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Virginia’s
out-of-the-way pristine shore
by
Robert Burke
Virginia Business
October 2003
On
nearly every summer’s day a truck loaded with plants
rolls down the long drive of Ed Tankard’s 1,000-acre
commercial nursery. Most turn north on U.S. 13, heading
for markets in places like Long Island or Connecticut,
where demand is strong for the lush green shrubs, trees
and perennials that thrive in the Eastern Shore’s
moist, sandy soil and long growing season. Seeing a
loaded truck leave is a satisfying image for Tankard,
40. “To me that’s best part of the job,”
he says.
Tankard
is the third generation to run the family nursery, located
just south of the small town of Exmore. He earned an
MBA at The College of William and Mary in 1992 and now
lives with his wife and two young daughters on a bayside
farm. His business — and the Eastern Shore’s
future, he says — depend on clean water and fertile
land. “Clean water is like a good bank account
for us, because we still make a good living off the
water,” he says.
On
the shore’s southern tip, though, a different vision
is taking shape next to tiny Cape Charles. The 2,000-acre
Bay Creek Marina and Golf Resort is under development
there, with an Arnold Palmer golf course and 3,000 lots
priced from $90,000 to well over $1 million. By next
spring there will be a new 224-slip marina, a restaurant
and 10,000 square feet of shopping. A second course
designed by Jack Nicklaus and a spa and fitness center
will open in 2005. “We’ll be very attractive
to boaters. We’ll be very attractive to golfers,”
says Oral Lambert, director of resort development at
Bay Creek Marina, who commutes daily from Virginia Beach
across the Chesapeake Bay-Bridge Tunnel. “It’s
going to be a major player on the East Coast as a resort
destination.”
The
Bay Creek project — by far the biggest development
on the shore — is evidence of the change sweeping
across this fragile peninsula. This two-county rural
region dotted with small towns is in the midst of a
real estate boom. Old bayside and oceanside farms are
being snapped up at eye-popping prices by out-of-state
buyers looking for a second home or a quiet retirement.
The investment and new money is welcome by many, but
there’s a lot of uncertainty about how to reap
the benefits of real estate-driven growth without hurting
what natives and newcomers love about this place. “We
don’t want to get too crowded here,” says
Steven Belote, 38, chief financial officer for Shore
Financial Corp., the region’s only publicly traded
company. He grew up in Onancock, a bayside town in Accomack
County. “We don’t want another Ocean City.
We don’t want another Nags Head. That’s my
personal side, but my banker side says, ‘Bring
it on.’”
Certainly
the shore could use some outside investment. The geographic
isolation that makes it so unique has also hurt efforts
to bring better jobs and economic growth. The available
jobs are often entry level and pay relatively low wages.
Chicken processing plants owned by Tysons and Perdue
are among the biggest private-sector employers here,
and there are acres of commercial farming. An increasing
number of people work in tourism-related service jobs,
especially in Chincoteague, home of the famous pony
swim, near the Maryland state line.
A
major change in the Eastern Shore over the past 20 years
has been in the type of homebuyer interested in the
market. “We’re seeing a lot of couples in
their late forties or early fifties, coming from the
D.C.-Baltimore or Philadelphia area looking for retirement
or vacation property,” says Eileen Kirkwood, a
local real estate executive who has developed more than
2,000 acres of property on the Eastern Shore. “These
buyers are looking at homes in the $500,000 to $1.2
million range, or exclusive waterfront lots for future
development. Unlike a traditional development, like
Bay Creek, we don’t stipulate when the property
has to be built upon. They can buy the land and hold
it for several years.” However, with interest rates
at historical lows, Kirkwood says that people are going
ahead and building, even though they are many years
away from retirement.
The
surge in sales of residential properties is part of
the reason behind the growth at Shore Financial. Since
going public in 1997 the bank’s assets have risen
79 percent to $187 million. Bank CFO Belote says that
besides home loans, the bank has seen a lot of growth
in small-business lending. “You don’t see
a lot of the traditional businesses, which I think is
a good thing. That’s what makes (the shore) unique.”
Many
of the small companies here were started by people who
visited the shore and decided to stay. Pam Barefoot
moved here from Richmond in 1984 after visiting with
her husband, and six months later launched Blue Crab
Bay Company, a wholesaler of gourmet foods. The business
employs 25 people and is located in the Accomack Airport
Industrial Park, a 371-acre business park in Accomack
County; last year’s sales totaled $2.5 million.
“This is a perfect place to live for people who
want to look for niches, to find something that’s
not being done and do it,” she says.
The
region has had little success attracting larger employers,
though. It simply can’t compete with regions that
have better locations and a stronger labor pool. “We
are a rural area with not a large population,”
says Keith Bull, Accomack County administrator. “A
lot of our work force is not as skilled and as well
educated as we would like to have it.”
There
have been efforts to attract companies that would mesh
well with the region’s sensitive environment. In
the mid 1990s Northampton County opened the Cape Charles
Sustainable Technology Park on 200 acres in Cape Charles
in hopes of attracting environmentally friendly industries.
Today, though, the park’s only building has just
one tenant — Waco Chemicals USA — a subsidiary
of a Japanese company. It uses blood drawn from horseshoe
crabs to make a substance that can detect bacterial
endotoxins and can be used for applications such as
testing injectable drugs.
The
county won a lot of praise for its eco-industrial strategy,
but it hasn’t paid off. County Administrator Lance
Metzler says it’s reassessing that approach. “We’re
not saying we’d get away from sustainable technology
totally, but just step back and see what our other options
are,” he says. A key goal is attracting better-paying
jobs a step up from entry-level wages. “The jobs
that pay in the $30Ks and $40Ks with great benefits;
we just haven’t been able to attract those,”
he says.
One
of the region’s biggest allies in promoting economic
development while still protecting the environment has
been the Arlington-based Nature Conservancy. It owns
14 of the 18 barrier islands along the shore, totaling
38,000 acres and providing a habitat for migratory birds.
In the mid-1990s it created the for-profit Virginia
Eastern Shore Corp. and got involved in a number of
economic development efforts, including real estate
and eco-tourism. It spent $3 million, for example, converting
an old U.S. Coast Guard station into a 12-room inn.
The
corporation’s business efforts failed, though,
and it racked up millions in debt. It was eventually
disbanded, says Steve Parker, executive director of
the conservancy’s Eastern Shore program. “We
learned a lot in partnering with for-profit businesses,
but most of all we learned we’re not a for-profit
business,” he says. The conservancy is putting
its effort back into the science and biology of conservation.
There’s still an economic benefit for the shore,
Parker says. A lot of the region’s economy “is
based on an unspoiled seaside and clean waters and farmland
and a healthy environment. So we see all of those businesses
benefiting from work the Nature Conservancy does.”
The
shore’s geography is part of the reason for a unique
cluster of high-tech jobs in and around the NASA Wallops
Flight Facility in northern Accomack near Chincoteague.
Since its creation in 1945, Wallops has been the site
of thousands of launches, and dozens of private-sector
contractors have employees there.
The
Wallops site is also home to the Navy’s Surface
Combat Systems Center. The Navy chose the Wallops site
because it’s as close to being on board a ship
as they could get when training crews in surface combat
systems. “They have everything but the water beneath
them,” says Steve Habeger, executive director of
the center, who retired this summer. Of the 350 people
at the center roughly 200 are private-sector contractors,
mostly for defense industry giants Lockheed Martin and
Northrop Grumman. The tech-related work being done at
Wallops, while it hasn’t created a large cluster
of private companies, does help the shore’s economy.
The Navy alone has a $17 million annual payroll, Habeger
says.
Still,
technology jobs are not going to dominate the shore’s
economy like the development boom taking shape at its
southern tip in Northampton County. The opening of a
parallel second span of the bay-bridge tunnel in 1999,
along with the development of projects like the Bay
Creek resort, has helped open up the shore to outsiders,
says Bill Parr, who has worked in the real estate market
there since the early 1980s.
But
Parr says that Northampton is uniquely prepared for
what’s coming. It has an “enlightened”
zoning ordinance enacted three years ago to cluster
development and protect the environment. “We’re
not overdeveloped yet and have enough conservation measures
in place to prevent the county from self-destructing,”
he says.
There’s
also a strong network of conservation-minded groups
and residents, such as the 15-year-old Citizens for
a Better Eastern Shore, a 501(c)(3) group that focuses
on land use and growth management. Another group, called
“We Decide!” was formed three years ago by
a handful of residents including Barefoot and Tankard
to fight a proposal to reduce the $20 roundtrip toll
on the bridge-tunnel, a move that would have accelerated
development by giving Hampton Roads residents cheaper
access. The group helped raise money to fund a study
that detailed the impact that changing the toll would
have. Tunnel traffic is increasing: In 2002, 3.4 million
vehicles used the tunnel, or an average of 9,351 vehicles
a day, up from 8,710 vehicles a day in 2001.
People
here know change is coming and want a say in how it
happens. Such as Bruce and Carol Evans, who moved here
about a decade ago from Richmond and now operate a bed
and breakfast in Cape Charles. Today he’s on the
Town Council there, and she’s a member of a regional
economic development partnership. “There’s
an advantage to being in two counties that the state
forgot for a while,” he says. “Now we have
a chance to do something unique.”
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