Prince George
County, VA

GO Virginia at crossroads as Tom Farrell succeeds Dubby Wynne as head of state-financed initiative


Three years after its creation, GO Virginia is approaching a crossroads with a new leader and pressure to show a return on the state’s investment in a different kind of economic development initiative.

Dominion Energy CEO Tom Farrell was re-elected chairman of the state GO Virginia board of directors on Tuesday, less than a month after he first replaced Virginia Beach business executive John “Dubby” Wynne, who resigned the leadership job in mid-August.

“I appreciate your confidence,” Farrell told members of a board that includes business leaders, state legislators and Cabinet secretaries. “I wished somebody else had raised their hand.” 

Wynne’s departure as GO Virginia chairman came less than six months after his resignation from a state-financed higher education research committee that also was created in 2016, as then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe and General Assembly leaders looked for new ways to jump-start a state economy that relied too heavily on federal defense spending.

Farrell has been a leader of the Virginia Growth and Opportunity Board from the beginning. The state already has committed about $70 million to the initiative over four years.

It will be up to Gov. Ralph Northam and a newly elected General Assembly to decide on how much more money to devote to GO Virginia in the next two-year state budget.

“The results are there,” the new chairman said after the board meeting on Tuesday at the Capitol. “GO Virginia is itself a startup — it just started giving out money a year ago.”

The board has approved $20.8 million in grants for 60 projects in nine regions, including seven in a region that includes the Richmond and Tri-Cities areas and extends through Southside to the North Carolina border. Those projects also are backed by $33.3 million in matching funds but only $3.4 million of the state money has actually been spent.

Those projects are expected to create 10,000 jobs and more than 400 internships, said Vice Chairman Ben Davenport, a Pittsylvania County business executive. He also leads a GO Virginia task force for investing in development of broadband telecommunications networks for some 600,000 Virginians who lack access. 

“The board has made great strides in outlining concepts to aid the regional councils and their leaders to develop additional projects that will have a lasting impact on the regions as well as the economy of Virginia as a whole,” Davenport said before the board approved a new policy on broadband investments.

But some regional councils are pushing GO Virginia to change its guidelines to broaden its investments, especially in proposed efforts to expand Virginia’s “tech talent pipeline” to include computer education from kindergarten through fifth grade, rather than just at the middle and high school levels.

“It is an immersion project, teaching computational thinking and computer sciences in every subject and every grade,” said former Del. Tom Rust, a Fairfax County Republican who is chairman of the Region 7 council in Northern Virginia. 

The Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads regions asked for $5 million this year to finance the Virginia K-12 Computer Science Pipeline Project, but ran afoul of GO Virginia guidelines that focus on a more immediate return on investment and help for employers who need high-tech talent. The program proposed to eliminate money for K-5 education.

Farrell said the board plans a special meeting with regional council leaders on Dec. 9 to talk about potential changes to GO Virginia guidelines that focus on creating jobs in the near term, not in elementary school computer science programs that would require a long wait for a return on investment.

“We want to make sure the commonwealth’s money is well-spent and it gets a good return,” he said.

Others applauded the K-12 concept, but said it would require more money to implement statewide than the board has to spend and suggested that the proper way to pay for it would be through the state budget for education. “There’s going to be tremendous competition for limited funding,” Secretary of Commerce and Trade Brian Ball said.

Legislative leaders say they remain committed to GO Virginia, which has had the less measurable benefit of encouraging localities and regions to cooperate on economic development instead of competing against one another.

“I’ve heard it everywhere,” House Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, said after the meeting. “The projects are nice, the incentive money is nice, but for the first time in forever, we see these regions working together.”

 
mmartz@timesdispatch.com

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