Devastating news of the loss of one of the community’s major employers — Keurig Dr. Pepper, formerly Green Mountain Coffee in Windsor — is a reminder of the importance of a diverse, resilient economy and the difficult, often thankless work necessary to achieve it.

Our heart aches for the roasting plant’s 379 employees and their families whose livelihoods will be disrupted when the plant closes by year’s end. We commend Isle of Wight County Economic Development staff for moving quickly to engage the state’s “Rapid Response Team” to provide resources for those affected. Our prayer is that they all land on their feet in jobs of comparable pay.

Secondarily, we dread the impact of the closure on Isle of Wight County’s tax base, which will be nearly $1 million poorer due to the loss of Keurig’s real estate and equipment taxes. The company is the county’s third-largest machinery and tools taxpayer behind International Paper’s Franklin mill and Smithfield Foods. County supervisors, who had adopted a lean fiscal 2025 budget even before the Keurig news, face more hard choices as they seek to keep homeowners’ taxes low but still fund critical services like law enforcement and public education.

We fully expect the Tidewater Logistics Center, a large warehouse and distribution complex that supervisors rejected recently in the face of intense community opposition, to get a fresh set of eyes, as it should in light of the Keurig news.

That’s not to say that supervisors should rush to revive and approve the project with only minor changes, but reporter Stephen Faleski’s story on this week’s front page about an unnamed company’s interest in using one of the buildings for manufacturing rather than distribution is intriguing.

With few exceptions, manufacturers, compared to distributors, tend to:

• Be larger taxpayers due to their more elaborate equipment
• Pay higher salaries
• Cause less truck traffic, which was citizens’ primary beef with a 24-7 warehouse complex on the edge of a residential neighborhood.

We commend county economic development staff and the project’s developer for seeking more economically impactful, less disruptive uses of property in which the county’s Economic Development Authority is heavily invested. The property is prime real estate near Route 460 and the Shirley T. Holland Intermodal Park, but county leaders owe it to nearby residents to be highly selective when considering how it can co-exist with a residential neighborhood.

Warehouses, which are in high demand thanks to the rousing success of the Port of Virginia, can be one piece of a strong, diverse economy, but Isle of Wight’s economic identity can’t become too distribution-heavy, as is occurring in neighboring Suffolk.

This is a county with a long, proud history of producing stuff, from paper to pork. Coffee pods will no longer be on that list, but it shouldn’t lessen leadership’s resolve to maintain a strong manufacturing economy.