The Herd: New hires and promotions for 1.27.10

Departures:

Sue Ann “SAM” Messmer will retire Feb. 1 from her positions at VCU as vice president for University Relations and Chief of Staff, Office of the President. Messmer came to VCU in 1972 and has served in numerous capacities throughout the university, including faculty member in the Art History department, associate dean and director of graduate studies of the School of the Arts, assistant vice provost for continuing studies and public service, vice provost for continuing studies and public service, vice provost for community and international programs and vice provost for university outreach.

New hires
Alex Cherlin has joined Compound Profit in development. Compound Profit provides working capital and equipment to companies. Cherlin was previously with Maquet Getinge Group. He graduated with a degree in finance from the University of Florida.

Law

Kevin D. Pomfret joined LeClairRyan as a partner in the intellectual property, corporate service and venture capital practices. He was recently at Cantor Arkema. Prior to attending law school, Pomfret worked on developing the U.S. intelligence community’s imagery collection and exploitation requirements. Pomfret also served as a satellite imagery analyst and a Soviet analyst for the U.S. government.  He is a graduate of Washington & Lee University School of Law and Bates College in Maine.

Real estate

Karen Treanor joined the staff of the Richmond Association of Realtors and Central Virginia Regional MLS as director of marketing.  Treanor was previously with REIN, Inc., the multiple listing service that supports real estate professionals in Hampton Roads. Treanor holds a BA in economics from West Virginia University and an MBA from Old Dominion University.

Banking

C&F Bank has announced a handful of promotions:

Donna Mathews has been promoted to assistant vice president, construction lending.

Maureen Medlin, director of marketing, has been promoted to the title of vice president.

Patrick D. Hanley was voted to the board of directors at Xenith Bankshares. He is a former senior VP and CFO of Overnite Corporation. He is currently engaged in consulting, private equity investing and as an active board member with a number of civic and philanthropic organizations. Hanley also serves on the Board of Directors of NewMarket Corporation (NYSE).

Higher Education

Patricia M.C. Brown, a health care administrator, will serve as 2010 leader-in-residence at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies. An attorney and Richmond alumna, Brown is president of Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins HealthCare LLC and senior counsel for the Johns Hopkins Health System. Brown is a 1982 graduate of UR and received her law degree at the University of Baltimore. Prior to joining Hopkins in 1994, she served as Maryland assistant attorney general and taught health care law at the University of Baltimore.

Marketing

PUNCH, a marketing firm, hired David Mizelle as a graphic designer. Mizelle is a graduate of the VCU School of the Arts.

Please send HR notices to TheHerd@richmondbizsense.com. Please tell us the name of the new hire, his or her position, and where he or she went to college in the body of the email.

VCU plans new med school building

Virginia Commonwealth University is getting a new medical school building.

Pei Cobb Freed & Partners designed the building. The firm is known for several projects, including the East Wing of the National Gallery, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Louvre Pyramid. Philadelphia-based Ballinger also served as architect.

Seventy million dollars of the budget is provided by state funds. The rest consists of university and private funds.

The 200,000-square-foot building will stand 12 stories tall.

Construction is expected to last from fall of 2010 to spring of 2013. Demolition of the A.D. Williams Building is slated for early spring 2010.

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Deeds takes a look at Richmond’s green economy

With the sun beating down, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds rode a crane to get a closer look at a new solar panel installation at the Virginia Commonwealth University physical plant.

Deeds visited the site at the invitation of Cityspace Solar owners Blue Crump and Justin French. Cityspace was hired to install the 6 kilowatt system at the VCU physical plant as the university advances its plan to go green. Read more

Your statistics are turning me on

Move over Justin Timberlake, because statisticians are bringing sexy back.

When you think of the field statistics, “sexy” probably isn’t the adjective that comes to mind. But an article in yesterday’s New York Times described it as just that.

According to the Times, the internet has spurred a need for statisticians more than ever before. The piece profiles a Harvard grad and a statistician for Google, Carrie Grimes.
Read more

Hackers bring the pain in Va.

Doctors in Virginia are thinking twice before prescribing painkillers such as morphine and Vicodin because of the recent hacker attack on the Prescription Monitoring Program, according to a state official who testified at a legislative hearing Monday.

The attack, which took place two months ago, allegedly compromised more than 35 million patient records.

The attack drew the attention of many concerned with the security of electronic records. In an undetermined number of cases, patients’ Social Security numbers were compromised.

Now there is concern that residents are unable to obtain needed medication from their doctors.

From a story in the Washington Post:

With the prescription database still offline two months after it was accessed because of FBI and state criminal investigations and work to upgrade the system, some doctors are reluctant to prescribe highly addictive painkillers such as Oxycodone, Vicodin, morphine and Valium, said Sandra Whitley Ryals, director of the Department of Health Professions.

“I do not have any indication, however, of how many that might be,” she told the panel.
Ryals said the reports were anecdotal and that the department had not received any complaints from patients.

Continued:

“I do know that our prescribers, mostly physicians, have grave concerns about not being able to access the information,” she said. They were being asked “to use their best judgment,” she said.

BizSense reported May 21 that VCU medical center had been at the forefront of the national push to digitize its medical records with nearly all its patient records in a system developed by a Missouri company called Cerner. Read more here.

There have been a number of high-profile personal information exposures in Richmond, including at VCU, where in April more than 17,000 academic records might have been exposed, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, a nonprofit that tracks such information.

3, 2, 1, Chipotle!

Chipotle fans, start your countdown. The new Chipotle burrito restaurant opens June 11 at Grace and Laurel streets on the VCU campus.

This will be the fast-growing chain’s seventh location in the Richmond area. It is the first tenant to open in a strip center built on the site of what was a Pizza Hut.

The Chipotle is just around the corner from Qdoba on Broad, another national burrito shop. Bo Dillaz, a locally-owned quesadilla joint, is also nearby. (If you go into Bo Dillaz, be warned: They spell everything with a “Z.”)

But competition has never stopped Chipotle, which also operates a location across the parking lot from Qdoba at Chesterfield Towne Center.

“Other competing restaurants are part of any community we enter,” Chipotle spokeswoman Katherine Newell Smith said in an e-mail.

Smith said that, like most businesses, Chipotle considers demographics, foot traffic and local office/business concentration when deciding where to set up shop.

Some of Chipotle’s success is tied to their ability to tap into the natural and local foods niche. The company recently announced their commitment for each restaurant to buy 35 percent of at least one produce item from a local farm (within a 100 miles or so).

Smith said Parker Farms in Colonial Beach is the local provider for green bell peppers to Chipotle restaurants in Virginia, Maryland and Washington.

Polyface Farm in Swoope provides pork for the Charlottesville Chipotle.

“More and more, we’re able to push farther to have a meaningful impact on the way people eat,” said founder, chief executive and chairman Steve Ells in a news release. “But there isn’t a switch you can throw to make this happen all at once. It’s an incremental revolution, and we’re committed to being part of it.”

Farmers aren’t the only ones to benefit from Chipotle’s expanding footprint in the area. The new VCU location will have a pre-opening event Wednesday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. as a fundraiser for the Byrd House Market and the Grace Ardent Community Garden in Oregon Hill.

For a $5 donation, customers will get a burrito, taco order or salad, with 100 percent of proceeds going to the two community groups.

Local universities keep builders building

Even with shrinking endowments and more cost-conscious students, local universities are plowing ahead with major construction projects, building dorms, athletic facilities and research centers. That’s been a blessing for some local firms. Read more

Va. regulations chasing payday lenders away

Cruising down Broad Street between Virginia Commonwealth University and suburban Short Pump, you’ll see a string of businesses with names like Cash Advance, Cash-2-U and Fast Payday Loans. They’ll lend you money until your next paycheck – at interest rates critics call exorbitant.

The 23230 Zip code has one of the highest concentrations of payday lending stores in Virginia, with almost one location for every 1,000 residents. The area is among the poorer sections of metro Richmond, with a median household income about $10,000 below the state average.

Payday lenders offer short-term, high-interest loans to consumers using the borrower’s paycheck as collateral.

Until last year, such businesses could charge $15 for a two-week $100 loan – amounting to a 391 percent annualized interest rate. The General Assembly capped the rate at 36 percent, making the fee for a two-week loan $1.38.

So some payday lenders started offering a different kind of loan, called an open-ended loan, which is not closely regulated. This year, the General Assembly responded by passing a law prohibiting payday lenders from providing open-ended loans. On April 8, legislators approved Gov. Tim Kaine’s recommendation that the law take effect immediately.

The result: Several payday lenders – such as Check ’n Go and Allied Cash Advance – are leaving Virginia. Advance America, which operates the Cash Advance Centers of Virginia, is on the ropes, too.

“The 36 percent rate cap would put us out of business,” said Jamie Fulmer, spokesman for Advance America, the nation’s largest payday lender. “We would only make $1.38 per two weeks – less than 10 cents a day. We wouldn’t be able to pay our workers or landlords.”

Some see the demise of payday lenders as inevitable.

“People who have stocks in these businesses have seen the regulatory climate is changing, and so it’s not a smart place to put long-term stock money into,” said Stephen Graves, a geography professor and payday loan expert at California State University at Northridge.

“I think there will not only be a decrease in the rate of growth, but I think there’s a chance that the industry will be eliminated all together,” he said.

Good riddance, say payday-loan critics such as Dana Wiggins of the Virginia Poverty Law Center. She says such loans trap consumers in a cycle of debt: “People become dependent on them.”

LaTonya Reed of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy agrees.
“It’s our essential belief that it is unacceptable to charge excessive amounts for loans based on the teachings of various traditional faiths,” Reed said.

However, proponents for the industry argue the opposite: that payday lenders provide a valuable service to average Americans who find themselves in unexpected financial binds.

“We focus on high-population retail areas near where citizens work, live and shop,” Fulmer said. “It’s the mainstream middle class who from time to time need support.”

Payday lending customers encompass a range of people, but lenders cluster in specific geographic locations. Virginia’s lower-income Zip codes have more payday loan locations than higher-income Zip codes, according to analysis by Capital News Service.

Graves has found a similar pattern among payday lenders in other states.

“They locate themselves among the desperate, and that’s what makes them predatory,” Graves said. “If they were evenly distributed, and they were a product that everyone could enjoy, then their site-location strategy would be to spread out.”

CNS analyzed the location of the 598 payday loan stores registered in Virginia as of April 7. The analysis examined the number of payday lenders by Zip code and by Zip code tabulation area. (A ZCTA is an area based on the first three digits of a Zip code.) The analysis also included income and poverty data from the U.S. Census Bureau. A map of the state’s payday loan locations is available here.

Overall, Virginia had about eight payday loan stores for every 100,000 people. The state’s median household income was $46,677, and 9.6 percent of Virginians lived in poverty, according to the latest census data.

The 232 ZCTA, which encompasses Richmond, had about 11 payday loans stores per 100,000 people for a total of 55 stores. The median household income there is $41,342 and more than 12 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

Areas with the most payday lenders per capita were much poorer than the state as a whole:

• Portsmouth had about 25 payday loan stores per 100,000 people. The area had a poverty rate of 16.2 percent.

• Norfolk had about 20 payday loan stores per 100,000 residents. Its median household income was $25,827, and its poverty rate was 18 percent.

• Southwest Virginia had about 15 payday lenders per 100,000 residents. Its median household income was $31,864, and its poverty rate was 19.3 percent.

The pattern held true for Zip codes, too. For instance, 29 Virginia Zip codes had more payday lenders than banks. The Census Bureau had demographic data on 23 of those Zip codes (the others were newly created). Of those 23 Zip codes, 21 had a median household income below the statewide median.

The opposite end of the spectrum is also telling: High-income areas had few payday lenders. For example, the 221 and 201 ZCTAs – swaths of Northern Virginia with median household incomes of almost $78,000 – each had about three payday lenders per 100,000 residents.

“They’re not in my neighborhood, I know that,” Graves said. “And I’m a white guy from the middle class.”

His research has found that payday lenders congregate near military bases. Graves wasn’t surprised that Portsmouth and Norfolk, which have a large number of military personnel, had a large number of payday loan operations.

“Those are the heaviest concentrations in any state almost without fail,” Graves said. In most states he has studied, the “Zip code with the highest concentration of payday lenders was adjacent to a military base. How could you say you’re not targeting the military?”

In Virginia, Zip code 23452 had the most payday lenders: 14. That’s next to Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach.

In 2006, the federal government enacted a law to prohibit lenders from making loans in excess of 36 percent interest to military families. Congress was responding to allegations that payday lenders were preying on military personnel.

But payday lending operations maintain that they are not targeting specific groups.

“That’s an allegation in which the facts of the matter don’t match,” Fulmer said.

He characterized the average payday loan customer as a homeowner with a middle income, a high school diploma and some college experience.

The customers are people like Brenda Cherokee, who was at the CheckSmart store, 4503 W. Broad St., on a recent Wednesday. Cherokee had just made a payment on her fifth payday loan from the past year.

“I chose it over other options because it was an immediate need, and I didn’t have enough to cover the expense in my savings,” she said.

Cherokee, a nurse, said she uses payday loans responsibly and pays them off as soon as she can.

“Some people don’t,” she said. “They borrow more than they can afford, and then they find they can’t dig themselves out of that hole.”

Sara Griffith and Josephine Varnier are journalism students at Virginia Commonwealth University. They contributed this report through the Capital News Service.

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The empty grocery store and parking lot at Grace and Harrison streets could soon be converted into classrooms and library storage for VCU, according to the school’s facility manager. Read more

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