Dear Commissioners: June 21, 2011 | Eastern North Carolina Now

Dear Commissioners: June 21, 2011

    At last night's open forum on the budget, the Carver spokesman stated that his firm had benefited from the grants Carver had received with EDC's assistance. This is a legitimate roll for the EDC and the grant writing process. Our taxes are sent out of county and state by income taxes. Only grants can recapture them.

    I believe that it was also mentioned that Carver is now profitably employing roughly 80 employees while it was speculated that without the EDC's help only 30 some employees would be at work. If the spokesman is correct and these jobs could not have come from the free market and Carver's own initiative, then this is a significant increase in the workforce of 50 employees which needs to be credited to the EDC.

    In its 2010 Report (12/31/2010) the EDC posts Carver as an 82 job dependency. This was revised to 84 recently. This number needs to be reduced by 50 jobs in accordance with last night's comments. The Carver base line is by their own count 35 jobs. (1)

    To the EDC's credit their revisions to the report as of June 1, 2011 reflect a drop in the PAS job claim for 2010 from 230 to 160. The ten year jobs total credit for all companies fell to 911 from 979.

    However, there are still questions regarding other firm's jobs numbers and there is still no explanation as to the overall method being used historically or currently for the purpose of these welcome revisions.

    In particular, I feel that

    a.. Impressions totals should be given no credit. Impressions was a 160 job firm when their grants were set out in 2007 and is a 158 job firm in today's tally. In fact, they have lost 2 jobs since 2007. When looking back over the EDC Report, 160 seems like a reasonable average measure of their core unassisted employment since 2003. This is their base number not the "added jobs".

    b.. PAS by NC One Fund's own 12/14/10 analysis when approving the grant was a 137 job firm.

    Those jobs were established. They were not threatened. The base number was 137. The grant was to be for "a new supply contract for 250,000 dishwasher panel systems." Only the number of jobs added above base line and created by this project can fairly be counted as "added jobs."

    All tolled, this will be another 368 job drop in the accumulated tally to 543 "added or retained". (2)