Have The Tides Turned For Buena Vista?
A growing university, a focused local government, and a successful Roanoke developer might be ushering in a new era for the city
Updated 6/19/18 at 11:58am
In a community hit hard by two floods and economic downturns over the last thirty years, Glamour Hut’s history has the resilient spirit that seems to undergird Buena Vista. When business after business closed shop or left town in the wake a devastating flood in 1985 and smaller one in 1995, the salon held steady.
“We’ve had slow times and slow days, but overall we’ve been really blessed,” said Connie Beverly, Glamour Hut’s owner.
To date, the community has never fully recovered. In recent years though, things have been changing around the salon. A vinyl lettering and graphics store, Vinyl Cuts, opened in February 2017 on the other end of the block. JJ’s Meat Shak built and opened a sister restaurant, JJ’s Shukin’ Shak, last summer down the street. When customers look out Glamour Hut’s front window, they see saplings lining Magnolia Avenue now instead of overgrown trees putting cracks in the sidewalks.
The most public change came in January 2018. Since Ed Walker announced plans to develop around a dozen properties in downtown Buena Vista, residents have speculated what the town will look like in coming years. For Beverly and Brenda Floyd, fellow stylists at Glamour Hut, they’d like to see the town more like it was in the early ’80s when the business buildings were filled with retailers: a Peebles, a drug store, an ice cream shop, a jeweler, a Ford dealership one street over. The list goes on.
“I’d love to see him make it where when you walk down here, you have trouble finding a parking spot. It used to be that way,” said Beverly.
Walker estimated they’ll have the buildings open for business in two years; it will take even longer to see the project’s impact on the town truly unfold. (Beverly and Floyd are certainly wondering how it will play out — Glamour Hut’s building was one of the Walker group’s purchases.) But between investors like Walker, Southern Virginia University’s dramatic enrollment growth, and City Council’s efforts to invite new business, the city might be on the edge of a new era.
A Growing University
Glamour Hut’s roots attest to the way the city’s and Southern Virginia University’s stories are woven together. DeeDee Moore, the founder and Beverly’s former boss, was a Mormon, and had three sisters that worked on the custodial crew at the university.
Southern Virginia is one of the city’s largest individual employers, with around 250 non-students on payroll. While many university employees moved to the area, Buena Vista and Rockbridge County natives fill positions in academics, administration, medical care, and facility services. John Sargent, Director of Facilities, says that almost all of his 25 employees live in the city, and at least half of them are native to the area. That doesn’t include the university’s use of several local contractors and subcontractors, he added.
Bob Huch, Southern Virginia’s Vice President of Finance, estimates that the university directly contributes $10 million or more to Buena Vista’s economy between salaries, benefits, and the services and products it purchases. Beyond its direct impact, the university provides a customer pool that both pays taxes to local governments and helps attract and sustain businesses.
“We live here, we shop here, we buy gas here, we go to restaurants here, and not just in Buena Vista but in Rockbridge County,” said Huch. “So the money we’re paying out to faculty, staff, and even a lot to students, that goes back into the local economy in the form of taxes, in the form of all these other retail goods and services.”
Like the city, Southern Virginia has had its ups and downs. Nine in 10 students at the university are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and when the Church lowered the age requirement for full-time missionary service in October 2011, it sparked a wave of young members applying to serve 18-month and two-year missions. While the number of full-time missionaries swelled by more than 30,000, the policy played a big role in a struggle to retain and attract students at Southern Virginia. From 2011 to 2013 fall enrollment fell by 17%.
Since then, the university has had a major turnaround. After bringing on a new president, Reed N. Wilcox, in 2014, Southern Virignia made a host of changes including a rebranding campaign, growing and adding academic and athletic programs, and a partnership with Apple — and their efforts seem to be working. Enrollment has grown 40% in last four years, and by fall 2018 it’s projected to break 1,000 students for the first time.
In April, President Wilcox announced plans for a two-building complex that will include housing, academics, and dining to accomodate the growth — which probably means more business for companies in Buena Vista.
While Huch emphasized the complexity and challenges of measuring a university’s impact on the local economy, he pointed out a simple principle about the relationship.
“One point in all this is that we all impact each other, and we should all support one another (the City, local businesses, the university, local residents, etc.). In as much as we do so, I think we all benefit,” he said in an email.
A City Inviting Business
The city seems to understand that interconnectedness too. For the last several years the local government has made a concerted effort to pave the way for business owners and investors to come and to stay.
“In order to attract business you have to put your best face forward and put your act together,” said Jay Scudder, Buena Vista’s city manager. “Companies and businesses look at what’s going on around, and if they see a jurisdiction that doesn’t have its political act together or its financial act together, it’s just not a good equation for growth and attracting business,” he said.
Scudder says the city has made a substantial effort to tighten up financially and reduce the city’s debt since 2012. They raised property taxes and waste disposal fees. They reviewed every department’s budget and cut spending. For example, in January 2014 the city council voted against continuing a policy of replacing multiple police cars every three years, saving $60,000 or more according to The Rockbridge Report.
“We kind of turned this thing around. How did that happen? Well, financially we got on our feet through a lot of hard work with city council and the finance committee and just making some tough decisions,” said Scudder.
They started cleaning up physically too. Business owners, residents, and city officials all point to recent public works projects that have made the city more attractive: updated sidewalks and new trees lining Magnolia Ave (the city’s main street), stretches of new or replaced sidewalks in other parts of the city, and a large repaved section of Beech Avenue.
The city has been working on more directed initiatives as well. In 2016 the city introduced an annual grant to help businesses provide facelifts for old storefronts downtown. There are new regulations and fines for business buildings, and the city has been meeting with business owners to encourage them to update their facilities.
Although it predates recent efforts, the flood wall makes its way into most conversations about a serious Buena Vista turnaround. Completed in 1997, it stretches three miles between the Maury River and Buena Vista. It’s stood as an important physical promise that businesses who invest here are less likely to suffer the same fate as the ones hit by the ’85 and ’95 floods.
While the town once thrived on a backbone of manufacturing companies (the sector still accounts for a third of employment), the city’s recent efforts suggest a shifting vision.
“Floods, drops in real estate values, loss of manufacturing to overseas, and other factors have changed our city. We are charged with redefining what we are and what we can be,” said councilwoman Lisa Clark according to the minutes of a City Council meeting in January 2018.
The current strategy involves business retention and finding companies to fill its unused manufacturing complexes, but city officials described a future that focuses on the community’s potential to attract more small businesses and outdoor recreation.
“We are close to the Appalachian Trail, we are close to the Blue Ridge Parkway, we have Glen Maury Park which is obviously an incredible resource with a lot of events that happen there that attract a lot of visitors,” said Rachel Moore, the city’s new Director of Economic Development and Tourism. Listing Buena Vista’s strengths, she led out with the area’s natural attractions before naming the downtown district, manufacturing, and Southern Virginia as other important pieces.
The Golf Course
The push to invest more money in the city involved a more difficult decision than budget cuts or raising taxes: diverting funds away from the Vista Links golf course, a previous attempt at economic renewal that didn’t pan out.
In 2015 Buena Vista’s govenernment opted to stop making payments to UMB, the bank that essentially loaned the city $9.2 million in 2005 to fund the new course. It was meant to bring in business, but it mostly proved to be a cash drain when it attracted few golfers and sparse housing development.
Since 2016 the city has been in a legal battle with UMB and ACA Financial Guarantee Corporation, the company that insured the municipal bonds that acted as a loan. The case hit a major milestone this February when U.S. District Court judge Norman K. Moon ruled that the city only had a moral obligation, and not a legal one, to pay up.
“There is no breach of the lease or forbearance agreements for the city’s refusal to appropriate rent payments, because the city was not legally (as opposed to morally) obligated to make those payments in the first place. All this comports with what these sophisticated parties would have understood at the time, especially against the backdrop of the Virginia Constitution’s prohibition on future financial commitments by municipalities,” said Moon in the February 8 opinion.
Despite the initial win, city officials won’t know for a while whether the gamble they took in 2015 will pay off. UMB and ACA appealed the decision in early March, but even if Judge Moon’s decision stands the companies could have a clear path to seizing the collateral agreed on in 2005: the police department’s building, city hall, and Vista Links.
The city has already taken a few hits for how they handled the payments, which amounted to defaulting on a debt. In 2014 two state financing programs denied Buena Vista funding opportunities, largely due to the situation with Vista Links. According Stephanie Hamlett, Executive Director of the Virginia Resource Authority (one of the programs that denied the city funding), the Authority would have to look at several factors — but an application from Buena Vista today would probably have the same result.
However, a local official familiar with the city’s funding efforts said that the golf course situation has made it more difficult, but far from impossible to secure funding. The city has successfully obtained money for projects in recent years, including multiple grants from the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) which helped pay for the recent public works projects around town. He added that the city has several projects on the horizon that will require significant financing, and they feel confident they will be able to get it.
A Shifting Tide?
Cameron Crowther, Executive Director of Career Development and an advancement officer at Southern Virginia, sees opportunity that trumps the challenges in Buena Vista.
Alongside a demanding career, a time-consuming volunteer position in his church, and a young family, Crowther owns three buildings in Buena Vista and is considering investing in more. When he looks at the town, he sees the convergence of the local government’s commitment to improving the economy and work with businesses, the growth of the university, and the apparent growth of retail and other businesses. For him, it’s obvious: this is an exciting time for the city.
“Anybody paying attention to BV can see that there’s potential here,” he said.
On the surface, that outlook seems to clash with the numbers. Unemployment dropped from 2010 to 2016, but household and per capita income steadily went down with it during the same period. However, both income measurements rose slightly from 2015 to 2016. It’s not clear whether that signals a turnaound, a plateau, or a pause in the downward trend.
It’s possible that Buena Vista’s economy is only a step behind Southern Virginia’s rebound. The available data, most of which stops in 2016, lags behind some important developments. Two weeks before Judge Moon declared the golf course debt a moral obligation in early February, Buena Vista was hit with electrifying news: a Roanoke developer, together with students in his real estate development class at Washington & Lee’s law school, announced a project to develop around a dozen downtown properties.
“It’s an amazing little city that’s wildly wealthy in natural resources and community spirit,” Walker told one news source in reference to the investment. “I think of it as a home town, I think of it as a school town, and as an outdoor adventure town.”
The total cost of the purchases came out at just over $1 million, and the group is expected to invest $5 million in renovations, according to WVFT. But based on what Walker and others around him are saying, the project is almost as much about building on Buena Vista’s culture and strengthening its community as it is about making a profit.
“What’s most interesting is to try to gently enter a community and listen to what they’re interested in. I think to explore the public history of a municipality is wildly interesting. To find out what the music tradition is, for example, then try to build some of that into programming,” Walker told WVTF.
The project looks particularly promising because of Walker’s track record. In 2002 he began buying and renovating properties in downtown Roanoke, and which played a key role in transforming a near-abandoned sector of the city into an urban center of housing, dining, live music and art. 10 years after he started, he was featured in the New York Times for his impact.
Walker’s announcement wasn’t unexpected, Jay Scudder told WDBJ7— cultivating a relationship with the developer was part of the city’s efforts in recent years to bring more business and customers downtown.
Cameron Crowther, who is familiar with the project, emphasized that Walker and his group aren’t the only ones bringing in business.
“There’s a lot of people investing in this area. Ed’s the largest, but there are a lot of developers buying homes quietly. There are a lot of buildings changing hands quietly. There’s more than a few people involved in this effort. And that is encouraging,” he said.
Local attorney and city council member Steve Baldridge told the same story. His firm, Jones & Baldridge, has handled an increasing number of real estate transactions every year since 2015.
Walker seems to have both joined and further propelled the rising tide of investors, though. Rachel Moore said she fields calls weekly from both locals and outsiders interested in doing business in Buena Vista.
“I’ve really seen a change in energy from what was described before with Ed Walker’s announcement. People seem excited to try things and at least check us out,” she said.
