Economic Incentives: County By County | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Sarah Curry, who is Director of Fiscal Policy Studies for the John Locke Foundation.

    We hear a lot about the state of North Carolina and how much they give in economic development dollars to private businesses — but what about the counties? County governments have their own agendas when it comes to economic development and can choose whether or not to participate in these sorts of activities. Unfortunately, it is not easy to find out how much the counties spend on economic development, because there is no single data source that tracks the expenditure of tax revenue on economic development activities at the local level. To address this need, JLF collected and categorized economic development spending in all 100 counties in North Carolina.

    What we found was that, between FY 2009 and FY 2014, 81 of North Carolina's 100 counties participated in economic development activities. Counties entered into 776 contracts worth nearly $284 million in incentives over the five-year period. Actual payments, however, totaled $144 million.

    At the state level we hear the argument that rural or poor counties need economic development more than wealthy counties, but after collecting and analyzing the data, we found no obvious relationship between the wealth or development level of counties and the amount they spent on economic development incentives.

    North Carolina lawmakers should mandate that counties meet a standardized reporting requirement for all economic development activities. Elected officials should then use this information to evaluate whether the costs of incentives outweigh the benefits. Below are the top five counties that paid incentives to private businesses over a five-year time period.

County	Approved Incentives	County	Approved Incentives per Capita
Iredell	$ 35,962,245	Iredell	$ 222.65
Buncombe	$ 29,728,143	Davie	$ 173.92
Forsyth	$ 27,859,345	Halifax	$ 150.92
Mecklenburg	$ 25,296,832	Lenoir	$ 133.96
Wake	$ 18,499,844	Buncombe	$ 121.91

    Many of the agreements that counties approve for economic development do not come to fruition because the company does not create the promised jobs or does not make the required investment in infrastructure. The problem with this is that counties are agreeing to pay million in incentives, yet they bet on companies not complying so that they won't have to actually pay for it. If every agreement were honored, county property tax rates would soar to pay for these incentive deals. Below are the top five counties that approved incentives to private businesses over a five-year time period.

County	Paid Incentives	County	Paid Incentives per Capita
Durham	$ 9,181,812	Wilson	$ 105.35
Wilson	$ 8,573,178	Person	$ 63.60
Catawba	$ 8,507,650	Lee	$ 59.35
Wake	$ 7,931,128	Lincoln	$ 57.26
Iredell	$ 7,657,306	Catawba	$ 54.89

    If you want to read more about these local government incentives, click here for the entire report, which details incentives for every county in the state from 2009 to 2014.