“We’re building from the ground up here,” says Mike Shadler, Pacifi c Life’s vice president of Lynchburg operations.
Pacific Life will invest $4 million
INNOVATE CREATE SUCCEED
and hire approximately 300 employees, including insurance case managers, under- writers, IT experts, business analysts and HR specialists during the next two years as the business grows. The goal, Shadler says, is to be able to process 100,000 term policies by early 2018 and process another 100,000 policies every year after that. Other new businesses have also
moved into the region. Meat processor Seven Hills Food redeveloped a century- old, 40,000-square-foot facility in Lynch- burg and expects to have more than 40 employees within the next three years. Bedford also will get its first brewery
when Beale’s Brewery & BBQ, a project by Petersburg-based developer Dave McCormack, opens a production facility, taproom and restaurant next summer. “We will sell to grocery stores and any- where you can buy packaged beer, and we plan to be in both the Lynchburg and Roanoke markets,” McCormack says.
Taking stock and rebuilding The region’s redoubled effort to
DISCOVER IN VIRGINIA’S FIRST TECHHIRE COMMUNITY.
collaborate more effectively is in part a response to a period of local economic turbulence. The area has lost more than 2,500 jobs in recent years, including 1,000 in 2016, according to Alliance officials. The insurer Nationwide closed its
opportunitylynchburg.com 72 JANUARY 2017
Lynchburg office as part of a larger con- solidation effort in 2015, resulting in the loss of 300 jobs. The Timken Co., which makes transmissions, power trains and other engine parts, is relocating its Alta- vista operations to another plant in North Carolina, a decision affecting 125 jobs.
Areva Inc., the France-based nuclear
energy giant and one of Lynchburg’s largest employers, trimmed its payroll by 50 positions in 2016, the latest in a series of adjustments the company has implemented in response to decreasing industry demand. Denise Woernle, Areva’s vice
president of communications, says the company is diversifying its portfolio of products and services. Areva’s Lynchburg-based Opera-
tional Center of Excellence for Nuclear Products and Services recently developed a more cost-efficient maintenance technique called “cavitation preening,” as well as the most comprehensive nuclear testing facility in North America, which allows the company to more reliably support the long-term operation of the existing nuclear reactor fleet. No one in the region has had it
tougher than Amherst County. Two years ago the county was bracing for the loss of its largest employer, Central Vir- ginia Training Center — scheduled to shut down by 2020 — when Sweet Briar College, its second largest employer, announced it would close. “The com- bined job loss of nearly 1,500 [positions] represented about 25 percent of all jobs in Amherst County, and it was going to create a huge negative loss of economic activity,” says Victoria Hanson, executive director of the Amherst County Eco- nomic Development Authority. The college was saved through a
Herculean effort by devoted alumnae, regional businesses and the local govern- ment, but the incident galvanized the community. “There’s nothing like a scare
Photo by Jill Nance Waugh
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