County's economic development program continues to flounder | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    This is the second in our series on the "phenomenal" 3-12-12 Board of Commissioners meeting.

    In this report you will find video of public comments offered to the board by Warren Smith. The subject is, again, the economic development program in Beaufort County. This is actually a repeat of several earlier attempts by Mr. Smith to get the board to furnish information supporting the expenditure of approximately eight million dollars on the program in the last half dozen years or so. As you will see, there is not much more of a constructive response this time than there has been on previous occasions.

    In the event that you may not know when Mr. Smith speaks to the "86% study" he is referring to an assertion by Tom Thompson, Director of Economic Development, on several occasions that 86% of the prospects looking to locate a business want a ready-made building. Mr. Smith has asked several times to see a copy of that study and no one has been able to produce it. Yet that is a large part of how building the Quick Start II building was justified. But it has sat empty since being constructed.

    Mr. Smith again addresses the lack of consistency in the 'jobs created' numbers offered by the EDC, as well as, the absence of any baseline employment guidelines. The lack of consistency and the failure to quote baseline employment numbers make it more difficult to both evaluate the actual contribution made by the grant to the community and to evaluate the recipient's compliance with the terms of the grant.

    Later in the meeting there was a report on the maintenance problems the building is experiencing and then even later in the meeting there is a discussion about whether to list the building on the open market. All of this fits together. The phenomenal thing about this is in the final video when you hear Commissioner Al Klemm use the exact same rationale justifying the "spec building" approach to economic development that clearly has not been effective, as Mr. Smith explains to them.

    Here's the first clip of Mr. Smith's presentation:



    The second clip of Mr. Smith's presentation also contains yet another phenomenal exhibit. The discussion speaks for itself but we have to say that Mr. McRoy's focus on this issue is absolutely phenomenal. What McRoy tries to do--which he flubs miserably-- is the classic "straw man" argument. That is, he ties to find one grain of sand in a huge dirt pile that he can contest--and yet he does not even have his numbers that he can clearly posit ---as if whether it was six million or something more or less spent on their economic development strategy is the issue. McRoy challenges Smith's numbers but can't explain, much less defend, his own numbers while obviously completely missing the main point: The effectiveness of the county's economic development program. This is an amazing exchange but Mr. Smith very aptly puts it in perspective in his response to Mr. McRoy.



    In the next clip you hear a report from Jim Spain, the county's Maintenance Director, who gives an update on the repairs to the Quick Start II building. This is a rather technical presentation but it does give you a feel for some of the problems and rehabilitation efforts they've been going through on the building:



    The next clip is simply a continuation of Mr. Spain's report:



    In the fourth clip you see one of the most--here's that word again--phenomenal exhibits of absurdity we have seen in a long time. Al Klemm, in the face of overwhelming--and to date uncontested--evidence wants to stick to the same strategy that has not work for four years. It is an amazing exhibition.