Return to Virginia Business - March 2004

In Virginia’s fastest-growing region, weary commuters want local jobs

Related story:
- Making workers ready

by Marjolijn Bijlefeld
Virginia Business
March 2004

The exodus begins before 5 a.m. for many of the Fredericksburg region’s best and brightest workers. Clutching coffee mugs and the morning paper, they climb into commuter vans or carpools, or just drive alone north on crowded Interstate 95 to their jobs in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. On a typical workday, Edie Chapman brews 130 to 150 pots of coffee for the commuters who stop by the convenience store where she works, a Wawa just off I-95. “It’s what gets these commuters up and on the road,” she says.

Every weekday, about 48,000 people — nearly 40 percent of the local labor pool — commute out of the region, enduring trips that can take two hours or more on a bad day. The misery of a long commute, though, was part of the bargain. For years the adage for homebuyers was that every mile south on I-95 cut $1,000 off the price of a house. And in the past two decades this four-county region located 50 miles south of Washington has emerged as a quintessential bedroom community, a sprawling mix of new housing developments and big-box shopping centers.

This is the fastest-growing region in the state. Between 1990 and 2000 the population here shot up more than 41 percent, and today the Fredericksburg area has more than 267,000 residents. Yet so far, too few professional jobs have followed the housing and retail growth. Were it not for some of the major local employers, such as the Quantico Marine Corps Base, a 4,100-employee GEICO office in southern Stafford and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in King George County, thousands more would be joining the daily flow.

These days the region’s weary commuters are the bait dangled by local economic developers. The pitch is essentially this: Our work force is so fed up that they’ll work for you for thousands of dollars less if you bring jobs here. A survey done for the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance showed 31 percent of workers would take a $5,000 to $6,000 pay cut if they could shave a half hour each way off their commute. Another 17 percent would be willing to forego a whopping $10,000 in salary to work that much closer to home. Gene Bailey, president of the Fredericksburg Regional Alliance, says Northern Virginia employers can “do zip code checks that come right back to us. They already know where their employees are coming from.”

Not only is there an educated local work force, but also thousands commute into the region from elsewhere. Northern Virginia has become so congested “that it’s easier for someone in eastern Fairfax to get to Fredericksburg than to the Dulles Corridor,” says Fredericksburg commercial real estate agent Alex Long. “Combine the reverse commute and what’s already here, and we’re approaching our critical mass.”

What the region lacks — and what would help keep local workers at home — is a major corporate location, says Larry Silver, CEO of Silver Companies, the region’s biggest development company. Silver hopes to fill that gap with a 525-acre corporate campus that he’s developing just north of the Rappahannock River. The main road and other infrastructure will be ready in mid-year; the project will have room for 3.5 million square feet of class-A office space. While there have been no announcements yet about what companies might locate there, Silver compares it to the Innsbrook Corporate Center in Glen Allen or the Fair Lakes complex in Fairfax County. “A company that employs 200 people can pay for its entire facility just by a $5,000 reduction in salary for those workers,” he says.

To serve on the project’s board, Silver has lined up heavyweights such as Sidney Gunst, president of Innsbrook Corp. and one of its key developers. The real estate firm of CB Richard Ellis will help with the marketing. The businesses Silver wants to attract are like high-end consumers. “A Saks shopper isn’t going to go into J.C. Penney. They know they’re not going to find what they want. A quality first-class office park doesn’t exist here, so users are bypassing this area.”

Thanks to a strong military presence in the Fredericksburg region, smaller successes are taking place. Last year, an office park opened near Quantico, and the four buildings were quickly filled with defense contractors Northrop Grumman, BAE, Battelle and Lockheed Martin, says Timothy J. Baroody, Stafford County’s director of economic development. Stafford has also landed the region’s first national association headquarters — the American Traffic Safety Services Association at the Riverside Business Park in south Stafford. And, Spotsylvania County has seen 182 percent growth in small-business development between 1993 and 1998, compared to a national average of 8 percent during this time.

But for now, retail and service jobs rule. Taxable sales in the region reflect its commercial growth, rising from $1 billion in 1990 to $2.5 billion in 2002. The retailers keep coming, mostly to sites near the region’s handful of I-95 interchanges. The Silver Companies’ massive, 2.4-million-square-foot Central Park shopping center, marked by a towering sign over I-95, is adding new stores and is nearly full. In Stafford on the region’s northern edge is the new Stafford Marketplace, an 800,000-square-foot shopping center anchored by Target and Kohl’s and jammed next to I-95 along a road already crowded with strip malls.
The revenues from retail sales are welcome, but there’s some frustration that the region’s workers have already had to wait too long for better local jobs. “We definitely could have had a more beneficial and higher quality type of growth over the past generation,” says Fredericksburg Mayor Bill Beck, who was elected in 2000. Instead, the city and counties “sold ourselves too cheaply. We have the opportunity to hold out for quality, and I hope the next stage of growth isn’t just a wave of more and larger big-box stores.”

The project leading the current wave, though, isn’t like anything else in the region or the state. The Silver Companies is moving forward with its 2,100-acre Celebrate Virginia project on land next to I-95 and on both sides of the Rappahannock River. On the Stafford side of the river, work has begun on the corporate campus and three golf courses. On the Fredericksburg side, plans call for a “tourism campus” with four hotels, a conference center and former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder’s national slavery museum. A gondola over the river will join the tourism campus to the golf resort and corporate campus.

Developer Silver wants to play up the region’s proximity to the historic attractions of the entire Central Virginia region. He envisions tourists booking a several-day stay, using Fredericksburg as a base to see the local attractions and travel to Charlottesville, D.C., Williamsburg and Richmond.

While developers like Silver are happily moving dirt, commuters are struggling with congested roads. “You'll find that right now, traffic is the number one issue in the region,” says G. William Beale, president and CEO of Union Bankshares and a long-time member of the local business community. A new interchange to support the new regional airport is coming to Stafford, but it was approved before Virginia Department of Transportation funding dried up. Hoped for projects, such as a western bypass to connect Stafford to Northern Virginia, or a new I-95 interchange near the Celebrate Virginia site, are on hold. “We’re using the same river crossings they had in colonial days,” says Dick Hazel, president of Hazel Land Companies. “(Due to traffic volume) the interstate has become the local connector. The regional planning board recently shelved many future plans for transportation improvements, which I consider one of the great unrecognized tragedies of our time.”

That leaves local businesses to rely on the already crowded local roads. Fredericksburg City Council member Joe Wilson, CEO of PermaTreat Pest Control, says the bad traffic made it impossible for workers to handle scheduled monthly visits to clients. He’s trying a new approach. “We’re saying, ‘Instead of $35 a month, why not schedule service for $85 every three months?’ Our revenue takes a hit, but profitability goes up and it reduces the number of trips we have to make,” he says.

The growth and traffic issues that dominate the agenda in Spotsylvania, Stafford and the city haven’t extended to less-populated King George County to the east or Caroline County to the south. King George is home to Dahlgren and to outposts of defense contractors such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Alion Science and Technology Corp., so it is developing a high-tech reputation in a relatively rural area. It also offers an alternative approach to Washington, D.C., via U.S. 301 across the Potomac River into southern Maryland. Caroline doesn’t have the raw numbers of workers, so it counts on borrowing labor from neighboring counties as it seeks to expand its economic base. A major recent win: The Virginia State Fair chose a site in southern Caroline for its new location.
In the middle of it all is Fredericksburg, a city of about 21,000 people that draws boutique shoppers and history buffs. It used to be the center of the local economy, but today it’s giving way to the fast-growing counties. Still, it has gained from the dramatic change, says Beck, the city’s mayor. “I’m bullish on the region,” he says. “We do have a location that is phenomenal. I think we can have a good balance.”

Return to Virginia Business - March 2004