A rendering of the planned Eli Lilly facility in Goochland County. (Courtesy Goochland County(
Goochland is set for another high-profile economic development project.
Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. announced Tuesday its plans to invest $5 billion to build a new manufacturing facility in West Creek Business Park at the eastern end of the county.
The facility would take shape on a 227-acre site at 12575 West Creek Parkway, county administrator Jeremy Raley told BizSense on Tuesday. The property is currently owned by Henrico-based insurance company Markel and at least part of it is home to a Richmond United soccer field complex.
It is unclear what the Eli Lilly project would mean for the soccer complex; county representatives told BizSense that as the property is privately held, the county is not involved in real estate negotiations.
The new pharmaceutical facility will span over 200,000 feet of production space and will also include offices and other areas, Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks said during a press conference held Tuesday at Main Street Station.
Ricks, along with Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Goochland Board of Supervisors chair Tom Winfree and others shared remarks at the event.
The Goochland facility is the first of four plants Eli Lilly plans to open in the U.S. as part of a $50 billion total investment.
Ricks said the company did a request for information in February to determine a location for the first of the four facilities, and received over 400 responses from 46 states before Goochland was ultimately chosen. Eli Lilly stated in a release that the West Creek site was chosen due to things like “workforce potential in the Greater Richmond Region, local incentives, ready access to utilities and transportation and favorable zoning.”
“I’m proud to announce that Lilly has chosen Virginia for our newest manufacturing plant. This is part of our $50 billion CapEx expansion, which had started in 2020, and (is) a commitment we renewed in February of this year and expanded upon,” Ricks said.
The new manufacturing facility will make bioconjugate and monoclonal antibody treatments, which are used to treat cancer and other autoimmune diseases, Ricks said Tuesday.
Ricks said the new facility will be the company’s “first dedicated, fully integrated, active pharmaceutical ingredient and drug product facility for cancer, autoimmune conditions and other advanced therapies.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks and others celebrate the planned Goochland County facility Tuesday morning. (Jackie DiBartolomeo photo)
Youngkin touted the economic benefits of the new facility, citing that 650 permanent jobs like scientists and technicians and 1,800 temporary construction jobs will be created due to the facility.
“There is going to be 1,800 great paying construction jobs that will work together for this facility to rise out of the ground,” the governor said at Tuesday’s event.
Ricks said the typical timeline to build similar facilities is around five years including regulatory approvals, adding that activity on the site should start up in the “coming weeks.”
“We’d like to beat that timeline,” Ricks said. “We’re working with the federal administration, FDA and others to speed those timelines up. Within three years we’ll be having sort of a facility built, it’ll look like a manufacturing site. The rest is up to the regulatory approval process, practicing, making sure we can make the medicine appropriately from there.”
Hiring for permanent jobs should begin in the next couple of years, Ricks added, saying he expects the “vast majority” of the 650 permanent jobs at the new facility will be hired from locals to the region.
Per an Eli Lilly release, the pharmaceutical company plans to announce the three remaining U.S. manufacturing sites this year, and expects to begin making medicine at its four planned facilities within five years.
Eli Lilly was founded nearly 150 years ago and is headquartered in Indianapolis, and has manufacturing plants in nine countries. Per the company website, it has around 49,000 employees total and took in around $45 billion in revenue last year.
Virginia lawmakers last month approved economic development packages for both Eli Lilly to build its Goochland facility and for competitor AstraZeneca to build a yet-to-be announced facility at an unidentified site in Albemarle County.
The Eli Lilly deal is the latest large project from a Fortune 500 company in Goochland County. Amazon broke ground in May on a 3 million-square-foot robotics fulfillment center on a 105-acre site at 2022 Ashland Road in the Rockville area. That center is set to open its doors in 2027 and will be the largest Amazon facility in the greater Richmond area.
West Creek is already home to large campuses for Capital One, CarMax and Performance Food Group.
Goochland County is also in the midst of deciding on a proposed tech-friendly development area that could bring new commercial uses to the area in and around West Creek. The county is looking to create both a “technology overlay district” and a “technology zone,” that would span about five miles along Route 288, going from Interstate 64 south to Patterson Avenue, sitting adjacent to Hockett Road. Much of the proposed district includes West Creek.
The technology overlay district and technology zone, which have caused a stir among county residents, would allow for multiple tech-related industries to be able to build in the district, from pharmaceutical companies to biomedical researchers to data centers. Those proposals go before the Goochland Planning Commission at its Sept. 18 meeting.
The 227-acre parcel slated for the Eli Lilly project is zoned as light industrial. Per county records, laboratory, pharmaceutical or medical buildings are already a by-right use of light industrially-zoned parcels in the county.
