Tuesday’s announcement by pharmaceutical company Covance Inc. that it is taking over the aborted Eli Lilly laboratory outside Manassas breathes new life into a site that was once hailed as a huge development for Prince William County’s job recruitment prospects, but had become an empty, half-completed building.
The 47-acre site, home to the abandoned shell of Lilly’s building, is expected to employ 550 workers in a 410,000-square-foot building, including 450 from nearby Fairfax County.
Eli Lilly bought 120 acres in the InnovationatPrinceWilliam industrial park when it planned to hire 750 employees producing medications at the site, but broke the plot into three slices in the fall as it sought buyers for the unused facility.
The Covance announcement improved efforts to develop two remaining sites Lilly owns on either side of the Covance property.
Although the county had wanted the property to hold one employer that would have offered 750 jobs, Eli Lilly said splitting the property into three parcels could result in more jobs and a better deal.
“We’re doing what we can to market that property as a productive piece,” said Ed Sagebiel, a spokesman for Eli Lilly.
The county is selling a 1.37-acre parcel to Eli Lilly next month for almost $450,000 that could speed the sale of one of the smaller pieces of land, which are about 40 acres and about 30 acres.
Covance’s arrival makes those neighboring sites much more attractive, and the county was willing to sell the land to improve development prospects, said Jason Grant, spokesman for Prince William County’s Office of Economic Development.
“If it helps them make it more marketable, that’s fine with us,” he said. “We wanted to continue to build our commercial inventory.”
