Rowan County and Salisbury sit nearly smack in the middle of the Piedmont Crescent, a swath of real estate hugging Interstate 85 from Atlanta to Washington that is home to the fastest-growing economy in the world.
This financially fertile crescent is the backbone of an economic expansion that has put the Southeast — from Maryland to Mississippi — in a position to churn out the equivalent of the fourth largest economy in the world.
“Salisbury lies right in the heart of the strongest growth corridor in the world,” First Union National Bank economist Mark Vitner said.“And there’s no reason that’s going to change anytime soon.”
It won’t be moving out of the Charlotte region, the fourth strongest job market in the country.
How then, can the county capitalize on that fortunate location? And what good does it do in the midst of a slumping economy that’s seen thousands of jobs lost right here in Rowan during the past year?
Answering those questions was the focus of an economic summit hosted Thursday by the Salisbury-Rowan Economic Development Commission and a study to be undertaken defining the county’s economic future.
Some of the answers seem easy: Diversify the economy, continue to build on the good quality of life offered here, educate children and adults to be successful in whatever the choice of jobs.
Other questions are harder to answer:How much should the county focus on high-tech industries, which accounted for 53 percent of the nation’s economic growth in the late 1990s while constituting only 8 percent of the overall economy?
One thing’s clear. The county has got to change, because the region, the state, the country and the world are changing. And none of them avoided the economic hangover of last year.
North Carolina took its lumps, especially in the manufacturing sector, and Rowan has been no different. Thousands of area workers have gotten pink slips as plants closed, crossed borders, or eliminated shifts.
Economic development leaders know this isn’t a trend likely to reverse itself, and that the county cannot look to the economy of the past to find answers for the future.
“Our economy is in transition,” said Randy Harrell, executive director of the Economic Development Commission. “With the decline in manufacturing, we all agree that we need to change our direction.”
To help figure out how to change direction, and exactly what direction to take, the Economic Development Commission has hired consultants Greenfield Associates.
Robin Spinks, Greenfield president, has worked nationally as an economic development official, an industrial developer and a consultant to companies on selecting sites for new facilities.
She said the scope of her study will include defining what industries Rowan wants to target, interviewing companies in those industries to learn what they would want in a new location, comparing those desires to what Rowan offers and, finally, going after some of those companies.
The interviews will include old-line companies like IBM and young turks like Amazon.com, she said. And the consultants will dig into not just what they need in factories or offices, but what they want in a corporate home.
“Companies have personalities just like people do,” Spinks said.“Some want to live in the country, some want to live in town. ... What we’ll find out is what message we need to give to them to make them move here.”
She said the cost of the study will run between $23,000 and $50,000, depending on how extensive the county wants to make the process, especially the company contacts and visits.
The length of the study, about four to six months, should give the county time to develop a plan to market itself to the industries it chooses. Vitner predicts the economy won’t experience a substantial upswing until 2002.
“It’s going to be a tough time, in the next year, to recruit a whole lot of new business,” he said.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be growth in the meantime.
Last year, 43 percent of the state’s economic expansion took place in the Charlotte region, said John Hunter, director of economic development for the Charlotte Regional Partnership.
Though venture capital dollars aren’t as easy to come by as in recent years, Charlotte now gets a bigger share of that money than in the past, he said.
Manufacturing won’t completely disappear, though it is changing from labor-intensive to capital-intensive, which relies on a big investment in automated processes.
The region is increasingly getting the attention of Japanese companies. Hunter cited one Japanese food-processing company that has placed Rowan on its “short list” for a potential plant site.
The company could initially invest around $50 million and increase its investment to $400 million, but would only employ around 30 people, Hunter said. He declined to elaborate further.
And Hunter suggested the county consider recruiting to create a “cluster” of companies from one industry, which he said is an increasingly common economic development tool.
He gave Catawba County as an example. Catawba is home to several fiber-optics cable plants, and is looking to increase its education offerings in the fiber-optics field.
Rowan, he said, could be attractive to high-tech companies because of its proximity to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which houses one of only two public engineering schools in the state.
But Vitner cautioned the county not to become too enamored with “high-tech” industries as the key to prosperity’s door. Nashville, he pointed out, landed a Dell computer factory. Workers there start at $6.50 an hour.
Vitner said pharmaceutical makers and medical-equipment manufacturers would make attractive targets, and both industries are looking for sites with large labor pools.
He said the county shouldn’t rule out industries like warehousing and distribution, which tend toward areas with access to highways like I-85.
Steve Blount, chairman of the Rowan County Board of Commissioners, said the county should ready itself to take advantage of its position and control its own economic destiny.
“I think we’re getting ready to go through some major shifts, and this kind of forum gives us the information we need to make good decisions now to help us become the best community we can become,” he said.
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