The Northern Virginia Daily

Article date: September 21, 2005

A Phoenix rises

Business park may hold key to community’s economic future

By: Charlotte J. Eller

In a place where the massive Avtex Fibers Inc. plant dominated the economy for decades, visions of high-tech growth, combined with the region’s natural beauty and proximity to Washington, are giving local leaders increase confidence in the community’s future.

“The future is not only coming, it’s here in Front Royal,” Paul J. Carroll, executive director of the local Economic Development Authority, said Monday after the implosion of the boiler house at the former Avtex site.

Front Royal Councilman Fred P. Foster, who has spent 16 years trying to get the site cleaned up and redeveloped, recalled town, county and state officials and Rep. Frank Wolf working together on the project.

“In the future, I see it as being very diversified, very high-tech, no polluters, no smokestacks.  We’ve been through that phase and don’t want to go through it again,” he said.

The boiler house, the last major symbol of the plant’s local impact, toppled to the ground Monday as hundreds of spectators watched at the site, now known as the Royal Phoenix project.

“This [area] will be the center for the western part of Northern Virginia and the Northern Shenandoah Valley,” Carroll said.  “It’ll be a dual gateway” to the northern valley and Washington metro.

The heart of Front Royal’s economic revolution is EZ-Filer Systems, a technologically sophisticated firm started in 2001 by former New York business executive Robert C. Luse Jr.  EZ-Filer’s offices are located in a large area of the former Avtex administrative building.

Eventually, Luse hopes for the firm to occupy the entire building, he said.

EZ-Flier’s innovative computer software is modernizing workflow and record keeping in dozens of local and state government offices and medical practices.

The firm also has attracted the attention of major corporations, each of whom sent representatives to a luncheon held before this week’s implosion.  The firms have become EZ-Filer’s partners, said Luse and his director of development, Paul D. McWhinne.  They include high profile names like JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Fujitsu, CGE-AMS, Gateway Computers and SeniorNavigator of Richmond.

The firm, the first in the 440-acre Royal Phoenix development, will play a key role in the EDA’s efforts to give the Front Royal Warren County community a more diversified economic base.

“The whole idea is to ,,, diversify the economy, so that all the eggs are not in one basket,” Spiros V. Antoniadis, vice president of North American Realty Advisory Services, a New York marketing consultant working with the local EDA.

“All the eggs were in one basket,” said Warren County Administrator Douglas P. Stanley of the Avtex plant’s 1989 closure.  “And when the basket went, everything went with it.”

Since 1994, the community has been building up the U.S. 340-522 corridor with industrial and retail development, he said.

The Royal Phoenix site, with 160 acres designated for a high- tech business park and commercial uses, is taking the diversification plan to yet another level while providing good, well paying jobs for local residents, officials agree.

Currently, seven of 21 development firms who have inquired about the Royal Phoenix project have indicated considerable interest in the project,  Antoniadis said.

Interested development firms would buy tracts and then resell them to clean, high- tech firms and commercial companies wanting to locate there.

Among those that the EDA hopes to attract are a hotel conference center, a culinary institute and businesses involved with tourism interests in the area, Carroll said.

Another 240 acres of the Royal Phoenix site – on the banks off the South Fork of the Shenandoah River – will be set aside for a conservancy park.  An additional 30 acres is being developed as a soccer complex that will be turned over to Warren County, he said.

But the development will not occur simultaneously,  Antoniadis said.  First, each section must be signed off on by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Nevertheless, the future is bright for Front Royal-Warren County, Carroll said.