You know something is important when it draws more discussion than tax rates and fund balances despite coinciding with the public hearings on the city and county budgets, so we know the Henderson-Vance Economic Partnership is a big deal. We know it’s something different. We know it has people wary. What we don’t know is what exactly this grand collaboration will do.
We wholeheartedly agree with the concept of bringing anyone involved in the economic future of Vance County together for regular meetings. As we’ve said before, we like the model set by the anti-crime group VOICE: Get everyone you can find and anyone who’s interested in one room, share what is being done and what could be done, and attack the problem.
The Economic Partnership has part of the process right: bringing the proper people to the table. The group features representatives of the city and county governments, the Economic Development Commission, the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Development Commission, the Tourism Development Authority, the school system, the community college, the hospital and the Henderson Investment Development Corp., with room for at-large members on the board of directors. We’d like to see two of the nine at-large seats set aside for local clergy and two others reserved for representatives of nonprofit organizations — economic development has a social component, after all — and two Team Vance veterans, Sara Wester of the Employment Security Commission and Rick Seekins of the Kerr-Tar Regional Council of Governments, would be invaluable to any economic development project. The partnership can work out those kind of details.
Beyond the membership, however, what does the public know about the Economic Partnership? Not nearly enough.
The idea grew out of the work of Team Vance, the Duke Endowment-financed effort through Maria Parham Medical Center to chart a path into the future for our county. It is not merely some concept from the fertile mind of Rose Oil’s Sam Watkins, who has devoted himself to bettering Vance County through his leadership of the Economic Development Commission and the Embassy Square Foundation.
The start-up funding represents a five-year commitment from Maria Parham, Rose Oil, developer Eddie Ferguson’s firm and a few other local businesses. At this point, no public money is involved in the partnership, although such a request of the city and county is almost a certainty in the future.
Preliminary plans called for the partnership to hire an executive director, a grant writer and an office staff, but here’s where things get murky. What will the partnership’s employees do? Will the grant writer work exclusively on the quest for funds to finance economic development activities? Will the grant writer be a resource for other county organizations, which frequently express the need for a grant writer? What will be the relationship between this private, well-financed organization and the Economic Development Commission, Tourism Department and Chamber of Commerce? If the partnership is a brainstorming, idea-sharing, advisory group, sort of an economic VOICE, why does it need a paid staff and executive director? If the partnership staff and the executive director will, in effect, be Vance County’s lead economic development agency, why do we need the existing EDC and its director, Benny Finch?
Watkins and other partnership organizers have proclaimed that they are embarking on a new way for economic development in Vance County, but the lack of details leave us wondering whether we’re creating a private layer of bureaucracy atop our existing economic development apparatus or, perhaps, failing to go all the way with a good idea out of fear of offending or rattling elements of a system we all agree does not work in drawing jobs to this area.
Suspicion fills any information void. If the partnership wants to eliminate distrust and earn the support and funding of the public, it must go beyond promises to be as open as possible when the time comes. It must make openness a fundamental part of its operations.
The partnership is a private organization and thus isn’t subject to North Carolina’s open-meetings law. And the bylaws are drawn to prevent any more than three county commissioners and three elected city officials from serving on the board, thus avoiding accidentally tripping the open-meetings law by involving a quorum of a governing body. But that doesn’t mean the group is banned from adopting and following the provisions of the open-meetings law. It should do so.
All meetings of the board of directors or the executive committee should be open to the public, and the public, through the media, should receive notice of all of those meetings. When the partnership has specific economic development prospects that require confidentiality, the board or executive committee could go into closed session, just as the City Council or Board of Commissioners would do when discussing a property transaction or measures to bring a specific industry to town.
By adopting bylaws based on the open-meetings law, the partnership would not prevent discretion when necessary; we would prefer to be surprised with good economic news than scare off a big employer. But such bylaws would make openness and public meetings the default situation; the board of directors or executive committee would have to justify any closed meeting.
We’d like to see the partnership make such a change to the bylaws on its own, as a good-faith gesture to the people of Vance County. Failing that, we urge the Vance Board of Commissioners, or at least the four commissioners who aren’t on the partnership board, to withhold any endorsement of the partnership and its bylaws until the group adopts an open-meetings provision as part of the bylaws (just as some Founding Fathers withheld support for the Constitution until a Bill of Rights was on its way).
If we’re going to follow a new way forward, let’s go all the way together.