Why was VIA Funded?

The VIA grant was awarded on the basis of the content of an Implementation Planformulated by an Implementation Team,  The plan included more than twenty Jump Start projects identified by members of the Team to take advantage of two major Huntsville projects which will bring jobs and opportunities to the VIA region:  the 2005 Department of Defense Base Reallocation and Closure (BRAC) process which will bring several thousand new jobs to Redstone Arsenal, and the creation of the Hudson Alpha Institute of Biotechnology, which will add a thousand jobs and be a national leader for this emerging industry.  Economic multipliers suggest that these major defense and biotechnology projects will bring several times that many indirect jobs, perhaps as many as 20,000, into the VIA region.