As I listen to more and more of the candidates running for Town Council, I become more and more convinced that business is the future of Blacksburg, not the University. And I mean that in a good way, for both Tech and the Town. Blacksburg is a college town, and will always be a college town. Having a nationally ranked football team has been good for Tech and good for the town, including town businesses.
But the university has been struggling with budget cuts for years, and is now looking at another round of 15% budget cuts. Meanwhile, out in the CRC business park, more than 200 businesses employ over 2200 people--in total, more jobs than the entire university. And many of those businesses are fast growing, high tech enterprises that are hiring.
It was great to hear Krisha Chachra, one of the candidates for Town Council, talk about the need for more options for growing businesses. Blacksburg has a shortage of Class A office space--Rackspace (formerly MailTrust) is renting street level retail space because there is not a single building in Blacksburg that can accommodate their size. Ditto for Modea, which has to split their operations between two locations in town. The CRC has done a fantastic job of facilitating the growth of business in Blacksburg, but they can't do it all. One of the ideas that came up last night was putting some Class A office space on North Main, up near Moog or in that vicinity.
I'm concerned that too many of the Council candidates seem to think "business" in Blacksburg means nothing more than retail--t-shirts and pizza. Those businesses are vital to Blacksburg, but the minimum wage jobs in those businesses are not what is going to attract and retain young business professionals. The professional businesses in the CRC and other parts of the community are creating low impact, good paying jobs that are environmentally friendly. If a sustainable and environmentally thoughtful economy is what we want in Blacksburg, business is a big part of the future.
