(The Center Square) – Six to seven years ago, a billion dollars recruitment and expansion project coming to North Carolina wasn’t new, says the CEO of the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina.
Today, that has changed – and quite dramatically, he says.
“You go back not that long ago – six, seven years ago and it was uncommon to see more than a handful of these billion dollar recruitment and expansion projects on an annual basis,” Chris Chung, CEO of the public-private Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina told the Joint Legislative Economic and Global Engagement Oversight Committee on Monday. “That trend has changed dramatically. We are seeing a lot more really big projects that are looking at North Carolina as well as Georgia, Ohio as well as other states we compete with.”
The projects are more complicated and require much more infrastructure such as water and sewer capacity, Chung said.
“They typically require a much more aggressive incentive posture,” he said. “This body, the General Assembly, has been key to help North Carolina win some of those big pursuits by working on special legislation to attract some of those companies.”
It’s not a short-term trend, Chung said.
“We expect to continue to see a lot of these large mega projects considering North Carolina,” he said. “Our position of course is to try to put North Carolina in a position to win as many of these as we can.”
About 10% of the projects the state for which the competes are in the life sciences field, Chung said. That amounts to 25 projects, averaging about $250 million each in investment.
“If we were to win all of those, that would account for 5,600 new jobs and about $6 billion in new investment,” he said.
Weight loss drugs have generated an enormous amount of investment in the state, Chung said.
“That is an enormous market for the life sciences companies,” he said. “They have to produce those therapies somewhere. That has been a lot of North Carolina’s success in this sector and that is where a lot of opportunity still sits to capture even more of that production capacity here.”
It’s not just the drugs that are being produced here but of the physical devices used to administer the therapies, such as auto injector pumps, Chung added.
Those production facilities typically require large water and sewer capacities. He suggested the Legislature consider allowing local governments to tax increment financing – bonds for infrastructure that are issued based on the future income the local governments will receive from future property tax revenue generated by the new businesses.
“It’s a very common tool employed in other states,” Chung said, adding that it would reduce the amount of funds the state has to contribute to economic development projects.
“If you can arm us with some of the tools so that we can get ahead of it preemptively, TIP financing is one way to do that,” he said.
