Leaders of eastern North Carolina’s enlarged 26-county business recruitment agency will meet with area county managers and economic developers this week for the first time since last month’s announced merger of two regional economic development agencies.
The closed-door meeting, scheduled for Tuesday in Edenton, is designed to give the NCEast Alliance an opportunity to introduce itself and discuss its economic development efforts with officials formerly represented by North Carolina’s Northeast Alliance, NCEast President John Chaffee said.
“From our standpoint, what we want them to have a better understanding about is how we, as the NCEast Alliance, go about economic development,” he said.
NCEast also wants to hear from “the players of northeastern North Carolina” about ways the enlarged economic development agency can proceed as it works to recruit business and industry, enhance tourism and boost job creation.
NCEast, which formerly served 11 counties, formally merged with the 15-county Northeast Alliance last week after the two groups signed a memorandum of understanding last month.
Both alliances previously were part of a state-funded system of regional economic development partnerships. After North Carolina’s Republican-led government decided to privatize business and industrial recruiting, however, state financial support was withdrawn and the partnerships were required to raise private funding.
Northeast Alliance officials said they elected to join NCEast after deciding they could not raise enough private funding on their own to keep the agency sustainable. The merger means NCEast now serves an area stretching from the fringes of the Research Triangle and the Interstate 95 corridor east to the Outer Banks.
The terms of the merger specify that the former Northeast Alliance’s 15 counties, including Pasquotank, Camden, Currituck, Chowan and Perquimans, will be allowed to participate in the enlarged NCEast for free for at least 4½ years.
According to Chaffee, after the 4½-year period, former Northeast counties wishing to continue participating in NCEast will have to pay an annual fee of 30 cents per capita. That means Pasquotank, which has a population of 40,000, would pay approximately $12,000 a year to remain a part of NCEast.
Currituck, which has a population of 24,396, would pay more than $7,000 annually.
Camden, with a population of 10,187, would pay more than $3,000 a year.
Camden County Manager Mike Renshaw said the annual fee to remain an NCEast member after 4½ years probably will be at the top of his list of questions for NCEast leaders at Tuesday’s meeting.
The meeting is not open to the public.
Renshaw said he generally is optimistic about Camden’s chance to participate in the enlarged economic development agency.
“More resources and more assets and more knowledge, applied to further encouraging economic development in northeastern North Carolina, is going to be beneficial to the whole region,” he said.
Pasquotank Manager Rodney Bunch said his county looks forward to working with NCEast the next 4½ years. But it’s too early to say if the county will pay for membership after then, he said.
“Four and a half years is too far for me to say what we’ll do then,” he said.
Currituck Manager Dan Scanlon said his county likely will take a wait-and-see approach on remaining an NCEast member after 4½ years. He said a lot will depend on what the enlarged agency accomplishes. It also is too early to say how NCEast will benefit Currituck or northeastern North Carolina, he said.
“We’ll just have to see how this new arrangement works as they implement it,” Scanlon said.
Scanlon expressed concern that elected officials in the northeast did not get to have a say in the NCEast-Northeast Alliance merger.
“I feel the elected officials should have been a part of this process,” Scanlon said.
Asked about county officials’ lack of involvement in the merger, Chaffee declined comment, saying only “that water has already passed over the dam.”
He said NCEast’s plan going forward is to work closely with officials in the region formerly served by the Northeast Alliance.
Vann Rogerson, formerly the Northeast Alliance’s president and now an executive vice president with NCEast, said the merger’s terms were purposefully structured to give Northeast counties time to see if the new arrangement works for them.
“We get to try this thing out together and see where we go,” he said. “We’re trying to be fair by just making sure that the counties got to participate for free.”
Rogerson maintains the merger offers great opportunities for the former Northeast counties.
He noted NCEast’s service territory now stretches from areas just south of Virginia’s Hampton Roads area to the Port of Morehead City and includes the Coast Guard Base in Elizabeth City and Marine Corps’ installations at Cherry Point and Jacksonville.
“We are marrying up some resources that we never had before,” Rogerson said. “There’s a lot of opportunity for us to get a fresh look at how we do things.”
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