150-acre Riverstone Technology
Park near South Boston, equipped with a broadband wireless
system, and the Roanoke River Regional Business Park,
a 275-acre park with redundant fiber cable infrastructure,
bandwidths up to OC3 and DSL switching.
Even
with agricultural jobs dwindling to less than 3 percent
of the labor market, tightly packed rows of ruffled
tobacco leaves still line the stretch of State Route
47 between South Hill and Chase City. The three counties
are among the state’s top producers of flue tobacco,
accounting for about 40 percent of the state’s
total production. Horses and cows graze in pastoral
fields and local markets still draw the regulars in
search of sweeter than sweet peppers or homemade apple
butter. All the same, economic development leaders predict
a continual decline in farming jobs. That means lots
of locals need new skills for a new and still uncertain
economy.
Jones
says rebuilding the work force will eventually bring
jobs. So along with French and Southside Virginia Community
College, he has pushed for comprehensive training and
educational programs in everything from high-performance
manufacturing to nursing to truck-driver training. The
truck-driver program helped supply workers after Dollar
General Stores put a 1.2-million-square-foot distribution
center in the town of South Boston in Halifax in 1997.
It also helps other trucking firms replace workers they
might lose to Dollar General. “Now when a person
finishes the six-week program they can make $30,000
to $50,000” a year, says John Cavan, president
of Southside Community Community College. “That’s
a great economic development tool.”
The
region has also gotten help rebuilding its work force
from one of its most successful businesses. The Estes
Community Center in Chase City, which trains health
professionals including licensed practical nurses and
registered nurses, was funded with matching dollars
from Richmond-based Estes Express Lines, which got its
start in Chase City with one truck. The Estes family
matched the $500,000 raised by the community to fund
the center, which helped the region attract a new 120-bed
nursing home now under construction in Chase City. “We
said, “if you build a nursing home, we’ll
give you the nurses,’” says Charles Duckworth,
former Chase City mayor and president of the local industrial
development authority.
Meanwhile,
economic development leaders here are pushing a strategy
that has a lot of elements — keeping the companies
it has, luring new ones to help the under-employed work
force and reshaping Lake Country’s image. Says
Ramsey of the Brunswick IDA: “I would like us to
be known as a pro-business community with leadership
that strives for economic success.”
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