Hampton Roads Intelligence Report - Site Selection Magazine

by GARY DAUGHTERS

HAMPTON ROADS INTELLIGENCE REPORT | INTRODUCTION

The Winds of Change Have Arrived

Courtesy of William & Mary

Courtesy of Consociate Media

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here’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the mayor of a good-sized city with certain cultural aspirations.

“I will do everything in my power to bring to our fair city a world class symphony,” this mayor is said to have harumphed. “Just don’t make me go.”

It’s a similar thing with regionalism.

It may sound great in theory, but joining forces across jurisdictional lines to promote economic development often gets little more than lip service. Or it’s done with the various entities holding their noses.

Not so in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

In Hampton Roads — with 1.8 million residents, the largest metro between Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — regionalism is written into the DNA. It’s an article of faith.

“One city can’t do it all by itself,” says Doug Smith, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Alliance, the economic development authority that covers Virginia Beach, Norfolk, 144

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Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News and nine other related localities. “We’ve got example after example of really strong collaboration. It’s what we live by, and it’s something companies that are looking at your area expect to see.

Just look at the $5 billion transportation package under construction right now, arguably the largest in the nation. We taxed ourselves and are building it ourselves.”

Other such examples abound, many of them tied to the budding marriage of the region’s “blue” (maritime) and “green” (sustainable) economies.

Highlighted by the successful, regionwide effort to establish Hampton Roads as an offshore supply hub for the exploding wind power industry, they include the Hampton Roads Maritime Collaborative for Growth (HRMC), Old Dominion University’s Maritime Initiative and the Virginia Offshore Wind Landing, a point of entry for entrepreneurs into the offshore wind business.

Spreading out from that circle and powered by a truly singular workforce abetted by world-class education networks lies the potential to grow in directions that include data analytics, cybersecurity, unmanned systems and advanced healthcare. Regional collaboration, again, lies at the root of efforts to link sections of Hampton Roads to a high-speed fiber ring to enhance the region’s attractiveness to tech-heavy enterprises.

“The traditional blue economy is morphing,” says Smith. “We’re figuring out where the blue economy meets the green economy. And we think we can be that place. We are a maritime industrial base. That’s who we are, and diversifying our economy is built around that.”

— Gary Daughters, Senior Editor

HAMPTON ROADS INTELLIGENCE REPORT | MARITIME

Where Brain Meets Brawn Huntington Ingalls expands in Hampton Roads on a pioneering mission for the Navy.

I Huntington Ingalls is partnering with Boeing on an extra-large unmanned underwater vessel for the U.S. Navy.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Ingalls

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nside a cavernous, high-tech factory in Hampton, Virginia, a new generation of warship is being imagined, created and readied for deployment by a unit of Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), the nation’s largest military shipbuilding company. With operations across the U.S. and in a dozen other countries, HII has its headquarters in Newport News, neighboring Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval base.

It amounts to a whole lot of metal, topped off by layers of tech, and muscled into shape by a local legion of military-minded brainiacs.

HII has an outsized impact on the community that surrounds it, pumping some $ billion annually into the Virginia economy, most of that in and around Hampton Roads. Huntington Ingalls, a  spinoff of Northrop Grumman, is Virginia’s largest private employer, with more than , Virginians among its , worldwide workers.

Up and running since late , the company’s ,-sq.-ft. Unmanned Systems Center of

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Excellence is at work on two publicly announced projects perched at the cutting edge of the mission to develop a new fleet of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Those projects are just the beginning.

HII’s Bill Ermatinger, executive vice president and chief human resources officer, spoke with Site Selection in mid-February about the company’s wide-ranging pursuits and the knowledge workforce that makes them all happen in Hampton Roads.

The market for unmanned underwater vehicles is still in its infancy. How do you see it evolving?

Bill Ermatinger: What you’re really doing is you’re asking, ‘What does the future Navy look like?

How many of these unmanned systems are going to be required?’ And not only for the U.S. Navy.

You’ve got to look at the navies of Japan, Australia, Belgium, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, even the Republic of Korea and Canada. It’s a matter of

expense. Not every country can afford a $ billion aircraft carrier, or even a submarine. But a UUV, they can. And so it has the potential to rival one day the output of what we’re currently doing.

Workforce was the primary reason we chose Hampton Roads.”

— Bill Ermatinger, Executive VP, Chief Human Resource Officer, Huntington Ingalls

What’s the idea behind HII’s new Unmanned Systems Center of Excellence in Hampton? How does it respond to this particular moment?

Ermatinger: We now have the ability to make small UUVs, medium UUVs, larger UUVs and extralarge UUVs. The smallest is maybe the size of a torpedo and the largest about a quarter of a submarine, so pretty big. We cover the entire spectrum — design, development, integration to the fleet, operation and maintenance. So, then the question is, where are we going to build them?

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And you chose Hampton Roads.

Ermatinger: We had a very competitive process, and that’s where it ended up. Your next question is ‘Why?’ Workforce development was our primary reason we chose where we did. Hampton Roads and Virginia overall have the unique ability of creating workforces. They do. We see it because we live here. It’s head and shoulders above. Very important is the fact that Hampton Roads has a large group of veteran retirees, and we want to tap into that. There’s just a wealth of highly skilled employees, and we would love to leverage that.

Could you be more specific about Virginia’s ability to create workforces?

Ermatinger: Workforce development is the ability of providing the right people for the right job at the right time for the right company. You can’t just wait for when a company shows up and needs  people. They are not going to just materialize overnight. You really have to start planning workforce development at the pre-K level.

And then you have your apprentice programs, community college systems and higher ed. If you’re not connecting all of those dots, you’re not going to win in workforce development. It’s that connectivity where Virginia does a really good job.

How many workers are on the job now at the new facility?

Ermatinger: If you walked in, it could support about 400 to 500 people. Right now, we have about 50.

Like I said, we just opened it. But even the site itself can be expanded on a piece on land that Hampton donated. There’s capacity for us to grow.

HII’s workforce development model is one that other companies might want to try to replicate.

Ermatinger: We are really not a shipbuilding company.

We’re a workforce development company that just happens to make ships. We spend $100 million a year on training. Our apprentice school here in Virginia was founded in 1910. It offers 19 trades and eight advanced degrees. It is an accredited college with basketball and football teams. We graduate about 500 people a year. While they’re here, we pay them $40,000 a year. That’s with no debt and no obligation to stay here after you’re done. It’s

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such a great example that we testify about it before Congress about once a year.

How does regional collaboration throughout Hampton Roads play into workforce development?

Ermatinger: Statewide, Virginia just really has a leg up on a lot of other states. A lot of other states are trying to catch up. But here in Hampton Roads, we have all the school superintendents engaged in workforce, starting with pre-K. We have Tidewater Community College, Nelson Community College, Old Dominion University, William & Mary, Christopher Newport University, Norfolk State, Hampton University. We have the local chambers of commerce and the state chamber. All the local workforce development partnership groups, they’ve got a seat at the table. So, when you get everybody at the table like that, it becomes a problem that is a lot easier to solve.

HAMPTON ROADS INTELLIGENCE REPORT | OFFSHORE WIND

The Teeth of the Matter

Siemens Gamesa chose Norfolk Marine Terminal, a key to establishing a “hub.”

Courtesy of Siemens Gamesa

Offshore wind is the test case for a promising model of economic development.

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f this is a race and the prize is a commanding stake in the East Coast wind energy boom, then Hampton Roads has taken the lead coming out of the opening turn. The Port of Virginia’s Portsmouth Marine Terminal (PMT), having re-positioned itself for the offshore wind boom, is locked in now as onshore “hub” to the nation’s biggest offshore wind project, Dominion Energy’s .-GW, $. billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project, scheduled for completion in .

PMT, as of October , is fully leased. An -acre, -year, $ million agreement with Spain’s Siemens Gamesa, a top blade maker, followed the deal in August for Dominion to

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lease  acres at the port for staging and pre-assembly. Sweden’s Ørsted, another industry player, held a much smaller lease already.

“This makes PMT an offshore wind hub,” says Stephen Edwards, CEO and executive director of Virginia Port Authority. “You’ll have ships coming in with these huge components and then taking them out to the Dominion project once they’ve been finished at PMT. PMT,” Edwards affirms, “will cover the whole kit and caboodle.”

From what is essentially a standing start, the Biden administration hopes to see  million American homes powered by offshore wind by . If the federal government has a say over which East Coast port or ports might best serve as

the massive buildout’s primary hubs, consider that the Energy Department is anteing up $ million to upgrade PMT for offshore wind operations.

The federally funded project is to include the construction of three wharf areas, infrastructure hardening, electrical upgrades and other improvements. In its successful application for the grant, the Port of Virginia submitted that “$. million in benefits are realized by using PMT as a staging port,” for offshore wind.

Room to Grow PMT was recognized in a  report commissioned by the North Carolina Department of Commerce as one of three top ports on the East Coast

with the potential to support offshore wind. One of the other two is but a swim away.

“Portsmouth Marine is all taken,” says veteran developer Jerry Miller.

“Norfolk Southern’s got the other one.”

Miller expects to soon begin developing Norfolk Southern Railroad’s 123-acre Lambert’s Point, which sits directly across the Elizabeth River from Portsmouth Marine. A former railyard, the property enjoys the same deep-water channel and zero air-draft restrictions as PMT. Ideal for offshore wind, believes Miller, Lambert’s Point and PMT both benefit from Norfolk’s long tradition of shipbuilding and ship repair.

“The shipbuilding industry is still the main industry on the waterfront here until offshore wind really takes

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off,” Miller tells Site Selection. “And that’s why it’s such a nice marriage of the two. It’s just a question of resources and trying to balance that between the needs of shipbuilding and offshore wind, and hopefully they can be symbiotic here and not competitive.

There’ll be some competition,” Miller anticipates, “but one should make the other stronger in my mind.”

The Lambert’s Point project has taught the veteran dockhand Miller much about the complexities of the offshore wind industry, a sector that includes more than 600 job titles. Who knew, for example, that there’s a team that installs a “bubble curtain” around drilling areas to protect the aural sensibilities of whales?

“I am amazed at the number of companies that need to be located

here for offshore wind installation, and the myriad reasons that they need to be here,” Miller marvels. “There are guys that do the blades. There are guys that do the turbines, guys that do the towers, the transition pieces. And everyone has a different company, a different specialty, and they all need to be on the waterfront.”

Long after Dominion’s CVOW goes online — not to mention the ambitious Avangrid wind project off Kitty Hawk, North Carolina — those billions of dollars’ worth of offshore wind assets will need to be tended to on a massive scale. Other offshore farms will materialize. Which is to say that this is not an industry that’s likely to pitch its tent and then bolt. Once they’re dug in, those big wind machines aren’t going anywhere.

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In Search of the “Blue Green” Model Around Hampton Roads, offshore wind is the paradigm for a far-flung regional project to engage the dominant

We realize that we have this amazing array of assets.”

— Nancy Grden, Executive Director, Hampton Roads Maritime Collaborative for Growth

maritime, or “blue” economy, with the surging potential of the nascent “green” revolution. “Where the blue economy meets the green economy,” does sound like a great idea. But what does it mean in practice? And could Hampton Roads

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be the model for that, too?

Virginia Offshore Wind Landing, a blossoming community in downtown Norfolk, offers entrepreneurs an entry point into the offshore wind industry.

Partners include Virginia Energy, Old Dominion University’s OpenSeas Technology Innovation Hub and the Hampton Roads Alliance. Since its launch less than a year ago, Virginia Offshore Wind Landing has not only hosted some  companies, but also has established itself as a hive of potential insiders.

“It’s become a place,” says Doug Smith, president & CEO of the Hampton Roads Alliance, “where if somebody is going to have an important conversation about offshore wind in the region, they end up there.”

Established shortly before the onset of the pandemic, the institutionally funded Hampton Roads Maritime Collaborative for Growth (HRMC) is among the most visible of a slew of regional partnerships devoted to promoting blue/green synergy.

“We’re talking a lot about this,” says HRMC executive director Nancy Grden, “because it does bring together the fact that we have these waterrelated assets. And we’re also committed to resilience and reducing our carbon footprint.

So, as a region, maybe we have the opportunity to bring those together.”

The Navy. Offshore wind.

Resilience against a rising sea.

These, believes Grden — also executive director at the Strome Entrepreneurial Center at Old Dominion University — are the pillars of that economy.

“Resilience is absolutely one of our verticals,” Grden says.

“It’s not just building more walls and installing more sensors, but looking at innovation.

Resilience can benefit from data analytics, advanced systems, cybersecurity and so on. It’s all part of taking a look at this in a big, major way.

“This region,” Grden believes, “is unlike any other. We recognize that we really have this amazing array of assets and opportunities to promote growth, but also to focus on innovation. Very often,” she believes, “these industries are thought of as gray, not very exciting. But there’s quite a lot of room to maneuver. A lot of room for innovation.”

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HAMPTON ROADS INTELLIGENCE REPORT | WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

Base Commitment Military veterans and higher education combine to differentiate the Hampton Roads workforce.

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hen it comes to supplying a steady stream of outstanding talent, Hampton Roads enjoys an advantage that might be singular. Each year, anywhere from , to , veterans retire from the region’s Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard installations, according to Shawn Avery, president and CEO of Hampton Roads Workforce Council.

For smarts, energy and leadership, these seekers of second careers and retirement gigs are among the cream of the crop.

“I love veterans. I wish I could hire every one of them,” says BillErmatinger, executive vice president and chief human resources officer for Huntington

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Ingalls, the massive military shipbuilder headquartered in Newport News.

Nearly % of HII’s Hampton Roads staff boast military roots. “You don’t have to teach veterans about leadership,” Ermatinger says. “They already get it.”

In Nov. , Avery’s group opened the Hampton Roads region’s second Veterans Employment Center. The new jobs hub in Newport News assists veterans in resume building, interviewing skills, making contacts and assessing educational options. Virginia’s Smithfield Foods covered the cost of the center and announced plans to hire , veterans by .

“We have one of the largest concentrations of military personnel in the world,” says Avery, noting that vets

are known to have been targeted by scammers. “We’ve heard about people charging $ to supposedly help with a resume. We don’t do any of that. It’s all free. We’ll help you get placed.”

If people are the jet fuel, then higher education in Hampton Roads is the engine of workforce development. More than , students at any given time are enrolled in close to a dozen colleges and universities in the region.

Site Selection spoke in February with the eminent presidents of William & Mary, Old Dominion University and Tidewater Community College. The former is the region’s oldest college, and the latter two are the largest by enrollment.

Katherine Rowe President, William & Mary

People think of William & Mary as an ivy-clad bastion of the arts and sciences. Does that picture need an update?

How does your background as a Shakespeare scholar inform your efforts to promote entrepreneurship?

Katherine Rowe: Research at William & Mary is not something that’s new. I think we’re being recognized newly for some things that we’ve done for a really long time that have become really powerful. We have conducted exceptional and relevant research for decades, and we are unusual in the degree to which we involve undergraduates in that research. What has shifted over time is that we’re taking a “whole institution” approach to thinking about combining the very best of that top research university with the breadth of the arts and sciences.

Rowe: In the theater, it’s all about resourcefulness. It’s about adapting to unpredictable, contingent conditions with the resources that you have and being very, very efficient. It’s about listening to your audience to understand what’s landing. Well, that’s exactly what entrepreneurs do. They’re resourceful.

They are adaptive. They listen to their market to understand how they need to evolve.

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Brian O. Hemphill President, Old Dominion University

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One of your first major projects since becoming president in 2021 is the ODU Maritime Initiative.

That would suggest that it’s a high priority for you and the school. What do you hope to achieve through the initiative?

home and brand for maritime innovation in Hampton Roads.

Brian Hemphill: The ODU Maritime Initiative, which was announced last fall, will both coordinate and grow the University’s maritime-related degree and certificate programs, talent development, entrepreneurship, research and innovation. To chart a clear course for this important work, we are developing a series of pathways, including a national hub for autonomous systems; a maritime small business innovation collaborative; a Department of Defense center of excellence for naval sustainment and mission engineering; and a sustainable

Hemphill: We are specifically focused on developing new partnerships and expanding current partnerships around data science, healthcare and maritime.

Additionally, the university is nationally known for research in coastal resilience, modeling and simulation, bio electrics, port logistics, maritime engineering and cybersecurity. The university is proud to be a key academic research partner for the Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory and NASA-Langley Research Center.

In what other sectors does Old Dominion have workforce development partnerships?

You have about 27,000 students currently enrolled. What are the most popular courses of study at Tidewater Community College?

Marcia Conston President, Tidewater Community College

Marcia Conston: Our most popular courses are in the health care fields. Information technology and cybersecurity are very big majors, as well. We also have skilled trades, and with our being right here in the shipping area, that includes things like advanced welding, electrical and plumbing. A lot of our instructors come from the shipyard, and we also have a lot of instructors with military backgrounds.

Are you a proponent of imparting “soft skills” in the classroom?

Conston: Soft skills can make or break a person in the workplace. We can always train a person to do the job, but the crucial component is to have the ability to navigate the workforce.

That’s by working well with their peers, showing up on time and knowing how to interact with their supervisors. We are embedding soft skills throughout our curriculum. We are very focused on that.

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HAMPTON ROADS INTELLIGENCE REPORT | HBCUS

The Power of Historically Black Universities At Norfolk State, confidence is key.

G A pilot program will send Norfolk State business students to Wall Street.

Courtesy of Norfolk State University

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lenn Carrington succeeded so well professionally that, after a lengthy career in law and finance, he purchased a home in the tony South Florida enclave of Palm Beach Gardens with the intent of retiring. That was five years ago. A week later, Carrington got a call from his alma mater, Norfolk State University. Would he consider accepting the deanship of the NSU School of Business?

“I said, ‘Not really,’ ” Carrington recalls, “because I’d just bought this house and planned to be a snowbird. But I hung up the phone, and I realized I had to do this. When I thought about it, I wouldn’t have had the option of owning a place in Virginia and a place in Florida if it weren’t for Norfolk State. I owe so much to this university.”

His father, Carrington recalls, held a seventhgrade education and was “brilliant.” Carrington

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went to Norfolk State on a basketball scholarship.

Academically, he skated through without apparent dedication or direction. He thought he might like to manage a grocery store.

But in the halls of Norfolk State, Carrington found the support, as he tells it, of mentors who recognized within him a well of latent talent and encouraged him to pursue a more ambitious agenda, one that sent him to law school at the University of Virginia. A job at a legal firm led to a leadership position at the IRS and senior roles at the accounting firms Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young, where he served on the executive board and authored a book on mergers and acquisitions. He is a two-time recipient of the Tax Excellence Award given by the National Bar Association’s Tax Section.

Dean of the NSU business school since 2017, Carrington imparts lessons he has learned in life

and business to some 700 business students, most of whom attend the university on financial aid.

NSU is one of two Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Hampton Roads, the other being Hampton University, sometimes known as “the Black Harvard.” Carrington’s zeal for his mission at NSU is infectious, as this recent conversation with Site Selection demonstrates.

How have you drawn upon your career successes to differentiate the educational experience at NSU’s School of Business?

Glenn Carrington: I have a program here called First Day Ready. So, when you hit the streets upon graduation, when you have your first job, you know what is expected of you on day one and how to get it done. You know from the very start that you’ve got to be exceptional. That’s the attitude that we’re trying to promote here, and it’s done wonders for us. We have established partnerships with around 50 companies that want our graduates.

In terms of how we approach training our students, there’s an academia part and an experience part.

You put them both together, and you’ve got one solid graduate.

How else do you help to guide your students into the professional world?

Carrington: As one example, we have just entered

into a partnership agreement with Supernova Consulting to create a program called Supernova Consulting Scholars. They’re going to take five of our best students each year and put them on Wall Street. They’re being exposed to Wall Street as finance majors. We are all so excited about this, because African Americans don’t often get a chance to work on Wall Street. Now the sky is the limit for these students. Supernova Consulting is using Norfolk State as a test case, because they recognize the will that we have here, the will to succeed. These students are high achievers, and so we put the pedal to the metal with them, put them under some pressure and put them in a competitive position where they have a chance to succeed.

For aspiring Black professionals, what are some of the advantages of an HBCU education?

Carrington: We think that HBCUs and this HBCU in particular are very powerful and have the recipe for you to succeed. Our tuition rates are about onethird less or one-half of what other schools charge.

More important, we offer a stable, safe, nurturing environment, especially for low-income and firstgeneration students. If you come to us and you’re a little behind in say, your writing skills or whatever, we will put together a package to make sure you advance your skills and become better. Something that’s so very important for African Americans is

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When I started here, I think I slept through most of my classes. But by the time I left I was making all A’s. It’s a powerful experience that charges you up for life. It can change the direction of people, as it did for me. If I hadn’t come here, I’d be working at the grocery store.

HBCUs are powerful because they know how to reach their target audience.

How do you see the mission of HBCUs evolving?

Glenn Carrington changed plans to accept a Norfolk State deanship. “I had to,” he says.

Courtesy of Norfolk State University

to have your confidence up. This university will help you to build your confidence. That is a critical element in learning to fight through the bad times and take constructive feedback.

You speak of power. Where does that power come from?

Carrington: You can take somebody who comes here and maybe they’re not really prepared, and they can be flipped. They can be changed. I was part of that change. I was part of that power.

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Carrington: Right now, the huge thing is cost. The cost of an education is escalating so much that you can’t sustain it unless you can get financial aid. We have got to find ways to raise money to enable these students to get an education, because that’s the only way we can keep up. It’s the only way that we can keep our programs up to speed. Another important thing is that majority schools are not for everybody. They don’t have the ability to reach back and give somebody the extra help they might need. A lot of successful African Americans tell me they wish they had started at an HBCU. To help find yourself, sometimes you need coaching, and we can deliver that. The support team you gain here will be with you for the rest of your life. And there’s nothing more valuable than that.

HAMPTON ROADS INTELLIGENCE REPORT | INFRASTRUCTURE

The Port of Virginia has succeeded where others have fallen short during the pandemic.

Photo courtesy of Port of Virginia

Where the Waters Meet Only Hampton Roads enjoys connectivity like this.

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f we took ports for granted before the pandemic — and, yes, many of us sort of did — well, we don’t anymore. Among the growing ranks of those who follow these things acutely are those who would say that that the embattled U.S. supply chain owes a solid to the Port of Virginia, which has run more smoothly and with fewer freeway-style pileups than some of its East Coast rivals.

“We had a record ,” says Port of Virginia CEO and Executive Director Stephen Edwards. “We handled % more business, and we handled it well.”

That same serene coastline that’s amenable to the ports and the Navy, to shipbuilding and repair and offshore wind industries, is one of three end points for high-speed commercial fiber cables that link North America to Europe, South America and soon,

Africa. It’s an arrangement born largely of geography, as the other two transatlantic U.S. links are New York and Miami. Hampton Roads is right in the middle, a real good thing should something happen.

Economic development officials see these cables as leverageable assets.

“It helps us create an organic link on the other side of the Atlantic,” says Patrick Duhaney, city manager for Virginia Beach, the most populous city not only in Hampton Roads but in the state of Virginia.

“This cable gives us a starting point for conversation with folks in Spain,” Duhaney tells Site Selection. “In the past year,” he says, “we’ve gotten three Spanish companies to set up corporate headquarters here in Virginia Beach.”

A related, cross-jurisdictional plan for a -mile, -strand “fiber ring” SITE SELECTION

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Portsmouth Marine Terminal Courtesy of Port of Virginia

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has cemented a mold of cooperation among the cities of Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk and Virginia Beach. Their shared vision is to use high-speed data transfer to transform Coastal Virginia into one of the most innovative and connected regions in the nation.

“We agreed that we should come together to take advantage of these transatlantic pipes coming in,” says Susan Vitale, a Chesapeake City Council member and driving force behind the effort.

“Being the digital port of the Mid Atlantic, we decided that we would start with the five southside cities closest to the pipes to build the backbone of our fiber optic ring. That’s phase one, and then moving on to future phases we can expand the ring beyond that to our sister cities, both north and west of us on the peninsula. We’ll be setting ourselves up for a lot of opportunities.”

The Hampton Roads vision is all about opportunities. Keep an eye out.

These folks are finding their way.