When it comes to bringing high-paying jobs to James City County, the challenge is finding the right space for companies that offer them to operate.
Creating high-paying jobs was at the heart of a discussion among county staff and members of the James City County Planning Commission on Thursday about economic development in the county for the next 20 years.
Much of the conversation’s energy was directed toward bringing such jobs to the county to reap the benefits they provide: a way to lure young people to the county and a boost in tax revenue for the county’s coffers.
Some members of the planning commission encouraged economic development officials to look at bringing in research, medical and high-tech companies to the county as a way to create more jobs with high salaries.
“I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” said James City County Economic Development Authority Member Tom Tingle of those sectors of the economy. “We probably need to give ourselves a reality check. We don’t have a research university in our backyard or a medical center like Sentara Norfolk [General Hospital] or Riverside [Regional Medical Center]. We need to look at what we can be when we grow up from a reality standpoint.”
That means looking at industrial companies and manufacturing, a sector of the economy that James City County Office of Economic Development Director Russell Seymour said is doing “surprisingly well” in manufacturing compared to elsewhere in Hampton Roads.
Existing manufacturing businesses looking to relocate or new businesses looking to open for the first time want to minimize their expenses. In most cases, it is cheapest for these businesses to move their operations to existing buildings, bypassing the often lengthy process to receive approval to build on undeveloped land and then wait for the construction to occur, Seymour said.
But there is a dearth of these buildings — typically 50,000 to 100,000 square feet — leaving the county at a disadvantage to other municipalities with a larger stock of these structures. Of the vacant space that could house a manufacturing or other industrial operation, 13 percent of the available buildings are larger than 10,000 square feet, said James City County Zoning Administrator Jason Purse.
The existing industrial and business parks in the county are almost all full, Seymour said.
“There are not many if any real open buildings that are vacant,” he said. “That’s something we’re going to have to address moving forward. We’re a destination businesses would like to locate to.”
The lack of those types of buildings means that even though the county is close to the Port of Virginia and the international connections it affords, businesses looking to relocate to the U.S. from overseas look to other markets with less infrastructure costs associated with starting operations, Seymour said.
Private investors that could come in and build a large structure with the hope it would be rented or sold to a company looking for space are still skittish from the years of the recession, when several such buildings in Hampton Roads did not work out as expected and cost their investors money, Seymour said.
The county is also facing the impending end of its enterprise zone, a state-created tool that provides benefits to industrial businesses looking to relocate at no cost to the county. The state only allows a limited number of enterprise zones at any one time.
The zone has been in place in part of the county since 1996 — Seymour said Thursday the zone was responsible for about $23 million of new or planned development and around 370 jobs — but is slated to expire at the end of 2015, which removes a tool from the county’s ability to compete with other municipalities to attract the type of business that generates high-paying jobs.
A bid by the three Historic Triangle municipalities to become a regional enterprise zone was shot down by state regulators last year. The county is applying again to snag one of the five enterprise zones soon to expire and should find out if it has again received the designation sometime before 2015.
Along with attracting better jobs to the county, some of the commissioners asked about solutions for empty retail space in the county.
“Retailers are like sheep, they follow each other,” said Elizabeth Friel, a member of a group of planning commissioners and citizens working toward enshrining the county’s goals for the next 20 years. In Williamsburg Crossing, which has suffered from a lack of tenants for several years, many businesses that once existed there relocated to New Town.
Friel said she has heard from citizens who think retail is overbuilt in James City County, and that the service sector is creating new employment but that “those aren’t always the best paying jobs.”
Seymour said many people in the county go north or south to shop elsewhere on the weekends, and figuring out which retailers to bring here to keep those shoppers in the county “is something we need to take a look at.”
The purpose of Thursday’s discussion was to analyze the economic development portion of the draft update to the county’s comprehensive plan. The plan, a document which guides what direction the county should take in the next 20 years, features lengthy sections on a slew of topics including land use, transportation, parks and recreation, community character and economic development.
