Before the Vance County Board of Commissioners votes to endorse the Henderson-Vance Economic Partnership on Monday night, everyone has the chance to do some homework on the topic.
The commissioners will take up the matter late on the agenda as part of County Manager Jerry Ayscue’s report to the board. Ayscue recommends that the board follow the 2-1 opinion of its General Government Committee, endorse the concept of the partnership and appoint Commissioners Terry Garrison, Tommy Hester and Danny Wright to one-year terms as members of the partnership’s board.
Despite the inalterable opposition of Board of Commissioners Chairman Tim Pegram, the partnership is all but assured the county endorsement. As will usually be the case when the partnership brings requests to the board in the future, the proposal will start with the support of the three commissioners in the economic development group and will need only one more vote. Eddie Wright said at a meeting of the General Government Committee on June 22 that he will vote for the partnership.
Unlike the Henderson City Council, the county commissioners will not vote on the partnership’s proposed bylaws, which have caused controversy and are in the process of being revised by the steering committee forming the nonprofit group.
With little doubt as to the outcome Monday night, the most interesting aspect of the agenda item could be any discussion among the commissioners about the partnership and how it will operate.
In the meantime, anyone interested in the partnership and economic development in Vance County can do some homework by reading four stories published this weekend by The Daily Dispatch (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4) and by going back to the Market Street Services report to Team Vance in December 2003 that raised the idea of merging economic development efforts within the county.
One page in that 63-page report, Page 47, addresses the organizations working on economic development. The Team Vance discussion related to that page led to a report in early 2004 that called for a more extreme realignment than what has emerged as the Henderson-Vance Economic Partnership.
The entire report is worth reading to get a feel for the state of Vance County economic development and where Team Vance was looking to take us.
The same is true of the Dispatch articles: Other than the valuable information from a 26-page study released in October by Wilbur Smith Associates and the summary of comparable organizations in neighboring counties, the most important thing about the articles is that they summarize the known facts about the partnership and how the county got to this point.
Everyone should get as much information as they can before reaching any conclusions, pro or con, about the partnership.
After doing our homework, we do have a couple of comments.
First, we’re not sure all of the secret negotiations that go into business recruitment are in our best interest. It seems that such confidentiality puts the business at a huge advantage: The company knows what every jurisdiction is offering, knows what it wants and knows the minimum it will accept, while the recruiting government or agency or partnership knows only what it is offering.
As North Carolina’s recruitment of Dell proved, the company can bluff a government into bidding against itself, raising its own offer to overcome what it thinks is the competition, even when there isn’t any.
If, on the other hand, governments made their offers in public, what would they lose? Competing jurisdictions would know what they were up against. We’re told by those who play the industrial recruitment game that such knowledge is bad because we don’t want the other guys to know what we’re doing and what we’re willing to offer. But aren’t companies already playing one offer against another? At least if everything were public, we would know whether the competing bids were real.
Ultimately, either we’re the right place for a company, or we’re not. The incentives should be the icing on the cake, not the entire basis for a decision. As long as everything is done in private (and as long as we’re throwing metaphors around), the businesses shopping themselves will always hold all the cards.
Our other comment is less philosophical. Even after reading the Dispatch articles, we have no more insight into what exactly the partnership intends to do. We can’t wait to find out.