Taxpayers get the shaft on Quick Start II | Eastern North Carolina Now

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

    The Beaufort County Commissioners think they have a buyer for the ill-fated Quick Start II building in the Washington Industrial Park. The board voted Tuesday, after a closed door session, to accept an offer for $1,050,000 for the building which originally cost $2.4 million. So the Beaufort County taxpayers are getting less than 50% of what they have in the building, not counting all the maintenance costs that have been poured into it in recent month and the interest on the money.

    "I voted for it..." Hood Richardson told us, "...because we need to get the thing off our hands and onto the tax rolls. The appraisal we were furnished valued the building at between $900,000 and $1,070,000 in the current market. It is time we cut our losses and move on," he said.

    The deal is contingent on the new owner producing 35 jobs within eighteen months, but there is no provision in the deal for how long those jobs must be maintained. Consequently, it would appear that the owner can walk away from the deal after 18 months with no "clawback" to the county.

    There is also a provision in the deal that a natural gas line must be run to the site at no cost to the County but if no gas company will supply gas the buyer can back out.

    The offer must be advertised for upset bids and if another buyer offers more then this deal is null. That does not seem likely in that the building has not attracted any serious offers for four years.

    The irony of all this is that just six months ago Tommy Thompson, in a video recorded presentation, and EDC board member Al Klemm claimed the building was worth $2.1 million and "prospects are good that it will be sold soon for that amount." Yet today Klemm was one of the votes to sell it for less than half what he claimed it was worth just six months ago.

    It is unclear whether the buyer of the building can move some or all of the 35 jobs from another operation within the county. Nothing in the motion appears to prevent that from happening, but we have not been furnished a copy of the formal motion and the discussion was in secret.

    A source not in the meeting tells us that it appears that this is part of a scheme to use the building to supply an existing company in the county with products produced in the new building. If that is true then our source speculates that the reality would be that no new jobs would be created simply because they would displace jobs that would have operated at another location within the county and thus the real effect would be no jobs. The county has previously done a similar "shell game" on jobs with another recent incentives deal. And there is no way, from what we have been told, that one can determine whether this deal will increase the tax base as much as another alternative of the company being supplied might have produced. Thus, the job creation claim is dubious, at best, and the increase tax base may be equally dubious. It's hard to tell, at least until a little sunlight gets let into the deal.

    Commentary

    This is a bad deal for the taxpayers of Beaufort County. It is such a bad deal that somebody ought to have to pay for it. That "somebody" we feel are the people who decided to build the building in the first place. It was a terrible decision. Classic buy high, sell low. The EDC, Committee of 100 and Gang of Five speculated with taxpayers' money and we lost.

    Remember, you can't sell this turkey but once. The simple fact is that if it goes for $1.07 million we can never recoup what we have in it. They are selling it at a 'give-away' price. Everyone who was involved in this boondoggle should be ashamed of themselves. What makes it worse is that they used taxpayer money to gamble with and they lost.

    To be sure this bunch will now have learned their lesson. "If you build it, there is no assurance they will come." They have dumped six million dollars down the toilet.

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