DANVILLE, Va. – Work is underway on the site of the Microporous development in Pittsylvania County. The battery company is promising to invest more than $1 billion dollars and add more than 2,000 jobs to the community.
It took decades of work to get Danville and Pittsylvania County to the point where it could attract even the promise of a billion-dollar investment, according to economic development officials.
“The state of the economy was very much in disarray. We had lost a lot of jobs in tobacco, textiles, and ,furniture,” said Linda Green, executive director of the Southern Virginia Regional Alliance. “So the region as a whole had suffered. We had gone through NAFTA … so a lot of industries had moved international.”
Green said the turnaround began with a focus on training workers and determining what the region had to offer. That includes programs like GO TEC, which expose middle school students to careers like advanced manufacturing, machining, and health care.
“They focused their attention and said how do we move forward? How do we train our workers for better jobs, for better pay? What are our niches,” Green said.
Leaders settled on sectors that included advanced manufacturing and engineering. They also collaborated on sites like Cane Creek Centre and Ringgold East Industrial Park.
“We have more certified sites than most of the rest of the state and that means a commitment, a commitment in counties that aren’t wealthy that made a strategic commitment to prepare our workers, prepare our sites and make sure that when an industry walks through, they see we want them. We know they’ll make a difference,” Green said.
That’s led by 34 new companies, and 36 expansions by existing companies, with a total of 8,081 jobs.
Danville has seen the bulk of that growth and is slowly reversing a decades-long declining population, according to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia.
“As we all know, industry wants to locate where the well of talent is, and we’ve been able to showcase that the well of talent is in Southern Virginia,” said Corrie Bobe, director of economic development and tourism for the City of Danville.
She said the focus now is turning toward planning for a future with more residents while maintaining and improving quality of life.
“We’ve seen so much growth in our River District, but we’re looking beyond the River District as well, looking at other historic districts, our parks,” she said. “There’s been significant investment within our public school system … so ensuring that this is a community that residents and companies will thrive in.”