Gov. Bev Perdue and the N.C. Commerce Department have a curious practice when it comes to announcing economic incentives linked to job creation.
When a company brings jobs that match or exceed a county's annual average wage, their press releases mention it. When the wages are less, as in the case of today's announcement, there typically is no such mention.
Today they announced that Advanced Textile Solutions will open a plant in Caldwell County and create 127 jobs as part of a $500,000 investment over the next three years. For that, the company will get $127,000 from the One North Carolina Fund.
Those jobs will pay an average annual wage of $19,111, the first time the state has offered the One NC money for jobs paying on average less than $20,000 a year. Caldwell County's annual average wage in 2008, the most recent year available from the Employment Security Commission, was $29,756.13.
So these jobs are paying on average $10,000 less than Caldwell County's annual average; they also amount to little more than roughly $2 dollars above the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Commerce spokeswoman Kathy Neal said the $127,000 is a worthwhile investment because the county's unemployment rate is high -- nearly 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009. But she did not provide much explanation as to why the announcements choose to drop the fact that these jobs could well bring down a county's annual average wage, which doesn't sound like much of an economic bang for the taxpayer buck.
"The information Commerce provides to the Governor’s Press Office usually includes the average wage if it is at or near the wage of the new jobs," Neal said in an e-mail message.
The deal isn't done yet, as my colleage John Murawski reported. The One NC grant requires a local match, which would bring the government assistance up to $254,000. Caldwell County's commissioners have yet to vote on the local share.
Dan Kane has covered local and state government and N.C. State University at The News & Observer since joining our staff in 1997. Most recently, he and J. Andrew Curliss teamed to report “The Missing Money,” a three-part series that explored the state's growing number of tax breaks and the related rising revenue loss. Kane's reporting also exposed one of the worst academic fraud cases in U.S. higher education history at UNC-Chapel Hill. Contact him at
Comments
RE: THE JOBS ISSUES IN NORTH CAROLINA
Wed, 05/19/2010 - 21:50 — beachbum3Why is it that while she is supposely preaching jobs for north carolininans that yet she is allowing the practice of blacklisting of a former state employee thru her ties within the highways contracting industry of a forty years service former employee that was wrongfully terminated over trumped up an untrue issues just because this one employee refused to join in in the corruption that is an has been taking place within the ncdot. where that contractors in this state an their lobbyist are being allowed to get away with the performance of bad non speceficiition work on new construction project throughout this state an in turn are costing the taxpayers millions of dollars thank you
Good story
Wed, 05/19/2010 - 20:04 — penniless_taxpayerI wonder how much the taxpayers will have to spend underwriting those high-paying jobs. That is usually the way it works. I still remember how Dell ripped us off.