How Virginia's Metro Areas Are Weathering the Recession

How's Virginia faring in the recession? Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads are doing well among the nation's metropolitan areas. Richmond is about in the middle.

That's the conclusion of a new Brookings Institution study of the nation's top 100 metro areas.See: http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2009/06_metro_monitor.aspx.

All in all Virginia isn't in bad shape, the study implies. Hardest hit areas include California, such as the Bay Area, Los Angeles and the Central Valley and most of Florida. The rust belt from western Pennsylvania, across northern Ohio and on into Michigan are also hard hit. The strongest single area seems to be the central Southwest, including most of Texas and Oklahoma. The Northeast is mixed as is the Deep South.

The obvious reason for NOVA's and Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News' strength is the federal government. Both areas are filled with civil service and defense jobs.

Richmond is a little harder to explain. With its chemical plants and cigarette factories, the Richmond area is more of a blue collar manufacturing area than its Old Dominion sisters. Although it is the seat of state government, Virginia's public sector is taking its lumps with significant layoffs and budget shortfalls.

Raleigh-Durham, another point of comparison for Richmond, fares better, Brookings reports. There are similarities with tobacco and state jobs, but the North Carolina capital region is home to the Research Triangle and its many pharmaceutical and health care jobs that are more recession-proof and simply outclass what Richmond has to offer.

Brookings implies that we may be on the way to a weak economic recovery. I'll take that. After the past 18 months, I'll take anything.

Peter Galuszka

What Does FDA Regulation of Tobacco Really Mean?

Many years ago --38 to be precise -- I was sweating in the Turkish bath of an Eastern North Carolina tobacco field working on a story about seasonal labor hired to prime and sucker the plant. It was just before dawn and a reddish tinge glowing over the country mist. Young teenagers were getting out of a ramshackle school bus to get to work on the bright green plants.

I was a college kid working a summer on my hometown local daily. At the time, tobacco had a deep and lasting impact on states that grew it, including Virginia and of course, North Carolina

where bright leaf ruled in the east.

So, it comes as a bit of a stunner and time trip to realize that the $89 billion U.S. tobacco industry may well be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. It always seemed odd that it wasn't. Nicotine is as much a drug as aspirin or morphine. Tobacco is a plant like peanuts, corn, soybeans or wheat. But the powerful tobacco industry managed to fight off decades of threats of regulation to avoid any interference by the feds that could question tar, nicotine or any of the other thousands of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in every satisfying drag of a cigarette.

Yet as overwhelming as the Senate vote was last week for FDA oversight, exactly what it means isn't quite clear. Expected are strict new rule son cigarette advertising, a ban on candy or fruit-flavored smokes and possibly big limits on "snus" or smokeless tobacco products that tobacco companies such as Richmond's Philip Morris USA have invested heavily in.

Oddly, the FDA ruling has split the usually unified tobacco industry in two. Philip Morris has backed FDA regulation for years. Reynolds American and Lorillard Tobacco have continued to fight it tooth and nail. Opponents claim that Philip Morris wants the bill because it understands that strict regulation of tobacco is inevitable and backing FDA oversight could lock PM in its leading market positions with such popular smokes as Marlboro.

I listened carefully on NPR when I was driving the other day when I heard PM spokesman Bill Phelps explain that his firm knows its products are harmful and is trying to deal with it. It's the same argument PM has been issuing since the Master Settlement Agreement in 1998. It's also a bit disingenuous because its recently split off sister company, Philip Morris International, is aggressively targeting international markets with higher tar and nicotine products. The World Health Organization predicts that one billion people will die of smoking related illness globally during this century.

According to The Washington Post today, the old Eastern N.C. tobacco belt where I cut my teeth as a cub newspaper reporter is in turmoil over the FDA oversight possibility. Farmers are quoted saying that the FDA is overworked and incompetent. It can't handle emergencies and they do have a point. They badly fell down on the job in this year's tainted food scandal at Lynchburg-based Peanut Corporation of America that ended up with a number of deaths and many illnesses.

In as much as we don't know what FDA regulation of tobacco will mean -- it won't come close to banning the product -- it does show how much times have changed in the Tobacco Belt. As the Post points out, North Carolina industries have moved away from tobacco to computers, software, banking and pharmaceuticals.

That's a little less true in Richmond where PM has a huge presence. If the FDA all but puts smokeless tobacco out of business, one wonders what will happen to PM's $350 million research lab at the Virginia Biotech Park in downtown Richmond. It is the cornerstone of the park that struggled for years and now seems to be taking off.

But the trend is clear. The question now is how much things will really change.

Peter Galuszka