West Virginia Regional Technology Park Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Training & Education Center Celebrates Grand Opening

“We have an issue that machine tool technology has really declined in our country,” Harmon explained. “We don’t have the capabilities and capacity that we used to have 20-30 years ago. How do we get that back?”

The Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Training & Education Center (formerly Robert C. Byrd Institute) opened to much fanfare Wednesday at the West Virginia Regional Technology Park.

The training center will supply a reliable pipeline of skilled workers to manufacturing employers around the state.

Appalachian Regional Commission federal Co-Chair Gayle Manchin joined about 90 people for the ribbon cutting ceremony in South Charleston.

She said investing in workforce development in the Appalachian region will strengthen the state and country as a whole.

“It is about working together. It is about breaking down barriers between our communities, our states,” Manchin said. “If we lifted our boundaries between West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, we wouldn’t know where to put them back. If we grow West Virginia, if we grow the Appalachian region our country will be stronger. We will be stronger as America and at the end of the day I think that’s what we all really wish for.”

Manchin pointed out that training programs offered through the center serve as an integral part of lifting up communities left behind by the coal industry.

“It’s very important to understand we’re not talking about a thing, ” Manchin said. “We’re not talking about a program, or a machine. We’re talking about people. It’s meeting people where they are and giving them opportunities that they didn’t have before. It’s making sure there is transportation, that there’s childcare, that people don’t come hungry into these programs. By creating an ecosystem for training, that’s how we build hope.”

“Hope for those who never could aspire to a four year college program. Hope for those that couldn’t adapt their lives to a 9-5 schedule and hope for those really interested in the trade, really interested in knowing how to run those machines.”

West Virginia Regional Technology Park CEO & Executive Director Matt Ballard and Derek Scarbro, interim director for Marshall Advanced Manufacturing Center were present for the event along with Joannie Harmon, workforce director with the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation in Tennessee (IACMI).

“This is a really amazing initiative and so much hard work has gone into this,” Harmon said. “I know, because we started this conversation about a year and a half ago. It was kind of scary, I’m not going to lie. There were a lot of cobwebs and we weren’t sure what this was going to look like but it was amazing.”

Harmon said IACMI is one of 17 identified manufacturing institutes in the U.S. The organization works with the Department of Defense (DoD) and federal government which she said has “huge investments” in institutes with a focus on particular technology.

IACMI comprises a partnership of industry, universities, laboratories, and federal, state and local governments that work together to benefit the nation’s energy and economic security.

Harmon said the Department of Defense formed a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in east Tennessee to create new technology around CNC machining to get more machinists with skills to work on big machine tools.

“This isn’t just another CNC training program, it’s a little different in that it is bringing in new technology,” Harmon explained. “What we are doing is working with our community colleges, technical colleges, high schools and universities like Marshall to get this new technology introduced into industry and into the workforce.”

IACMI introduced Marshall University to ACENet, a joint Department of Defense and Department of Energy (DOE) initiative launched in 2020. Its goal is to reestablish American leadership in the machine tool industry.

Marshall now delivers ACENet training to participants from Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky.

CNC Master Machinist instructor Steve Nelson said the ability to manufacture precision parts and military components plays a role in national security.

“You see, on the other side of the room we have some CNC equipment that has some automatic functions and features,” Nelson said. “They are based on this equipment that has been made and used for over 100 years. Manufacturing, primarily CNC machining, welding and fabricating play a role in providing for DoD military equipment and items, it’s a vital component of our infrastructure.”

Carol Phillips, executive director of West Virginia Women Work said trainees from her program will work with Nelson to learn new manufacturing skills.

“Manufacturing in West Virginia is everywhere,” she said. “It’s a needed job in the state, it’s a high paying job in the state and that’s our goal – to get women into high paying careers.”

Currently, more than 1,000 manufacturing jobs are open in the Appalachian region.

Lavender Hopes and Realities: Farming Project Doesn’t Go as Planned

We reported earlier this year on an economic development project to grow lavender on former strip mines in West Virginia. After the story was released, we heard from a number of students involved in the program, saying they were disappointed and felt misled by the outcomes of the project, called Green Mining. West Virginia Public Broadcasting revisited the story to find out what happened, and if the project is still going as expected.

Back in 2014, West Virginia’s then-Governor Earl Ray Tomblin asked the West Virginia Regional Technology Park to come up with some ideas that could help generate new jobs for displaced coal miners in southern West Virginia. The idea that the CEO of the Technology Park, Rusty Kruslock, had was to grow lavender on former strip mines.

In 2016, the project was awarded grants through the Benedum Foundation, then the Appalachian Regional Commission, to fund the first couple years of the Green Mining program. In the interest of full disclosure, both of these organizations have also provided funding to West Virginia Public Broadcasting in the past.

Seventeen other companies also donated time and resources toward the first phase of the lavender project. The Technology Park offered classes to teach people how to grow lavender, and they paid the students a $10-an-hour stipend to attend classes. The project attracted 47 students in 2017, including several from out of state.

Veteran Debra Ritchie and her therapy dog Ranger.

“We sold everything we owned, packed up our little car, [and] drove 9 hours to West Virginia,” said veteran Debra Ritchie, who moved to West Virginia from Florida with her husband, Scott, and their daughter after hearing about the Green Mining program.

“[We] came here to be lavender farmers,” said Scott Ritchie, who’s also a veteran. “We were supposed to get a deal to where once we graduate the school, they were supposed to give each [veteran] two acres of land. And we went to school, graduated from the school, and went to go talk about the land and…nothing. No call back. No email return, nothing.”

They said they were told that following the 6-week-course, they would have the option of growing lavender on a mine site, to help raise some supplemental income. But that didn’t happen.

“I definitely learned not to put all your eggs in one basket, that’s for sure,” Scott said. “We pretty much put all our eggs in one basket and the basket got knocked off the table.”

Other students we spoke to said they had also been led to believe that they would be offered land to grow lavender on after their six-week training course. Another veteran, Amber Stanley, lives just outside Charleston.

“Now I’m feeling pretty misled, and I also feel a little bit exploited,” said Amber Stanley, another veteran who completed one of the training courses in 2017.

Student with the Green Mining project in 2017.

So what happened? The project’s main organizer, Rusty Kruselock, said the grant money simply ran out. They couldn’t pay their staff anymore, so they couldn’t continue the next phase of the project. We asked him about the students who say they’re disappointed, people like Amber, Scott and Debra?

“We apologize if that’s the impression, we weren’t aware of that, but we certainly reached out in the springtime to everyone we could,” Kruselock said. “But we’ll do everything we can to rectify that in the future.”

An hour after we recorded that interview with Kruselock, a volunteer with the Green Mining project did send an email to the former students, asking if they would want to be a part of a new phase of their project, a lavender growing cooperative. The students we talked to said it was the first time they had heard from the program in seven months.

The idea behind the cooperative, in part, is to get former students to help maintain the existing lavender fields, as volunteers.

West Virginia Public Broadcasting visited the mine site nearly a year later to see how the plants had fared through the winter. The grey, moonscape soil now has some purple growing on it. Small plants of English and French varieties of lavender dot the rocky fields.

A little more than 3,000 lavender plants survived the winter. Kruselock said that’s about half of what they planted last year.

A few volunteers, and at least one person who’s been paid part time, has been up here in the past few months weeding the fields. Most of that weeding work has been done by Lori Bailey. She heard about the lavender project from a news story and reached out to see how she could get involved.

“I just thought that was the greatest thing, cause there’s so much land that’s had mountaintop removal and I just think that’s great [that lavender is] making that look beautiful,” Bailey said.

But without Bailey and a handful of volunteers up here, the lavender plants might have been overtaken by weeds.

That’s still a risk if they don’t find a way to keep the volunteers engaged or figure out how to pay people to maintain the fields.

“The last thing you want to do is go out and plant 2,000 [or] 10,000 acres and then not have anybody to work it or not have anybody to take care of it,” said Marina Sawyer, one of the Green Mining project’s main organizers from last year.

“If we don’t have the workforce or the students coming out to do that work, then you end up losing valuable plants. And we’re not about that either.”

But a few months after this interview, Sawyer and the other staff were all let go. They were only contracted to work on a one-year grant, and the funding ran out.

WVPB reached out to the Appalachian Regional Commission, which funded the project last year, to ask if they are happy with the project’s outcomes. They didn’t want to do an interview, but Wendy Wasserman, director of communications, sent the following statement:

“This project proves that Appalachia’s coal impacted communities are well-positioned for innovative economic development. The Green Mining team identified an asset, did the research, and literally got their hands dirty. Now a series of new value added products using Appalachian-grown lavender are headed to market.”

Wasserman said the project was turned down for a second round of funding from the ARC because so many other projects applied for funding. She said the application process was incredibly competitive this year.

Meanwhile, Rusty Kruselock said that in a few years, he hopes these fields of lavender will be producing enough essential oil that will earn some income for the project.

“Most of our revenue down the road is going to be shared profits. Once we get oil processing, we’re gonna use the shared revenue to make the whole foundation self-sustaining.”

And the West Virginia Regional Technology Park does have the equipment, and the chemical expertise, to produce that oil. But they won’t be producing very much oil any time soon, not for at least another year or two, until the lavender plants are big enough.

So in the meantime, how will the program support itself and maintain the fields of lavender? Kruselock said although they didn’t receive a second year of funding from the ARC’s Power Plus program, they are going to try again later this fall. And he said, the handful of volunteers will help keep it going.

At this time, there are about five students still involved in helping the project grow.

Not among them is Debra and Scott Ritchie, who said they aren’t sure they have trust in the program anymore.

“It kind of put me back to that, ‘well why am I even trying?’ thought process,” Debra Ritchie said. “So I was angry. Real angry. And disappointed.”

She said it was nice to see the recent email that the project hasn’t gone completely underground, but they don’t have time to spend volunteering on the mine site, not at this time anyway.

At this point, the Ritchies are just struggling to pay their own bills. Debra got a job at a gas station, and her husband Scott is still looking for a job. They said they aren’t sure if they will stay in West Virginia, or if they plan to leave the state in search of work.

BridgeValley Faces Eviction Over $1.8M in Back Rent

A West Virginia college could be evicted from its campus as the landlord has asked for more than $1.8 million in unpaid fees.

The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports obtained documents showing BridgeValley Community and Technical College could be evicted from its South Charleston campus for not paying almost two years’ worth of rent. Lawyers representing the landlord, West Virginia Regional Technology Park, asked the college’s president in early May for the payment by June 7.

BridgeValley President Eunice Bellinger said Tuesday the school hasn’t paid the rent because it does not have a current lease agreement with the landlord. The college’s most recent lease expired in June 2015 and it hasn’t signed any agreement since.

Bellinger says a lawyer from the state attorney general’s office is helping with the dispute.

Scientists to Discuss Economic and Community Impact of Research

Four scientists from state colleges and universities plan to discuss the economic and community impact of research programs at a forum at the West Virginia Regional Technology Park in South Charleston.

The Tuesday event by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission’s Division of Science and Research features scientists from Concord, Marshall, West Virginia and West Virginia State universities.

Concord geology professor Joe Allen has researched earthquakes in deep fault zones.

WVU chemical engineering professor Brian Anderson studies development of sustainable energy systems.

Professor Sanjaya, director of West Virginia State’s Energy and Environmental Science Institute, researches the innovative use of plants to clean up the environment and ways to enhance their bioenergy and nutritional value.

Professor Nadja Spitzer of Marshall has received a National Science Foundation award for her research into exposure to silver nanoparticles and how it could be affecting the brains of children and adults.