And here I was, thinking that Danville was just a fictional city in the Tri-State Area that was the setting for one of my favorite cartoons ever. But alas, Portfolio Recovery Associates is planning a $15 million investment in a real Danville, located in Virginia, that will bring 500 jobs to the region, it was announced yesterday.
This will be the company’s third office in Virginia, a call center in Hampton and a call center and its corporate headquarters in Norfolk. The new office is expected to open at some point in 2019 and will have 375 employees by the end of its first year, scaling up to 500 employees by the end of year three at its new facility.
“Christmas is certainly coming early to Danville,” Mayor Alonzo Jones told officials and community leaders at the announcement yesterday, according to a published report. “You can feel the excitement in the air.”
PRA will be using a call center that was shuttered earlier this year as the location for its new office. The company even said it plans to hire some of those workers who were laid off when the old center closed.
The company is receiving a number of grants and exemptions — totaling about $4 million — for opening the new office. PRA Group is also receiving a $1.66 million loan to help it open the new office.
Plans for the move began about 18 months ago, according to a published report. Also making Virginia a more attractive location was a new law that eliminated “Virginia’s double taxation on debt collection money from other states. The double taxation applied to debt-buying industries serving clients outside Virginia,” Rep. Glenn Davis, a state legislator.
