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On January 3, 2005, Marine Staff Sergeant John Jones was leading his platoon in a convoy on his second combat tour in Iraq when a double-stack anti-tank mine exploded under his vehicle. The thunderous blast blew him 25 feet into the air and when the dust settled, Jones had been severely injured. He had lost both his legs below the knee and his career in the Marine Corps.

He spent the next two years in rehab at Brooke Army Medical Center and the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio, Texas. He was medically discharged in 2007 after 12 years in the Marine Corps. At age 30, he faced the challenge of starting a new career in a civilian world he left right after high school.

That was 10 years ago. When I met him four years ago, I learned that he had not only found that new career, but also was using his Marine training and the skills he had acquired since leaving the corps to help other veterans making that same challenging transition.

Barring any special meeting circumstances, Aug. 8 was City Manager Mark Haley’s last meeting in City Council chambers as the top administration. During Council proceedings they honored Haley reading a proclamation of his accomplishments and going on record expressing their appreciation.
Haley has worked in the City of Hopewell for 38 years. As he will tell it, he wondered into the city working the graveyard shift at the Wastewater Renewal Facility (now the Hopewell Water Renewal facility) where he eventually became and worked as the director for 34 years.

The state of U.S. manufacturing is a hot topic in national economic and political conversations today. Issues like tax reform, trade partnerships and regulations are fueling a national debate over how to create and retain U.S. manufacturing investment and jobs. Though a favorable business and tax climate is important to manufacturers, the most critical factor leading to location decisions for new investment and jobs is actually the labor market.

Thanks to technology advancements, manufacturing operations are much more automated today than they were decades ago. As a result, high-tech production processes that rely less on manual labor have made it possible to consider new investment in the U.S. over low-cost labor markets in countries like China. Automated production does not equate to zero jobs; instead it means that operations need more skilled labor in order to operate, maintain and retool technologically advanced equipment.

A 10-year evaluation of Virginia’s Gateway Region has found that the economic development group is among the best in the nation.

Sustained Impact of Boston, Massachusetts, an independent evaluator fully funded by the Cameron Foundation recently completed the study. The in-depth study was conducted to thoroughly examine the VGR’s practices and procedures and construct a benchmark of the organization’s effects on economic development compared to other economic development groups across the nation.

The study stated that the VGR had “undergone dramatic transformation over the past decade” effectively becoming a global outreach vehicle for the region. The International Economic Development Council, the largest global non-profit membership organization of its kind based out of Washington, D.C., has developed the most widely accepted standard of best practice guidelines for the industry. The Sustained Impact study determined that the VGR has utilized many of these practices.

Governor Terry McAuliffe announced Monday that, through the New Economy Workforce Credentials Grant program, Virginia’s Community Colleges provided workforce training that enabled 2,173 Virginians to secure industry-recognized credentials, licenses, and certifications needed for high-demand careers, in the first year of the grant program. Governor McAuliffe awarded the 2,172nd and 2,173rd credentials at an event commemorating this achievement this afternoon.

This milestone nearly triples the number of people who were credentialed last year, bringing the total to 4,268 Virginians. More than half of the credential earners, 2,173, took advantage of the New Economy Workforce Credentials Grant program. Training for the remaining 2,095 credentials was funded by employers, federal grants, or other private sources.

Fort Lee will be hosting a series of events today and tomorrow to celebrate its birth 100 years ago.

The majority of events will occur on Monday, including a Centennial Celebration at 11 a.m. at Williams Stadium. The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature the Black Daggers parachute demonstration team, Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps and the final mile of a 100-mile run through local communities.

But while the celebration is now, the history of Fort Lee stretches back a century. In 1917, in order to prepare soldiers for World War I, the Army turned what was largely vacant land into Camp Lee. It was one of just 32 camps that was build to train soldiers for World War I.

After months of anticipation, the Boathouse at City Point will open to the public Saturday night, with all hands on deck.

“The Hopewell community created this restaurant with our partnership,” said Paige Healy of the HOUSEpitality Family Restaurant Group, the company that owns and operates the four regional Boathouse restaurants.

First floated two years ago, the idea of opening the Boathouse at City Point didn’t gather significant steam until last summer, when the city of Hopewell brokered a multipart deal with its Economic Development Authority, owner of the former Navigator’s Den restaurant Haralambos Papanicolaou and Boathouse originator Kevin Healy.

Southern ports are experiencing a record foreign trade boom thanks in part to an expanded Panama Canal that permits Asian cargo ships to reach them more easily.

Georgia Ports Authority and the Port of Virginia, which include the nation’s fourth and fifth largest ranked by volume, respectively, each moved the most cargo they have ever handled in May. The two ports posted more than 10 percent year-over-year volume growth for the month.

A new era of international trade is underway on the U.S. East Coast, and the Port of Virginia is well-positioned to cement its position as the mid-Atlantic’s true global gateway.

In early May, the port welcomed the COSCO Development, the largest containership to ever come to the East Coast. A few weeks later an even larger vessel, the OOCL France, eclipsed the COSCO Development’s record. And so the big ship era at the Port of Virginia is underway.

These two ships are the first of a new generation of ultra-large container vessels to come to the East Coast. These mammoth ships are fitting symbols of the important role that international commerce and trade play in the Virginia and the national economy.

Millennials are moving to America’s cities — and not just the biggest ones. While places like New York City and Los Angeles remain millennial magnets, research from the Urban Land Institute shows that smaller cities, from Virginia Beach, Va., to Riverside, Calif., are actually seeing the most relative growth in their population of 25-to-34-year-olds.

Virginia Beach’s uptick in millennials — a 16% increase from 2010 to 2015 in the metro area — is no surprise to Bryan Stephens, president of the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce, which includes Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Newport News. Several years ago, Stephens’ department asked local millennials what would make the region a more attractive place to live, work and raise a family. In response to the survey’s results, the city has focused on extending a Norfolk light rail, which launched in 2011, as well as developing new restaurants and revamping city centers. “All of that has been deliberately evolved over the past few years,” Stephens says. (Virginia Beach has also earned a reputation for being an attractive home for retirees too.)