LILLY IN THE FIELD Near George Mason University, Innovation Park in Prince William County, Virginia, has had a big year. Soon to occupy the building at the lower right is Comcast Cable Communications. Meanwhile, the field in the upper portion of the picture will soon be home to Eli Lilly's new $450-million insulin manufacturing facility.

Virginia

It was a big step for Lilly's manufacturing operations to leave the confines of Indianapolis for the first time, but the internationally heightened need for dispersal of operations dovetailed nicely with an inviting proposition from Prince William County in Virginia, prompting the location of the company's second insulin factory there, a $450-million investment announced this spring.
        "As we reviewed possible locations, we concluded that Prince William County offered the best combination between cost of operations, quality of life and the ability to attract and retain a skilled work force," said Sidney Taurel, Lilly's chairman, president and CEO.
        "Given that this was their first North American manufacturing facility outside of Indianapolis, this was a very serious site location analysis that they had a large team looking at, so there were multiple issues," says Martin Briler, executive director of the Prince William County Department of Economic Development, whose group put its first packet in the mail in late 2001 before going face-to-face with the mystery company in January 2002. "Always cost of course. And one of the ruling issues for them was the quality of the work force. Lilly employs an awful lot of people around the world, and they recognize that their strength in the marketplace is a highly educated and highly educatable work force. That's something they had us begin to demonstrate for them very early."
        John Schofield, marketing and research director, says that the community colleges played a big role by showing how they could tweak the semiconductor industry training program they administered to create a whole new program targeted toward Lilly's needs. In addition, visiting employees from a similar plant in France -- and who might need to make the move to the U.S. -- were impressed by the cosmopolitan nature of the D.C. area.
        "One thing that helped is that the county owns some of the ground in the tech park, but some of it is owned by other individuals," adds Schofield. "On the site they came in on, about 80 percent of it is owned by a private individual. He was a member of our team, and he was motivated to sell. I think that the Lilly team was impressed that the state, the local authority, all the local utilities, the Virginia Department of Transportation and the private property owner could all pull together in a relatively short period of time, and respond almost hourly to the questions the company raised. They could get a clean site and move immediately."
        That was no exaggeration, with the announcement coming a scant few months after the initial contact. Groundbreaking was to have taken place in August. The good news for the county did not end there however, as Comcast Cable Communications announced a $21.5-million, 300-employee technical support center after a multi-state search.
        Altec, a Birmingham, Ala.-based manufacturer of equipment for the utility and telecommunications industries, recently completed construction on 170,000 sq. ft. (15,810 sq. m.) of manufacturing space in the Botetourt Center at Greenfield. The $12.5 million facility will employ 150 workers within three years. Tom Richmond, director of manufacturing at the Altec plant near Daleville, said that Altec initially considered Western Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee and Southern Ohio for the project but ultimately selected the Roanoke Valle based on transportation infrastructure, work force capabilities, educational opportunities, business environment, population and site availability.
        In Mecklenburg County, Trinity Packaging Corp. has decided to put its new 300-employee plant into an existing building in Rocky Mount that it bought for $9.1 million, rather than build an entirely new plant for $10 million in Clarksville, as the plastic bag manufacturer -- like its pharmaceutical and telecom cohorts -- needed fast-track progress in order to meet peak demand quickly, and found it in Virginia.

West Virginia

Increasingly, the Mountain State is intricately tied in to not just the Appalachian resource-based economy, but the coastal tech-oriented economy as well. Consider the Census numbers, which showed that West Virginia had the worst increase in average commute time of 41 states... because a mounting number of West Virginians drive all the way to the D.C. region to work. The anecdotal evidence is backed by figures showing the state's greatest population growth in its far eastern counties.
        Nevertheless, West Virginia officials want to keep those people closer to home too. One initiative seeks to build on the presence of the FBI fingerprint lab in Clarksburg, the Pentagon's biometrics-testing facility in Bridgeport and the biometrics programs in place at West Virginia University in Morgantown by building an entire cluster of biometrics firms. A 500-acre (202-hectare) technology park in Fairmont is just getting started, with a handful of companies waiting to take space.
        "West Virginia is clustered from way back, because of the topography," says Todd Hooker, manager, national accounts, for the West Virginia Development Office.
        Among those prototype clusters is the Polymer Alliance Zone, an area of three counties that has the highest concentration of resin manufacturers in the world. The new Chemical Alliance Zone, in the river valley, includes longtime West Virginia corporate citizens DuPont and Dow. Another traditional industry key to the state economy is primary metals, which employs 11,000 people and trails only Indiana and Ohio in its share of gross state product.
        "There are three monumental acts and funding strategies that have been put together during this last legislative session," says Bill Turner, senior manager, national accounts, for the WVDO. "We created a venture capital pool of monies coming in from other states called the Adena Fund, a regional Appalachian fund for seed capital. We pledged $25 million of state resources to parlay against federal funds. [To read more about Adena, see "Way to Go, Ohio" from September 2002.]
        "We've also created a financing pool of funding, which is taking $19 million of lottery revenue," says Turner. "We're going to float bonds, and we're going to issue over $200 million of funding for economic development projects all over the state."
        Finally, West Virginia has passed tax increment financing, to be used on both sales tax and property tax, says Turner. And the threshold for job creation tax incentives has been lowered from 50 jobs to 15.
        Nevertheless, larger projects are more than welcome. Take the July announcement by Guardian Industries that it will add a second fiberglass production line, which means a $15-20-million investment and 100 new jobs in Inwood. Guardian, among the world's leading suppliers of automotive glass and mirrors, already operates a 700,000-sq.-ft. (65,030-sq.-m.), $35-million facility there.
        The state's business parks are holding their own, in large measure because the state makes up for its lack of flat land with a steep downslope in electricity prices.