By Jenalia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 30, 2005
More than a decade ago, Prince William County leaders looked past the tall grass, grazing horses and abandoned barns on a large patch of farmland just west of Manassas and envisioned an office park filled with high-tech companies.
The project, now called Innovation at Prince William, has not worked out quite the way they imagined. More than a third of the park's 1,500 acres are still vacant. Flashy high-tech companies came and went with the dot-com bust. Some of the park's major businesses -- a cable company's call center, a promised plant to make insulin -- fall short of the "cutting-edge education and technologies" center that county consultants once described.
"The expectation of what would be there over time has changed," said County Executive Craig S. Gerhart.
Yet officials and local business leaders say Innovation at Prince William reached a turning point with the federal government's recent decision to move a major FBI facility and its 300 employees from Tysons Corner and other locations to a new building at the park.
"The FBI is going to kind of raise the bar," said John Schofield, marketing and research director for the county's economic development department. "That's the sure sign that Innovation has arrived."
Getting to this stage wasn't easy. The project has been buffeted and reshaped by a succession of regional and national economic forces. In 2001 alone, Prince William County officials said, they revamped their marketing strategy for the office park four times as the tech meltdown was followed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Longtime Prince William County residents fondly remember their children playing on what was once "Granny Hersch's farm." The purple pumpkin painted on its silo was a local landmark until Mabel Hersch's descendants sold the land to a private owner. The county eventually bought the property.
More than 20 years ago, civic leaders saw the Hersch farm and neighboring property as a prime prospect for economic development because it was accessible to Interstate 66, bordered by a railroad line and close to a regional airport. They thought the area would become an industrial corridor with blue-collar jobs in a rural county that was becoming a bedroom community of subdivisions and strip shopping centers.
"Back then, that's how people thought of jobs," said Michael R. Vanderpool of Manassas law firm Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian PC.
By the mid-1990s, the county had white-collar jobs in mind.
In 1994, the county transferred 124 acres that had been donated to George Mason University for a Prince William campus that would specialize in information technology and biotechnology. County leaders hoped the campus would be a magnet for technology companies eager to hire its students and collaborate with the school's researchers.
Also that year, American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit biological research organization, announced plans to move from Rockville to Prince William County because it needed more space.
Several states competed for the laboratory that grows cells and sells them to government, private sector and academic researchers, but American Type Culture Collection selected Prince William, in part because of more than $6 million in incentives offered by the state and county.
In 1996, the county commissioned the Urban Land Institute's advisory services program to prepare recommendations for further development.
The consultants urged the county to adopt a catchy name for the park and suggested "Innovation at Prince William." They also proposed an "aggressive" five-year goal of developing 500,000 to 750,000 square feet of office and technology space. To deliver on that goal, the county bought 525 acres of farmland, including the Hersch farm, for $8.5 million in 1997.
"The board came under a lot of criticism for buying the property," Vanderpool said. Residents questioned whether the government should be involved in the private sector, said Vanderpool, who supported development of the park and helped negotiate a deal between the city of Manassas, the county and George Mason University to build an $18 million aquatic and fitness center on the university campus.
Private landowners also have maintained a role in the office park. They sold hundreds of acres directly to companies that moved there. Private parties still own 350 acres neighboring the county's land that is marketed by the county's economic team as part of Innovation at Prince William.
The county's timing seemed perfect, catching the region's wave of technology start-ups and expansions.
In 2000, Innovation's tenants included Ronbotics Corp., which made motion platforms that allowed arcade games and rides to gyrate, and Covad Communications Group Inc., which operated a data center.
Other companies with futuristic names announced plans to come to Innovation at Prince William -- Astrolink International LLC, Avenir Inc., Ebara Technologies Inc., FM Technologies Inc., EarthWalk Communications Inc. Gilbane Properties Inc. of Providence, R.I., agreed to buy 155 acres for speculative office space.
By 2001, the tech bubble had burst. Covad, which went through bankruptcy reorganization, and Ronbotics closed their facilities. The Rhode Island developer pulled out of its deal. And the tech companies never showed up to build their promised offices.
"Certainly the swings in the economy, and in particular what happened with technology in the early part of this decade, affected the whole area," said Jay Norman of Manassas-based Norman Realty Inc., who is leasing the Innovation Business Center, a speculative office project that is being built next to Innovation at Prince William.
"Our strategic plan was in the trash," said Martin J. Briley, executive director of the county's economic development department, recalling the four rewrites of the plan in 2001. County officials tried marketing the park for engineering firms, computer data centers and wireless companies, among others.
By 2002, the marketing team shifted its focus to life-sciences companies and government offices, the formula that now is taking hold. Innovation at Prince William now target employers that pay an average annual salary of $53,000.
Today, empty barns share the 1,500-acre office park with a few government contractors, a Comcast Corp. calling center that is in Covad's former building, American Type Culture Collection and the university. Not including the George Mason campus, there are slightly more than 400,000 square feet of completed office and technology space, compared with the 500,000 to 700,000 square feet that the consultants once set as a goal to reach in 2001. But there are commitments for more than 1 million square feet more office space.
County officials are working with the park's tenants on a master plan that will be presented to county planners and supervisors in July. The plan will include retail and services, such as restaurants and dry cleaners, for the park's occupants.
Nearly 126 acres of the park have been cleared, the red dirt primed for construction of an Eli Lilly and Co. insulin plant. When Eli Lilly announced its plan to build the plant three years ago, it said it would employ 700 people earning an average annual salary of $44,400.
In exchange for that $425 million project, the state and county offered Eli Lilly about $7 million in economic incentives. But the pharmaceutical giant, citing the increased cost of building materials, has yet to begin construction. The company said it now expects to start work on the building this summer.
There are also plans for an engineering technology company that works with the defense industry, a biotechnology company that makes cell cultures and a company that cleans electronic circuit boards before they are installed in cars, aircraft and military equipment.
The biotechnology manufacturing company, Mediatech Inc., plans to build a 100,000-square-foot facility and employ about 200 people when it opens, within two years. In exchange, the state and county have offered economic incentives worth about $800,000.
Smaller firms have not been given such incentives, but land is cheaper than in counties closer to the District, and that has been enough of an incentive for several companies and for the FBI.
The General Services Administration agreed this month to pay $4 per square foot for the 15 acres that will be FBI's future site. Area real estate agents said the market rate for such property in Prince William County is about $5 per square foot.
Local real estate brokers have long grumbled that the county offers land for less than the going rate, but most agree that Innovation at Prince William has helped attract business to the county.
"That is probably a little bit below market, but obviously the county has been trying to get occupants for that park," said John M. Weber, co-founder of Weber & Associates Realty Inc.
For companies seeking a place to build, Innovation at Prince William offers not only the lure of price but also of size.
That was part of the appeal for Zestron America, said Harald Wack, executive vice president. The company, which cleans circuit boards, purchased nine acres in the park and will move from Ashburn.
"To find nine acres in Loudoun County is rather difficult these days," Wack said.