Rural Center's ineptness cost the Washington and Beaufort County taxpayer's over $200,000 | Eastern North Carolina Now

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

    The N. C. Rural Center has come under fire as a result of a State Auditor's report that said, among other things, that the Center maintained inadequate accountability for grants it gave to businesses that were to create "new jobs." Michael Beisecker and Gary Robertson writing for the Associated Press have be best summary we've seen of the Rural Center debacle in this report posted at the Island Packet.

    But for those who have been keeping up with the Carver sewer line project here in Beaufort County this story came as no surprise.

    We've reported extensively on the Carver project. You can review these articles simply by typing "Carver" into the "Site Search" box on the right sidebar of this page, but this article summarizes the story of how the Beaufort and Washington taxpayers got the shaft from the Rural Center's poor grant management techniques.

    The Rural Center approved a grant based on the idea that Carver would "create jobs." But not only did Carver not create the jobs the company itself, and more particularly the top management of Carver, were not even held to account for the jobs. The taxpayers were the ones who had to guarantee the jobs.

    Carver employees have told us, some by posting Feedback comments here, that top management officials openly said that they did not promise to create any jobs. They said they were never required to create a certain number of jobs and back that up with collateral. But the Rural Center gave the money anyway.

    Moreover, the Rural Center allowed the county and city to cook the books on the number of jobs created by counting jobs that were not created by the sewer line. While that helped save the Beaufort and Washington taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, it nonetheless raises questions about how sufficient the Rural Centers' accountability standards were.

    In private business, where a business was borrowing money from a reputable bank, this would conceivably be labeled fraud. But for county, state and "non-profit" economic development operators, it's just the way things are done.

    What remains to be seen is whether the state will now move to see that there will be no more "Rural Centers."