Business North Carolina March 2021

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CaroMont Health CEO Chris Peek and medical chief Todd Davis lead one of the state’s biggest independent hospitals as health care consolidates in a hurry.

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The first Black woman to represent N.C. in Congress has had a lifelong passion for boosting rural America.

MARCH 2021

14 POINT TAKEN

An N.C. Justice Center scholar stresses the importance of thinking of the “three North Carolinas” — the urban, the white rural and the Black Belt.

16 NC TREND

Outdoor craze fills state parks; Waynesville’s full-service shop; a Lumbee-owned winery with deep roots; Guilford’s cash grab; new investment firm attracts big-name backers.

COVER STORY

MOUNTING PRESTIGE

Gastonia’s CaroMont Health foresees an independent future as it faces off against larger neighboring rivals.

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BY EDWARD MARTIN

82 TOWN SQUARE

As the auto and battery industries shift gears, Bessemer City is a hot spot for lithium.

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SHARED VALUES

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The pandemic has hurt the travel and tourism industry, but a slowing spread of the virus and vaccinations give businesses a brighter outlook.

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CO V E R P H O TO B Y P E T E R TAY L O R

March 2021, Vol. 41, No. 3 (ISSN 0279-4276). Business North Carolina is published monthly by Business North Carolina at 1230 West Morehead Street, Suite 308 Charlotte, NC 28208.

Telephone: 704-523-6987. Fax: 704-523-4211. All contents copyright © by Old North State Magazines LLC. Subscription rate: 1 year, $30. For change of address, send mailing label and allow six to eight weeks. Periodicals postage paid at Charlotte, NC, and additional offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Business North Carolina, 1230 West Morehead Street, Suite 308 Charlotte, NC 28208 or email circulation@businessnc.com.

Our annual list spotlights the state’s top-performing medical centers, based on federal and other data.

BY PETE ANDERSON

ATRIUM GETS SCHOOLED

72 FARMING

Despite pandemic challenges, North Carolina’s agriculture industry found innovative ways to deliver products over the past year.

BY MICHAEL SOLENDER

NORTH CAROLINA’S BEST HOSPITALS

North Carolina’s 58 community colleges play a huge role in the state’s thriving economy.

70 DESTINATION N.C.

Todd Collins sees community kitchens as a smart niche as food purveyors face a shifting market.

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Wake Forest School of Medicine’s growth lifts Charlotte’s spirits.

Winston-Salem crosses its fingers.

BY DAVID MILDENBERG

Start your day with business news from across the state, direct to your inbox.

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UPFRONT

► David Mildenberg

ENOUGH ALREADY

G

etting through the COVID-19 pandemic to a more normal status can’t come soon enough for me.

Sure, the freedom of working from home has many advantages for those of us with jobs that permit that alternative.

But decades of working in noisy offices has me addicted to the benefits of socializing with others, a work-life perk that I’ve never taken for granted. Much of my career has involved working in a lineup of desks, usually a couple of feet away from colleagues. The mantra “there’s no news in the newsroom” had me gone much of the time, anyway. But the setting seemed right.

My least favorite office environment was the basement newsroom of the Texas State Capitol, a beautiful building that was expanded and redesigned in the mid-1990s to provide virtually every office with natural lighting. But politicians don’t want newsies around, so they created a windowless newsroom that everyone calls “the dungeon,” a place without a redeeming quality except its proximity to the cafeteria.

Fortunately, the camaraderie of journalists there overshadowed the bleak environment. A newcomer could learn more about Texas in a week from those folks than through years of academic study.

Mostly, though, I’ve missed being around the great folks who make our magazine shine. Working from home, they’ve sustained Business North Carolina through this unexpected crisis.

Let me tell you a little about five folks who play key roles.

Creative Manager Peggy Knaack joined our company last year, taking over many duties previously handled by Moira Johnson, who retired after more than 30 years with BNC. Peggy moved a half-dozen times — her dad worked for Corning — before she graduated from high school in Cleveland. After graduating from Miami University of Ohio, she worked in Chicago for a decade before moving to Charlotte in 2003, where she’s been a graphic designer and magazine publisher. Peggy’s title fits her skills as she constantly raises the quality bar for the magazine and our digital efforts. She and her husband are raising two kids; one is heading to college this fall.

Art Director Ralph Voltz is a German native who moved to Melbourne, Fla., to

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attend high school and is a graduate of Savannah College of Art & Design. His late father, William Voltz, was a prolific science fiction writer. Ralph is a masterful illustrator who has taught collegiate graphic arts courses for many years. A soccer nut, he and his wife are raising two delightful daughters, who — big surprise — happen to be excellent soccer players.

Marketing Coordinator Jennifer Ware is our sole Sandlapper, a native of Florence, S.C., and a graduate of the University of South Carolina. She and her husband lived in Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta before moving to Charlotte about 20 years ago. They also have two cool sons; one is attending Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. Jennifer can fix any printer, design any brochure and solve most any problem with aplomb.

Our sales team is made up of two outstanding teammates.

Melanie Weaver Lynch is in her 20th year at the magazine, reflecting her key loyalty and success. She grew up in Wake County and is an N.C. State University graduate who is the regional account manager covering the eastern half of the state.

Raising two great kids with her husband is her main focus, but she also loves to serve her customers. She mixes world-class tenacity with a warm spirit that is instantly evident. I love how she advocates for her clients while respecting the editorial integrity for which BNC strives.

Sue Graf just completed her third year as the magazine’s regional account manager in Charlotte. She is a water-sports aficionado, having grown up on Long Island in Port Washington, N.Y., where she was a competitive swimmer. She attended University of Rhode Island, where her sailing team ranked as the nation’s best during her senior year. She later worked in sports marketing in Manhattan and Connecticut, then moved to Charlotte in 2004, where she’s been involved with several magazines and nonprofits. Her entrepreneurial son attends UNC Chapel Hill.

Get those shots, guys. I miss you!

Contact David Mildenberg at dmildenberg@businessnc.com.

V O L U M E 4 1 , N O. 3 PUBLISHER

Ben Kinney

bkinney@businessnc.com EDITOR

David Mildenberg

dmildenberg@businessnc.com MANAGING EDITOR

Taylor Wanbaugh

twanbaugh@businessnc.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Cathy Martin

cmartin@businessnc.com SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Edward Martin

emartin@businessnc.com SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR

Pete Anderson

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Dan Barkin, Page Leggett, Vanessa Infanzon, Bryan Mims, Shannon Cuthrell, Mark Tosczak, Michael Solender, Wiley Cash CREATIVE MANAGER

Peggy Knaack

pknaack@businessnc.com ART DIRECTOR

Ralph Voltz

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Peter Taylor, Alex Cason MARKETING COORDINATOR

Jennifer Ware

jware@businessnc.com AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT SPECIALIST

Scott Leonard

sleonard@businessnc.com

ADVERTISING SALES ACCOUNT MANAGERS

Sue Graf, western N.C. 704-523-4350 sgraf@businessnc.com

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BNC ONLINE

We love getting feedback from our readers.

Here’s a sampling of what you had to say about Business North Carolina on social media last month.

NC Retail Merchants @NCRMA Great to see @omarjorge of @comparefoods @MarvinREllison of @Lowes and Sri Donthi of @AdvanceAuto profiled in @BusinessNC as Dynamic Diversity Leaders #ncpol #SHOPNC

Yolanda W. Rabun @YolandaRabun

Dynamic Diversity

I opened my @BusinessNC magazine @TimothyHumphrey, saw our @IBM Embrace full page and said Yaaaasss!! then turned to your profile and said Yes!!! Yes!!! Yes!! congrats!

Mike Hawkins @MHCommissioner Thanks @BusinessNC — Love reading about these amazing achievers — and living vicariously by being able to say “I know her/him!” Strong @edpnc representation in this group

MANDY COHEN TAKES HER BEST SHOT HOUSING PRICES SOAR • SPENCER ROBBINS’ HIGH COUNTRY IMPACT • A JEWEL OF THE TRIAD

Dynamic Diversity

Natalie Haskins English Thanks to David Mildenberg and Business North Carolina for highlighting all the "Hot" things happening in Wilmington. We've always had a diverse and thriving economy. The rest of the world is finally learning about it thanks to publicity and concerted efforts by our community to tell everyone why they should #ChooseCapeFear. Thanks to Jim Roberts and the Cape Fear Future Foundation board of directors for your work.

Daily Digest: Hot Wilmington; UNC Health's outlook

Michael McRae

Millwright at Weyerhaeuser

Piedmont Triad, NC @ptpNC One of the many lively small towns here!!

The Sherrills helped my family through some very scary & tough times... I’ll always be grateful and they will always hold a special place in my heart. I’m very pleased to see them and SteelFab receive this recognition

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As the state’s executive suites and boardrooms become more inclusive, BNC profiles an array of distinctive leaders.

Dynamic Diversity

Town Square: Jamestown

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Timothy Humphrey @TimothyHumphrey

Business North Carolina

Grateful to be profiled for this issue @BusinessNC! North Carolina's companies wouldn't be the same without diversity of thought and perspective.

Dynamic Diversity

Von Nguyen @drvonnguyen Proud to see @BlueCrossNC in @BusinessNC’s list. “Powerful positions in North Carolina’s business and professional communities are increasingly filled by people with diverse backgrounds, thereby becoming more reflective of the overall community.”

Dynamic Diversity

Our February issue is here! Read about diverse, powerful leaders from across the state; a profile on Dr. Mandy Cohen, who has become the face of North Carolina's pandemic response; Spencer Robbins' impact on High Country development; unique women-run small businesses in the state, and more.

Timothy Humphrey #Diversity and #inclusion matters. Honored to be one of the executives featured in Business North Carolina's February 2021 issue!

Angela Haynie Congratulations Tim Michael Morris North Carolina is in the business of producing and growing leaders!

Darcee Brunson Congratulations Tim! They picked a winner!

Dynamic Diversity

Read these stories and more at

businessnc.com.

Sign up to receive our free Daily Digest newsletter at businessnc.com/daily-digest/.

FOLLOW US Business North Carolina @BusinessNC Business North Carolina @businessnorthcarolina

Check out Business North Carolina’s weekly podcast on Wednesdays at 10 a.m. at

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EVA CLAYTON The first Black woman to represent North Carolina in Congress has had a lifelong passion for boosting rural America.

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n 1992, Democrat Eva McPherson Clayton made history when she became the first Black woman in North Carolina to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She and Mel Watt were the first Black congressional representatives elected in the state since 1898.

Clayton, 86, held her seat for five terms in the 1st Congressional District covering much of northeastern North Carolina.

In the years leading up to Congress, the Savannah, Ga., native advocated for rural communities through several organizations. In 1970, she became the first director of the N.C. Health Careers Access Program. She later moved to the Soul City Foundation, the brainchild of civil-rights activist Floyd McKissick in the mid-1970s.

President Richard Nixon approved a $14 million federal grant in 1972 to build a town organized by Black businesses in Warren County. Although Soul City still exists, the project never got off the ground during a difficult economic period and in the face of strong opposition from some N.C. leaders including former Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican, and U.S. Rep. L.H. Fountain, a Democrat.

Under Gov. Jim Hunt, Clayton was appointed assistant secretary of the N.C. Department of Natural Resources and Community Development in 1977. She stayed active politically, serving on the Warren County Board of Commissioners for eight years.

After leaving Congress in 2003, she accepted an assistant director general position in Rome with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for three years. She organized 24 national partnerships and alliances worldwide to fight hunger and poverty.

Clayton now lives at Lake Gaston, writing op-eds and serving on a few boards. Encouraging the production of healthy food by small farmers continues to interest her. Comments are edited for length and clarity.

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Early in my life, I wanted to be a missionary doctor in Africa to heal the sick and help the poor. I attended college with that goal.

My biology teacher recommended Johnson C. Smith University, and I received a scholarship.

I majored in biology and general science. I also met Theaoseus Clayton, my future husband, my ▲ Eva Clayton taught at Kittrell Junior freshman year. [He was] College in Warren County before drafted into the military. attending law school.

Upon his return to college, we graduated together and married that December.

I held on to my goal of going to medical school after my husband graduated from law school and the birth of our two children. I earned a graduate degree in biology with the idea this would help [with] my acceptance into medical school.

Although I never applied to medical school, the same driving force of wanting to serve and make a difference inspired me to seek other opportunities.

My opportunities to serve were significantly enhanced when my husband accepted the offer to come to rural Warren County to form the first integrated law firm in North Carolina: Gilliland & Clayton in Warrenton. Generally recognized, where there are challenges, there are opportunities. Warren County and eastern North Carolina had a lot of both. Segregation ruled the schools and facilities, and [there was] limited

PHOTOS COURTESY OF EVA CLAYTON

BY VANESSA INFANZON

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voting participation by Blacks. [Then] began the civil rights movement.

I began my activism by demonstrating against segregated eating facilities, including one owned by my husband’s white partner, and [participating in] voter-registration projects with American Friends Service Committee. I briefly entered law school and failed to manage law school rigor and take care of four children. I was a dropout.

In 1968, I ran for the U.S. House of Representatives

against Congressman L.H. Fountain in the primary. I lost royally but increased voter registration, especially among Blacks, throughout the district. Other persons and I in the South were encouraged to run for public office by the Voter Education Project to increase voter participation. The reason I ran then was because no man would volunteer. Could it have been the odds were too high that Congressman Fountain would win? (Fountain, a Tarboro lawyer, served in Congress for 30 years, from 1953 to 1983.)

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In 1992, I decided to run again for the U.S. House of Representatives. The N.C. General Assembly drew new congressional districts. The new 1st Congressional District had much more favorable demographics for Blacks but was more physically challenging to campaign for than in 1968, [since it grew] from 18 counties to 28 counties. [There were] more men interested in this race than in 1968; I wonder why? Four Blacks and one white [man] were the five primary candidates. In the primary elections, Walter Jones Jr. led with 38%, and I had 35%. Forty percent [was] required to win in a multicandidate race. I called for a runoff and won. I had lots of community support in my campaign.

I ran as an individual, a Black woman who believed in herself, with faith in God and a desire to make a difference in her community. I said at my election, “I too sing America.”

1992 was the first “year of the woman” in Congress [because] women of all races were winning and assuming leadership roles.

I was the first woman to be elected president of a freshman class in 1993.

While in Congress, I served on agriculture, small business and budget committees. I voted against NAFTA because I considered it would hurt small communities dependent on factories and small businesses. I voted for bills I thought would enhance lives, support the economy and protect our nation. I was considered a moderate.

Today, small farmers are struggling and fading out fast.

There needs to be an intervention in the agriculture industry if small farmers are to have an opportunity to contribute and survive. I assisted Black farmers who, over the years, were discriminated against by the Department of Agriculture. These farmers lost their land and [were] denied loans and assistance they were entitled to receive. Hundreds of Black farmers gained the right to sue in court and won. (The USDA settled the Pigford vs.

Glickman class-action lawsuit involving racial discrimination in

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF EVA CLAYTON

▲ Clayton was the first woman to be elected president of a freshman class in Congress in 1993, top. Her late husband, Theaoseus Theaboyd “T.T” Clayton Sr., middle right, was a longtime Warrenton attorney.

1989, leading to more than $1 billion in payouts.) Black farmers are very few and aging out. The government needs to intervene with initiatives and support to encourage our young students to consider agriculture, including farming, as a career.

I served as co-chair of the [Congressional] Rural Caucus to elevate the needs and opportunities of rural communities in America. Currently, there is still the need to promote rural America. These needs have significantly increased because of COVID-19. The health and economy of these communities must be addressed immediately. We can start by passing Medicaid expansion and providing broadband in North Carolina. The federal and state governments should fund small businesses and agricultural opportunities. [They should] pursue opportunities that allow the partnership between urban and rural economies to complement each other.

Rural communities are often ignored or treated as an afterthought by elected officials. Rural communities across America and North Carolina are resilient, though struggling.

[They are] the source of our food, natural resources and recreation. We should protect and support their prosperity. Rural communities offer opportunities for alternative-energy development.

My most memorable vote and legislative engagement was the writing and approval of the farm bill in 2002. The vote I regret most was my vote for the Iraq War. I knew in my heart we weren’t confident that we were fighting the right people. I think I regret it because I didn’t have the courage to vote [for] what I really believed. ■

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WHY ORGANIZATIONAL FINANCIAL WELLNESS MATTERS This is the ninth in a series of informative monthly articles for North Carolina businesses from PNC in collaboration with BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA magazine.

During the past year, companies have communicated extensively with their employees about wellness – particularly in the context of health. Not to be overlooked, however, is financial wellness, which extends beyond the framework of financial literacy and empowers employees to build strong financial habits – while also contributing to a more confident, productive workforce.

Financial wellness is the No. 1 employer benefit that employees would most like to see added to their benefits in the future.1 And as companies and employees continue on the road toward economic recovery, financial wellness will remain an important consideration.

HOW EMPLOYEES’ FINANCIAL STRESSORS IMPACT EMPLOYERS When PNC Organizational Financial Wellness Market Managers Adam Butler and Stephanie Hughes sit down with N.C. businesses to discuss financial wellness programs, it’s not uncommon for them to share the following pre-pandemic data points2, which help bring context to the impact employees’ financial stressors pose to employers: • Financially stressed employees cost American businesses $500 billion annually in productivity.

• 49% of employees admit to spending three or more hours per week thinking about financial stressors at work.

• 47% of employees say that finances are a distraction.

• 26% of employees admit their productivity has been impacted by financial stressors.

• 10% of employees miss work occasionally due to financial stressors.

Furthermore, the cost of financial stress on an organization, in lost productivity and absenteeism, translates to more than $1,900 per employee, per year.3 “When you consider this impact, it’s clear to see that the cost of implementing a financial wellness program pales in comparison,” said Butler.

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IMPLEMENTING A FINANCIAL WELLNESS PROGRAM Financial wellness programs that are mutually beneficial to both employers and employees should take into account the unique needs at all levels of the organization. And while there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, Butler and Hughes say the following four elements are foundational to a solid financial wellness program.

1. Workplace banking: A strong bank-at-work program should offer a variety of account options for employees.

It also should offer onsite and virtual financial services, as well as workshops and informational events that address topics such as direct deposit sign-ups, applying for mort- gages, understanding various credit card programs and how they meet employees’ needs, and how to use digital money management tools. It’s important to note that this program should come at no cost or burden to the employee.

2. Consumer-directed healthcare: A Health Savings Account, or HSA, has become a common way to pay for healthcare; however, there are benefits of an HSA that are often over looked. Therefore, it is vitally important for employees to know how to use the tools they have available to them.

3. Digital financial assessment and resource center: To help motivate employee participation and improve their financial acumen, a successful financial wellness program should offer a customizable, digital tool. This tool should allow employees to assess their financial wellness, access a complete financial education curriculum, and earn points for tracking progress toward their goals. It also should allow the company administrator to gather insights on employee engagement and data trends, and provide reporting insights to assist with employee priorities and education.

4. Retirement plan and fiduciary investment services: Financial independence includes the ability for employees to retire on their own terms – without worrying if they can afford to do so. Successful retirement plan programs focus on everything from investment selection to policy assistance.

These programs also offer a dedicated resource for annual education campaigns, which often include surveys, online tools, live and virtual meetings, webinars and more.

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THE PNC ORGANIZATIONAL FINANCIAL WELLNESS APPROACH In October 2020, PNC launched the formation of a new financial wellness business called PNC Organizational Financial Wellness. While PNC has offered a number of financial wellness solutions across its lines of business for years, it has now established a cohesive team and strategy to better deliver comprehensive solutions and value-added guidance.

Through this offering, PNC is providing comprehensive financial wellness guidance and workplace solutions to clients through Financial Wellness Consultants, who serve as key business partners to the human resources suite.

“Financial Wellness Consultants collaborate closely with organizations’ human resources decision-makers or dedicated benefits managers to design custom programs, taking into account the unique needs and goals of organizations and their employees,” said Hughes.

For more information, please contact your PNC Relationship Manager or visit www.pnc.com/wellness.

THE OUTCOME OF FINANCIAL WELLNESS PROGRAMS

Employees say financial wellness programs have helped them1:

• Prepare to retire (47%) • Control spending (29%) • Pay off debt (29%) • Save more for major goals – e.g., home, education (29%) • Better manage investments and asset allocation (29%) • Better manage healthcare expenses (18%)

Regional Presidents: Weston Andress, Western Carolinas: (704) 643-5581 Jim Hansen, Eastern Carolinas: (919) 835-0135

Important Legal Disclosures and Information This article was prepared for general information purposes only and is not intended as legal, tax or accounting advice or as recommendations to engage in any specific transaction, including with respect to any securities of PNC, and do not purport to be comprehensive. Under no circumstances should any information contained in this article be used or considered as an offer or commitment, or a solicitation of an offer or commitment, to participate in any particular transaction or strategy. Any reliance upon any such information is solely and exclusively at your own risk. Please consult your own counsel, accountant or other advisor regarding your specific situation. Neither PNC Bank nor any other subsidiary of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. will be responsible for any consequences of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained here, or any omission. Any opinions expressed in this article are subject to change without notice.

PNC is a registered mark of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (“PNC”).

Banking and lending products and services, bank deposit products and treasury management services for clients and/or customers are provided by PNC Bank, National Association, a wholly-owned subsidiary of PNC and Member FDIC. ©2021 The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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2019 Employee Financial Wellness Survey, PricewaterhouseCoopers The Employer’s Guide to Financial Wellness — 2019, Salary Finance, 2019 John Hancock 2019 Financial Stress Survey M A R C H

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P O I N T TA K E N

► Dan Barkin

THREE PARTS OF A WHOLE An N.C. Justice Center scholar stresses the importance of thinking of the “three North Carolinas” — the urban, the white rural and the Black Belt.

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The numbers

Some counties in the Black Belt region saw growth in recent decades, in part because they were fortunate to be near major military installations, such as Cumberland, Hoke and Wayne counties. East Carolina University spurred growth around Greenville in Pitt County. But some counties weren’t lucky enough to have the military or a university nearby. Ten counties

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▲ William Munn

either lost population or were flat over the past 40 years. Counties with substantial percentages of Black people such as Anson (48.5%), Bertie (61.1%), Halifax (53.8%), Lenoir (41.4%), Martin (42.1%), and Northampton (57.2%) have lost population since 1980.

Overall, North Carolina’s population has grown by nearly 80% over the past 40 years. It has been driven by the Charlotte/ Mecklenburg County area, the Raleigh-Durham area and the Triad region, but also by counties near urban centers such as Brunswick, Union, Cabarrus and Johnston.

I was particularly interested in the counties that were not urban or urban-adjacent and were not in the Black Belt. These were the 33 counties, most with lower minority populations than those in the Black Belt, many of them in the Piedmont and mountains, that Munn identified as “rural.” I ran the population numbers since 1980. Only one has lost population, coastal Hyde County, with a population of about 5,000. So when we talk

PHOTO COURTESY OF WILLIAM MUNN

ou hear a lot that there are “two North Carolinas.” I have used the term. It means there is a prosperous urban North Carolina and a less prosperous rural one. Headline writers like this a lot.

But are there just two, or are there three?

William Munn of the North Carolina Justice Center makes an argument for three: There is urban North Carolina, there is a predominantly white rural North Carolina, and then there is what he calls the Black Belt — counties with high populations of Black people, mostly in the Coastal Plain.

Munn, a Fayetteville native, wondered about the lingering effects of slavery and institutional racism in the places where he was raised by his educator parents.

His search for answers resulted in a doctoral dissertation completed in 2016, titled Running Away From Home: Social and Economic Explanators of Net Migration in North Carolina Black Belt Counties.

Many scholars have studied the Black Belt, which runs from the Deep South northward to Virginia; Munn focused on eastern North Carolina.

The problem with the two North Carolinas construct is that it lumps nonurban counties together as if they have the same past.

“The structures of slavery, the structures of the subsequent sharecropper economy keeping Black people in subservient roles, keeping them away from being able to exercise the right to vote, create intergenerational wealth,” Munn says. “Those structures have helped create the disparities that we see in health, education and leadership.

“When you look at the map of the counties that had the highest proportion of slave population, it directly overlays with female poverty today, food insecurity,” he says. “Those are things that if you look around, as I did when I was 9 years old, ... and you went, ‘I don’t think I want to live here in Washington County or Bertie County,’ those are the things that show up, and you decide that you probably want to live somewhere else and do something else.”

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about the parts of North Carolina that aren’t Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro or Wilmington, we need to be specific.

Many rural counties have suffered job losses as textile and furniture companies have left, but they have retooled their economies, retrained their workforces and attracted new industries.

They have become retirement destinations and exurbs for folks willing to do longer commutes, or — lately — able to telecommute. Many still need help, but they have grown.

Munn focused on less-resilient counties in the east and northeast that are struggling to keep population — places that shared a common history.

Key indicators, he found, tend to predict whether people will come or go. Young people may not run the numbers, but they don’t have to. They can see what is happening around them to their friends and families and neighbors. In the Black Belt, as a whole, the rate of high school graduation and median household income lags that in urban counties. Child poverty rates have been significantly higher.

Here is how Munn put it in his dissertation: “[It] is not hard to deduce what kind of effect [these factors have] on a graduating college senior’s thought process when deciding whether or not to return to Tyrrell County to build a career, family and home. The student likely has not seen these stark quantitative incongruities but may have witnessed them manifest in a lived experience where utility shutoffs, school dropouts and incarcerations were not uncommon occurrences. These experiences and subsequent decisions have a profound impact on the Black Belt and its leadership.”

Some background

Munn graduated from Goldsboro High School in the late ’90s and got an undergraduate degree from Fayetteville State University. Then he worked in former Rep. Bob Etheridge’s Lillington office and then did similar work for Rep. David Price in his Fayetteville office while getting his master’s degree at UNC Pembroke. In 2013, he became a doctoral student at N.C. A&T State University.

Today, Munn works as a policy analyst for the Justice Center, focusing on health policy.

We talked about Cumberland County, with a population that is 39% Black. A few years ago, Munn was asked to talk to a group in Fayetteville. Cumberland County is, despite growing by more than a third over the past 40 years and serving as home to Fort Bragg, what the N.C. Department of Commerce classifies as a Tier 1 economically distressed county. Per capita property values in the county, on the western edge of the Black Belt, are half what they are in Wake County.

Here is what he recalls telling them: “You can’t structurally tie the hands of one-third of your population for the last 300 years and then wake up in 2019 and decide, ‘Oh, well, we want to be a Tier 3 county.’ You’ve done things to retard the growth of 30%, 40% of your population here, and now you wonder why we’re a Tier 1 county?

“And I was very explicit about the ideology, the thought process of the people who would continue to do these things,

and how it’s still prevalent, but more importantly, how it turns into policy. I have a simple equation: Ideology plus policy turns into outcomes.”

One policy is the way North Carolina pays for public schools, which is dependent in a significant way on local property taxes, which impacts how much poor counties can spend to retain good teachers. Meanwhile, companies don’t want to invest where they can’t hire an educated workforce, and parents don’t want to move to counties with subpar schools. So, as Munn suggested in his dissertation, North Carolina needs to break this low-wealth “vicious cycle” by rethinking the way it funds poorer districts to provide these counties a “fighting chance to remain competitive with larger urban districts.”

This is contentious ground. Some of you may think, “Well, Munn’s ideas are just more of the same from left-leaning scholars and think tanks.” And when we start talking about three North Carolinas, that is going to make some folks uncomfortable. There is an ongoing debate about how history should be taught in North Carolina’s public schools. This is history about how some students’ ancestors owned other students’ ancestors.

That is unpleasant history, and so there is a tendency in some quarters to want to glide past it.

Here is my challenge. Read his dissertation at willmunn.com.

Look at his research. Call him up and invite him to your civic organization to speak. Businesspeople pride themselves on being data-driven. We are now more than a half-century past the end of segregation in the South, and conditions are still pretty bad in large stretches of the Black Belt.

Solving the puzzle

There is a picture that appeared in The Fayetteville Observer in the summer of 1989. It showed 9-year-old William Munn at the Museum of the Cape Fear. There was a children’s workshop, and William was there because his parents would take him to museums.

On this day, at that moment, he was working on a puzzle and searching for a piece that would help him see the larger picture.

When we talked recently, Munn remembered that day and that time. When he was that age, he was trying to figure out another puzzle whose complexity was coming into view: Why, when he was with his family in some communities, places in the rural, eastern part of North Carolina, did it seem different than when his parents would take him to urban areas, like Raleigh?

“Why does it feel so much more liberating and free and accepting?” when they were in Raleigh, he recalled thinking. “What’s going on here?”

That question really can’t be answered by talking about two North Carolinas, but Munn has shown it can be by talking honestly about three. ■ Veteran journalist Dan Barkin went to high school in Newton, Mass., arrived in the South for college in 1971 and moved to North Carolina in 1996. He can be reached at dbarkin53@gmail.com.

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First take: Recreation

■ ENTREPRENEURSHIP

■ WINE

Page 18

Page 20

■ EDUCATION Page 22

■ INVESTMENT Page 25

■ STATEWIDE Page 26

NATURAL FLIGHT THE STATE’S GREAT OUTDOORS SERVE A VITAL ROLE DURING THE PANDEMIC AS THE POPULARITY OF HIKING, FISHING AND BOATING BLOSSOMS.

BY EDWARD MARTIN

N

owhere’s immune to pandemic challenges, but the past year has at least a sliver of silver lining, says Tim Gestwicki, CEO of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, one of the state’s largest environmental nonprofit groups.

The state allocated $125,000 for the federation’s labor-intensive program to collect trash from waterways and plant a tree or pollinating plant for every 25 pounds collected. In response, more than 2,000 volunteers statewide participated in the Trees4Trash program, he says. “Mindboggling.”

At the state’s parks, fishing holes and campgrounds, the virus with its forced distancing rules and premium on safe spaces is fueling an unprecedented rush to outdoor recreation. Experts think the trend will last long after vaccines are de rigueur and the virus subdued.

At the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, sales of unified, annual coastal and inland fishing licenses for residents soared 94%, from 35,947 to 69,591, from May through December. Hunting licenses were up about 20%, from 13,437 to 16,016.

“More people were hitting the water, too,” says Mindy Wharton, the commission’s public relations manager. Boat registrations jumped 13%, from 124,353 in 2019 to more than 140,000 in 2020, “more than any time in the last five-plus years.”

Licenses and fees make up a substantial chunk of the commission’s $88.9 million annual budget, which has increased by about 10% over the last year.

Folks also swarmed North Carolina state parks at a record clip last year even though many recreation areas closed for several weeks early in the pandemic. More than 19.8 million people visited state parks and recreation areas in 2020, 1.2 million more than in 2019, according to the N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation. The previous record was 19.4 million visitors in 2017.

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▲ Tim Gestwicki, CEO of the N.C. Wildlife Federation

“The records set in park visitation show that our outdoor spaces hold even greater value than we could have imagined before the challenges of the last year,” Gov. Roy Cooper said in a release.

Dare County's Jockey’s Ridge State Park topped the list with 1.9 million visitors. Other popular sites that notched more than 1 million visitors last year include state parks in Carolina Beach in New Hanover County, Pilot Mountain in Surry County, William B. Umstead in Wake County, Fort Macon in Carteret County and Eno River in Orange County and state recreation area Falls Lake near Wake Forest.

On the Fourth of July weekend, eight parks were full before noon. That’s become a regular problem at many of the state’s roughly three dozen parks, parks officials say.

Venturing outdoors gives people a virus-safe change of scenery and solitude. “People are seeking solace in nature,” Gestwicki says, adding that many urbanites are making their first ventures into woods and fields.

Less obvious, adds the federation’s Sarah Hollis, are workplace structural changes that prompt people to rediscover the outdoors.

“We see a lot more working from home, and the window is right there,” says Hollis, who is membership and outreach director. “People can look outside at the abundance of animals and plants, right in their own backyards.”

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▲ Grandfather Mountain State Park saw a 32% increase in visitors from 2019 to 2020.

▲Pilot Mountain and Fort Macon state parks welcomed more than 1 million visitors each in 2020.

Anecdotal evidence underscores the public-health value of open-air outlets for recreation, but Gestwicki and others stress more measurable public and private economic impact. A recent N.C. State University study found private rental properties at the Outer Banks had an occupancy rate of more than 95%. A federal study concluded western North Carolina’s portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, similarly swamped with pandemic escapees, provides more than $2 billion in annual economic benefits.

The downside? The seemingly boundless outdoors is in danger of being overwhelmed. “Unfortunately, some parks have experienced destruction and crowding,” says Hailey Post, an N.C. State graduate student in parks and recreation management who has been studying the trend.

Katie Hall, spokesperson for N.C. State Parks, agrees.

“We’ve seen an increase in littering and damage to natural resources,” she says. The state is urging visitors to select lessfrequented parks or show up early or late in the day to avoid crowds.

Such anecdotes might have a silver living, forcing the state to take a closer look at its outdoors, Gestwicki says.

“It puts the onus back on North Carolina, as one of the nation’s fastest-growing states, to keep investing in its environmental infrastructure.” ■

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Entrepreneurship

FULL SERVICE CATHEY BOLTON JUGGLES POTTERY, SPECIALTY FOODS AND SANDWICHES IN A PROPERTY HER FAMILY HAS OWNED SINCE THE '20S.

B Y PAG E L E G G E T T

W

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▲ Cathey Bolton

Keeping it in the family

In 2016, a prime piece of commercial real estate — the old service station at the downtown intersection of Depot Street and Branner Avenue — came on the market. Her great-grandfather opened the station in 1928, and it was later run by her maternal grandfather and then an uncle. “When Mom [Katy Bolton] and her three brothers wanted to sell, Mom and I couldn’t imagine driving past and seeing somebody else running it,” she says. So she and her mother bought the property.

Crafts and specialty food items now take up space once occupied by wrenches, oil drip pans and tire inflators. In May 2019, Bolton added Third Bay Filling Station, a breakfast and lunch spot offering coffees, teas, sandwiches, soups and homemade grab-andgo items like tomato pie and salmon dip.

With the tagline “Where craft meets food,” the popular eatery joined its siblings Cathey Bolton Design & Claywork and Corner Station Olive Oil Co. All operate in a building filled with family history.

“My mom thought the cafe idea was crazy,” Bolton says. “She felt I already had enough going on. But I said, ‘No, we need to

PHOTOS COURTESY OF CATHEY BOLTON

aynesville’s Cathey Bolton runs a high-end craft gallery, an olive oil/vinegar shop and a cafe. All under the same roof.

The mashup is no mishmash. It’s strategic.

“Someone will come in for a cup of coffee and meander over and look at a sandwich being made and say, ‘Oh, that’s that roasted garlic pepper I saw in the shop.’ Or ‘That’s the Madagascar black peppercorn olive oil.’ And then they can buy it. One thing leads to another leads to another.”

That describes how Bolton, who trained as a potter, came to own three distinct businesses and work nights and weekends at a fourth one. The Raleigh native began working in clay as a high school student at the UNC School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.

From there, she went to East Carolina University (Class of ’91) and earned a degree in studio ceramics with a double minor in sculpture and textiles.

She opened her first business, Art on Depot, in downtown Waynesville in 2008 — “the best year ever to open up a nonessential shop,” she says facetiously. Art on Depot was a fine art gallery, featuring the work of more than 30 artists, and Bolton’s working studio.

She expanded by selling her pottery wholesale to olive oil companies and high-end kitchen shops from New Jersey to Texas.

Then came marriage and motherhood.

Bolton and her husband separated when their daughter was 3 months old. On becoming a single mom who works full time (and then some), she says, “You just figure it out.” She’s turned “figuring it out” into an art form.

In 2018, she diversified even more.

“I’d been selling high-end art and crafts since 2008,” she says.

“I had a customer base. When I opened Corner Station Olive Oil Co. — in the building next door — people came because they knew me. And, I found there are quite a few people out there who know what really good olive oil is.” One clue is the label showing the date the olives were crushed.

Waynesville’s many visitors include olive oil aficionados. “I have customers who purchase spices, olive oils and vinegar during a vacation who can’t find these items in their own towns,” she says.

Her pottery has gone global, too. She’s shipped to customers in Australia, Austria, Canada, France and Italy.

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show people how to use these olive oils, specialty vinegars and over 200 spices and seasonings.’”

A self-taught cook, Bolton develops the recipes for Third Bay. “I love to figure out how to make things happen. I think that’s part of the creative process I’ve always enjoyed.”

Her sandwich lineup changes every four months. She’s elevated the humble grilled bologna sandwich by adding sharp cheddar, roasted garlic mayo, mustard and black pepper olive oil.

Bolton’s 10-year-old daughter, Katylou, wanted a sandwich named for her and her mom. The “CatALous,” a sliced turkey/ spinach/brie/cranberry sandwich with smoked applewood chipotle aioli quickly became a bestseller. In its first two months, Third Bay sold $6,000 of them.

Bolton’s trifecta of businesses has helped overcome the “craziness of the economy and COVID,” she says. “Being able to have so many different gourmet specialty items in one place — it’s really helped us through this past year.”

A family of entrepreneurs

Family support helps, too. A building that’s nearly 100 years old requires constant upkeep. Fortunately, she can turn to family for electrical, plumbing and HVAC help. Her brother, Mark, and father, William “Bill” Bolton III, operate Bolton Construction and Service of WNC, a fourth-generation business and a Business North Carolina “Small Business of the Year” honoree in 2020.

When she’s not at work, she’s on call as Bolton Construction’s emergency service coordinator — a one-person, after-hours an-

▲ Cathey Bolton sells her handmade wares and specialty cooking ingredients and hosts a casual eatery in a former service station in downtown Waynesville.

swering service. “The phone is by my bed every night and every weekend,” she says. “After a cold spell or a snowstorm, that’s when you get a lot of calls. And they come at all hours of the night.”

Bolton still manages to have a personal life. “When I go on a date, I have to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I don’t want to be rude, but I may have to answer my phone.’” ■

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Wine

BOTTLING THE PAST IN ROBESON COUNTY, WHERE THE GRAPES GROW SWEET, A LUMBEE-OWNED WINERY THRIVES.

BY WILEY CASH PH OTOG R A P H S B Y M A LLO RY CASH

T

wo legends persist in North Carolina, both of which have spread like twining vines from Roanoke Island westward across the state. One legend is about grapes, the other is about the Lost Colony, and both converge in Robeson County.

First, the legend of grapes: It is believed that when British explorers sent by Sir Walter Raleigh arrived on Roanoke Island in 1584, they were greeted by the sweet aroma of muscadine grapes hanging ripe on the vines. Centuries later, the “Mother Vine,” which is believed to be the oldest known grapevine in the United States at 400 years old, is still thriving on the Outer Banks, roughly 2 feet thick at its base and covering nearly a half-acre.

The second legend is the legend of the Lost Colony. Most North Carolinians know that Raleigh’s 1587 expedition, led by John White, disappeared while White was making a return trip to England for supplies. Three years later, when White came back to the colony, he discovered that nothing had been left behind aside from the word CROATOAN, which was etched into a gate, and the letters CRO that had been carved into a tree. What happened to these British colonists? Among the many theories, one is that the settlers moved inland and befriended Native American tribes, eventually intermarrying and joining the vast network of native people who had been living in the region for centuries before white settlers arrived. Many believe that descendants of the Lost Colony

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moved as far inland as present-day Robeson County, eventually calling themselves Lumbee in honor of the Lumber (or Lumbee) River. Perhaps that would explain why the Lumbee Indians, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River, with a population of more than 70,000, have always spoken English as their common language.

Not so, writes Malinda Maynor Lowery, associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill. She is a Lumbee Indian who was born in Robeson County. In her book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, Lowery writes, “The Lumbees are descendants of the dozens of tribes in that territory, as well as of free European and enslaved African settlers who lived in what became their core homeland.”

According to Lowery, the Lumbees' use of English as their common language is not due to their being founded by the members of the Lost Colony but was more a matter of convenience as a mixture of tribal communities began to coalesce in the area after migrating to escape disease, warfare and slavery. Native people have lived in what is now Robeson County for 13,000 years, long before Sir Walter Raleigh had his earliest notions of empire.

If the Lost Colony cannot explain the existence of the Lumbee Indians in Robeson County, it probably cannot explain the westward expansion of the muscadine grape either. According to

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the North Carolina Muscadine Grape Association, “in the early 1800s, North Carolina was a national leader in wine production and in 1840 was the nation’s top wine producer, with an industry built entirely on muscadine grapes.” There are currently 200 licensed wineries in North Carolina, generating $375 million each year in wages and $89 million in state taxe revenue.

One of the 200 licensed wineries is Locklear Vineyard and Winery in Maxton, about 40 miles southwest of Fayetteville. For the past 15 years, Charlie Locklear and his two sons, Charlie Jr. and Daryl, proud members of the Lumbee tribe, have been growing muscadine grapes and making a plethora of wines on the land that has belonged to the family for generations. The elder Charlie, who was born in 1942 and grew up farming tobacco, corn, cotton and “a little bit of hay” with his family, started making wine as a hobby.

“I just loved to do it,” he says on one bright day in early fall, only a few weeks after the grapes have been harvested.

The operation is tightly run, primarily by family and close family friends, with everything from the growing to the harvesting to the bottling happening on the Locklears’ property, where an old barn has been converted into a winery that features a tasting room and retail space. Outside, the land stretches for miles. Charlie, whose likeness appears on all of Locklear Vineyard’s bottles, remembers a time when the family was no less tied to the land, but simply had more land to tie themselves to. His great-grandfather owned 3,000 acres, and his grandfather came to own and farm roughly 300.

“If you’re not farming the big way now, you just can’t make it,” Charlie says, referring to the boom and bust of the agribusiness cycle that often finds farmers relying on huge yields to pay down debts for machinery and land. Now, the Locklears own 70 acres, considerably less than in the past, but the land is put to good use, much of it taken up by the vineyard where two variations of muscadine grapes — Noble and Carlos — are grown. The Noble muscadine is red, the wine sweet yet crisp. The Carlos is a white grape, resulting in wine with a sweeter, smoother finish.

“I like to experiment with different ways to make wine,” Charlie says. “If you make a good product that tastes good, people are going to buy it.” And people have bought it, and word of the sweet wine from Robeson County continues to spread. While their sales

▲ Charlie Locklear, owner of Locklear Vineyard and Winery in Maxton, has been growing grapes and making wine for the past 15 years.

are highest in the local market, Locklear wines are sold throughout eastern North Carolina, across the Piedmont and into the western part of the state. The winery now employs more people than ever before.

Robeson County can be a conservative place, and one has to wonder what the locals thought when Charlie Locklear decided to turn his wine-making hobby into a family business.

“Most people embraced it,” he says. “Probably 90% of them.

You’re never going to get 100% on nothing.” But folks will go easy on a local boy, especially when the family name is nearly as old as the land itself. Along with other surnames — Oxendine, Chavis, Dial, Lowery or Lowry or Lowrie among them — Locklear has a long history in the region, and Charlie has the roots to prove it.

“I was born here,” he says, “and in 1948 we went straight across the road and built a house. And when I got married in 1964, we remodeled this house, which was my grandfather’s house, and we’ve been here ever since.”

Locklear is a prominent name, he continues, and there are a lot of them.

“Our ancestors were here, and we were people with high education and businesses. We’re just continuing to promote the family tree, businesswise.”

And what does it mean to Charlie Locklear to work this land and create a family business from it?

“Well, I hope it’s an encouragement to Lumbees,” he says. “And I hope it’s an encouragement to whites and Blacks too: If you want to achieve something, you can achieve it. Don’t let other people tell you what to do. It’s like target practice: If you shoot at it long enough, you’ll hit it.”

After centuries of his people being on this land, it’s clear that Charlie’s aim is pretty good. ■

Wiley Cash and his wife, Mallory, live in Wilmington. His latest novel, The Last Ballad, is available wherever books are sold.

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Education

QUAKER NOTES IMPROVING FACILITIES BOOSTED DEBT AT A HISTORIC N.C. COLLEGE, BUT STUDENT ENROLLMENT HAS DECLINED.

BY MARK TOSCZAK

G

uilford College faces a serious financial bind, which isn’t a novel situation for one of the South’s oldest coeducational institutions.

In 2001, the Greensboro college formed in 1837 by the Society of Friends, better known as Quakers, had an annual deficit of more than $11 million and appeared to be in a downward spiral. Trustees recruited veteran educator Kent Chabotar as Guilford’s first non-Quaker president. Serving from 2003-14, the former Harvard University education professor helped revive enrollment, balance the budget and raise more than $50 million during his tenure.

But the economics of private colleges remain difficult, to put it mildly. Credit-rating agency Moody’s Investors Service noted in 2018 that about one in five small private liberal arts colleges

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is under “fundamental stress” due to upward pressures on expenses and “limited tuition-pricing power.”

From 2004 to 2014, an average of five private colleges closed annually in the U.S. From 2015 through 2018, the pace picked up to an average of 11 closings per year, according to Moody’s.

While Guilford is in no immediate danger of closing, officials say they need to raise $6 million in a year, including $4 million

by May 31, to bolster its balance sheet and avoid major cuts to faculty positions and academic positions.

Though Guilford is no longer a church-based college, it’s still known for a progressive perspective based on its Quaker heritage. It was a stop on the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to freedom. It’s always been a key part of the Gate City’s strong higher-education sector that includes

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about 55,000 students at N.C. A&T State University, UNC Greensboro, Greensboro College, Bennett College and other schools.

Guilford’s community outreach has included the Bryan Series, which has attracted high-profile speakers for more than 25 years, pre-COVID-19. Alumnus Jennifer King in February became the first Black female assistant coach in the NFL with the Washington Football Team.

But losses have ballooned in recent years including a $5 million deficit for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2020.

Enrollment declined nearly 20% since 2017 to about 1,350 fulltime equivalent students.

The school’s financial filings show that almost all of that decline has been in the college’s continuing education program, aimed at older, nontraditional students. In 2017, the program had 367 students; this year there are about 80.

Over the same period, interest costs have soared as the school issued tens of millions of dollars in debt and tapped lines of credit. Guilford had $79 million in long-term debt as of May 31, nearly double the level three years earlier. The debt stems mainly from costs of renovations of residence halls, athletics facilities, the dining center and arts complex.

After six years as Chabotar’s successor, Jane Fernandes announced her resignation in June 2020 with a plan to hold the job through July 2021. Six weeks later, after dismissing 47 staffers and not filling 34 open positions, Guilford trustees installed Carol Moore as interim president. She had previously led three colleges in Vermont and South Carolina.

Moore initiated a study on how to reverse Guilford’s declining fortunes, producing a Nov. 7 plan to lay off 16 tenured professors and cut 11 other faculty positions — the college has more than 80 full-time faculty. The proposal also called for cutting a third of its majors, mostly in areas with low enrollment. It was a regrettable but necessary step, Guilford’s board said in a release. The plan prompted widespread criticism from alumni, faculty, staff and students who said it violated Guilford’s tradition of consensus decision-making. The faculty passed a resolution of “no confidence” in Moore and the trustees.

As a result, the Guilford board in early January reversed course and suspended the planned cuts. The trustees established working groups to seek a different approach and set fundraising goals, according to emailed statements from Ed Winslow III, a Greensboro attorney who chairs the college board.

Guilford needed the “important time and space to do the nec-

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essary work together to establish a sustainable future.”

Winslow told a local newspaper that “alumni rose up and said, ‘We really love this place.’ Trustees are trying to respond in a positive way to that.”

He and Moore didn't respond to requests for interviews. A college spokesperson declined comment.

Through mid-February, an alumni group, Save Guilford College, had raised $3.3 million in pledges over five years from about 900 people.

Other Triad private colleges have also shown financial stress — and an ability to rebound. Salem College, a women’s college that started granting college diplomas in 1890, was put on probation by its accreditation agency in June 2018 for financial problems. After meeting fundraising goals, it was released from probation in December 2019.

Bennett College, a historically Black women’s university, would have lost accreditation if not for a $9.5 million emer-

gency fundraising effort in 2019.

Greensboro College finished a $21 million capital campaign last year, topping its goal by $6 million. President Lawrence Czarda’s contract was extended through 2026 for helping the college remain in good standing with accreditors and “achieve a sustainable financial stability,” according to a February press release. He has been president since 2010.

Without accreditation, students can’t qualify for federal financial aid. In North Carolina, about half of private college students receive need-based Pell Grants, says Hope Williams, president of N.C. Independent Colleges & Universities, a Raleigh-based trade association.

Small, private colleges have fewer alumni compared with public schools, which can translate to less giving, says Stathis Poulos, a partner for the BDO consulting firm in Raleigh.

Moreover, strong competition for students means many don’t pay full tuition rates, reducing revenue. At the same time, Guilford and others are investing more on their facilities.

Guilford had $44.9 million in tuition and fee revenue in 2020, along with $24 million in unfunded financial aid. That means it discounted tuition and fees by more than 50%.

Enrollment challenges are prompting some private institutions to cut or freeze tuition and adjust their program offerings.

Many N.C. private colleges have increased their health care curriculum, Williams notes. For example, about 90% of the state’s physician assistant degrees are issued by those colleges.

Maria Rosales, a Guilford political science professor and clerk of the faculty, expects job cuts and changes to the academic programs may still happen. But she hopes a gentler, more collaborative approach can be achieved than Moore’s initial plan.

“I think this is a time to get the community rallied around the college,” Rosales says. “And that rallying around the college, I think, can transform Guilford, long term, for the better.” ■

Flat revenue, higher costs Guilford College's finances (fiscal year ended May 31)

2020

2019

2018

2017

(million) TOTAL REVENUE

$47

45.5

44.5

45

TOTAL EXPENSES

$52.1

48.7

44.4

43.6

SURPLUS/DEFICIT

$(5.0)

(3.3)

(0.1)

1.4

source: Guilford College

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Investment

BIG BUCKS THREE ICONIC N.C. FAMILIES BACK AN INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT VENTURE THAT STARTS WITH $1.35 BILLION UNDER MANAGEMENT.

BY DAVID MILDENBERG

PHOTO COURTESY OF NEW REPUBLIC PARTNERS

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he Belk, Close and Bowles families are three influential Carolinas households whose business, political and charitable ventures have shaped the state for more than a century.

Now, they are joining forces to back a new investment management and wealth advisory business poised to make a major mark.

Veteran N.C. banker Ralph Strayhorn and money manager Thomas Hoops launched Charlotte-based New Republic Partners in February. It became the sixth-largest Registered Investment Advisory firm in the Carolinas and is among the 50 largest in the Southeast with $1.35 billion in assets under management. The company also owns Roanoke Rapids-based New Republic Bank and has about 30 employees, about half of them based in Charlotte. Board members include Raleigh retail-chain owner Art Pope, a leading N.C. Republican, and former N.C. State Treasurer Janet Cowell, a Democrat who leads the Raleigh-based Dix Park Conservancy nonprofit agency.

The John M. Belk Endowment, the M.C. Belk Pilon family interests and the Springs-Close-Bowles family interests are clients and shareholders in New Republic. The combination brings together heirs of two famous families: The Belks built the nation's largest familyowned department store chain and the Springs textile company was the largest industrial employer in South Carolina for decades.

New York private-equity group Sycamore Partners bought Charlotte-based Belk for $3 billion in 2015. Fort Mill, S.C.-based Springs, a public company for many years, combined its business with a Brazilian textile company starting in 2001. Members of the Belk and Close families were minority investors in the Carolina Panthers NFL football team, earning huge returns when hedge-fund owner David Tepper bought the team for $2.2 billion in 2018.

New Republic Partners plans to offer investment, advisory and credit solutions for individuals, families, endowments, foundations and advisers. Investors with $10 million or more are the target market for the firm’s “complete wealth-management services,” says Hoops, who is president and chief operating officer. The business will also market to accredited investors, usually typified as having a net worth of $1 million or more, he says.

“This is a very challenging time to be an investor, and their portfolios need to look different than they have historically," Hoops says.

Thomas Hoops, president and COO, and Ralph Strayhorn, chairman and CEO of New Republic Partners

Private-equity and private credit investments can provide greater return potential than traditional stocks and bonds, he adds.

Strayhorn is a Durham native and former bank CEO whose consultancy, Cape Point Advisory, worked with 15 banks during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Hoops is a 35-year veteran of the investment-management industry and a former executive at Wells Fargo and predecessor institutions. Most recently, he was on the executive committee at Legg Mason Global Asset Management, where he led global product strategy, M&A and strategic investing.

“The investment team at New Republic Partners brings innovative thinking and a high degree of expertise,” says M.C. Belk Pilon, president and board chair of the John M. Belk Endowment. She will be on New Republic’s board along with Sam Bowles, who is joining the business as a managing director. He is the son of former Springs Industries CEO Crandall Bowles and Erskine Bowles, a Charlotte investment banker and a former UNC System president. Pilon is the daughter of the late John and Claudia Belk. John Belk was a former Charlotte mayor who led Belk Store Services for many years, while Claudia Belk was a local district court judge.

“We partnered with New Republic Partners because they expanded our capabilities in ways that other asset managers and advisers could not,” Sam Bowles said in a release.

New Republic’s staff includes people who have overseen investments for the Belk and Close family offices. Chief Financial Officer Jason Grooters is a former chief accounting officer at Raleigh-based First Citizens Bancshares.

New Republic Bank opened in 1998 and has offices in Roanoke Rapids, Burlington and Rocky Mount. Other parts of the business include the advisory firm and a broker-dealer, New Republic Securities. ■

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COAL ASH BILL COMES DUE

▲ Duke Energy’s Dan River Steam Station

I

t’s been seven years since a pipe burst at a coal ashcontainment pond at the Duke Energy plant near Eden, allowing 39,000 tons of coal ash to flow into the Dan River. Many had known that coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal, could become a problem, yet it took a crisis to spur action. “Because of the Dan River spill, Duke was forced to make changes on how they deal with coal ash,” says Dave Rogers, a Durham-based Sierra Club official.

Related to the spill, Duke pleaded guilty to nine violations of the Clean Water Act, paid a $68 million criminal fine, and spent $34 million on environmental and conservation projects to benefit rivers and wetlands in North Carolina and Virginia.

It also estimated a $8.5 billion tab for cleaning up and closing coal ash basins at its existing and retired coal plants, about half involving N.C. operations.

Who should pay that bill has been a source of much dispute. The matter was largely settled earlier this year in a deal involving Duke, N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein, the N.C. Public Staff and the Sierra Club. Stein and others presented the agreement as a victory for N.C. consumers, who will be

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expected to pay about $3 billion toward the state’s $4 billion tab. The N.C. Utilities Commission must ratify the settlement.

The Sierra Club, Stein and others had initially argued Duke stockholders should pay for the cleanup. They argued the problem wasn’t the ratepayers’ fault. Duke contended that the remediation is a legitimate cost of doing business.

The Utilities Commission and the N.C. Supreme Court made clear that saddling Duke with the whole bill “wasn’t a realistic option,” Rogers says. “Neither came close to reaching that solution.”

The Sierra Club expected the commission would force Duke to pay from zero to half of the cleanup tab, “so a settlement in which they will pay 25% seems like a fair deal,” he says. The Public Staff, which is charged with representing the public interest in rate cases, had pushed for a 50-50 split.

Saddling Duke with a $4 billion expense would have been a hefty blow as the giant utility shifts from relying heavily on coal and natural gas as fuel sources to alternative energies.

The $1.1 billion settlement prompted S&P Global Ratings to cut Duke’s credit rating by one notch.

COURTESY OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

B Y DAV I D M I L D E N B E R G

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Duke raised cash in late January by selling a nearly 20% stake in its Indiana subsidiary to a Singapore sovereign wealth fund for $2 billion. The move helped offset the coal-ash settlement and a $1.6 billion write-off tied to last year’s cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which was intended to move natural gas from Pennsylvania to the Southeast.

Looking ahead, Duke says it will spend $59 billion on capital projects over the next five years, mainly to improve its dis-

tribution and transmission networks in six states. Florida regulators are mulling a plan to let Duke implement rate increases over several years to pay for modernizing its electric grid and recover costs from closing coal plants and starting clean energy initiatives.

The utility seeks a similar multiyear approach in North Carolina, though lawmakers rejected the effort in 2019 after criticism from several business and consumer groups.

Environmental groups want Duke to more quickly close its coal plants and spend more on wind, solar and other alternatives. The widespread power outages in Texas in mid-February underscore the importance of a reliable energy grid, however. “For the Sierra Club, our goal isn’t to weaken Duke or other monopoly utilities,” Rogers says. “Our goal is to help them transition to a cleaner future as soon as they can.” ■

TRIANGLE

Park. The 371,640-square-foot building will include 10 stories of residential space and retail.

CrowdfundNC acquired its second startup community in two months. Charlotte-based offers educational courses, forums and other training opportunities for entrepreneurs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

RALEIGH Machelle Sanders replaced Tony Copeland as secretary of the N.C. Commerce Department. Sanders previously headed the N.C. Department of Administration and was a Biogen executive.

Foster City, Calif.-based Gilead Sciences plans a major business services and information technology hub here.

The biopharmaceutical company is investing $5 million and will add 275 jobs.

Gilead could receive state and local incentives of more than $9.9 million over 12 years, dependent on meeting investment and hiring goals.

COURTESY OF SEPI, RED HAT

Kane Realty joined forces with developer Merge Capital on Park City South, a planned 11-story, mixed-use development next to Dorothea Dix Engineering firm SEPI named Nick Ellis president. Ellis, who will lead the company’s operations and finance teams, joined SEPI in December 2019 as senior vice president. Previously, he worked as managing director of Savills and in leadership at Kimley-Horn and Associates.

Brian Hamilton Management acquired Canada’s Frozen Mountain, which focuses on streaming, videoconferencing and interactive broadcast solutions. Frozen Mountain’s clients include Match.com, UPS and WWE. Hamilton sold his Sageworks fintech company to the Accel-KKR privateequity group in 2018.

Two senior Red Hat executives left the company: DeLisa Alexander, Red Hat’s former chief people officer, and Arun Oberoi, former executive vice president for global sales and services. IBM bought Red Hat in July 2019.

Marius Pharmaceuticals named coCEOs Himanshu H. Shah and Shalin Shah as the company gears up for the release of a drug it believes will treat hypogonadism, a condition in men that prevents the body from producing enough of a key hormone. The drug, Kyzatrex, is set to be released in the fourth quarter. Former CEO Om Dhingra, was named vice chairman.

N.C. State University’s Poole College of Management is launching a master of management, marketing analytics program this fall. Officials say it is only the second graduate program of its kind in the Southeast. It will be offered entirely online.

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Consulting firm McKinsey agreed to pay $573 million to 47 states, five U.S. territories and Washington, D.C., including $20 million to North Carolina, for the company’s role in advising opioid companies on how to promote their drugs. N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein says he is pursuing separate lawsuits against Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, and Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family.

Environmental Defense Fund leader Dionne Delli-Gattiwas was chosen by Gov. Roy Cooper to lead the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. She will replace Michael Regan, who was nominated by President Joe Biden as the next administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

DURHAM ProcessMaker, an open-source process-automation platform, raised $45 million in Series A funding — its first outside investment. Aldrich Capital Partners in Virginia provided the funding.

Agtech company Vestaron raised $18.3 million from 16 investors. The 40-person company, which moved its headquarters from Michigan to North Carolina in 2019, plans to use the money to promote its new plant pest-control product, Spear, internationally.

Medical-device maker Bioventus raised $104 million in an initial public offering after selling 8 million shares at $13 each. It initially hoped to sell shares for $16 to $18.

Redwood City, Calif-based DPR Construction is plotting a major research and development hub and regional headquarters here at a site developed by Keith Corp. of Charlotte. The project is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

Cree will change its name to Wolfspeed, the name of its semiconductor unit. The company also appointed Marvin Riley, CEO of Charlotte-based Enpro, to its board of directors.

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Gene-editing firm Pairwise raised $90 million for research in new ways to grow agricultural products for consumers. The company was founded three years ago and raised $25 million, then entered a $100 million research collaboration with Germany’s Bayer pharmaceutical company.

Deep Blue Medical Advances raised nearly $1.6 million in January, bringing its equity to more than $3.4 million. The company, founded in 2014, is focused on its T-Line Hernia Mesh technology, which recently received FDA clearance.

ArchiveSocial won a $1.59 million contract to archive Donald Trump’s social media footprint during his presidency. The company works with more than 5,000 government agencies to maintain social media records.

Tobacco Wood Brewing, a female- and veteran-owned brewery, is expanding from its flagship location in downtown Oxford to here this spring.

Owner Mara Shelton opened the business in 2018 and says the new location will have more taps than the Oxford pub and a varied menu.

Textile printer Spoonflower is expanding to a 110,000-square-foot building and adding 100 employees. It currently operates out of a 25,000-square-foot manufacturing site.

Veritas Collaborative, an eating disorder treatment clinic, is merging with The Emily Program in St. Paul, Minn., and moving its headquarters to the Midwest. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The treatment centers will retain their names and branding while operating under a parent company with a new name.

CARY The USA Baseball National Training Complex at Thomas Brooks Park will host Major League Baseball’s first-ever pre-draft combine in June. High school and college students will be showcased during the combine ahead of the draft, set to take place in Atlanta in July.

Home lender PennyMac Loan Services is investing $4.3 million in a 35,000-square-foot mortgage production center here, adding 322 jobs over several years. The new positions will pay an average annual salary of $64,567, higher than Wake County’s average of $63,966.

The company could receive a Job Development Investment Grant of more than $1.9 million over 12 years, based on reaching hiring and investment targets.

APEX Lidl opened its 10th N.C. store here.

The German-owned retailer promotes a low-cost strategy with stores in Raleigh, Wake Forest, Sanford, Rocky Mount, Fayetteville and Wilson, as well as in the western part of the state.

COURTESY OF LIDL

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TRIAD GREENSBORO Loren Hill, the former president of High Point Economic Development Corp., was named the economic development director of the Piedmont Triad Partnership’s Carolina Core. The new role broadens his work to span a larger region that includes High Point, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and the surrounding areas.

The GlaxoSmithKline Foundation gave $1.5 million to N.C. A&T State University to help support its new Aggie Commitment Trailblazer Scholars program. The program benefits students transferring to the university to pursue STEM-related majors from 11 N.C. community colleges.

Greensboro’s Weaver Investment is planning a 94-apartment development near Stoney Creek Golf Club as an expansion of its Fairway Village apartment complex. The development is part of the 600-acre Stoney Creek project, where 27 acres remain undeveloped.

Piedmont Federal Savings Bank will relocate from its current home on West Third Street to the downtown Roar food and entertainment center by early summer. The bank is adding tablet banking with electronic-signing capabilities, realtime video banking, and cash recyclers.

Forsyth Technical Community College was awarded $5 million by the U.S. Department of Labor to work with eight two-year colleges in the Piedmont Triad on advancing career pathways in manufacturing. Forsyth Tech will lead a consortium focused on meeting area manufacturing needs.

KERNERSVILLE Venture Properties of Wilkesboro bought the Kohl’s department store site here for $7.6 million. The 11.8-acre property is home to an 86,584-square-foot Kohl’s that was built in 2001 and has 10 years remaining on its lease.

Novant Health is seeking state approval for a 60,000-square-foot expansion at its medical center here. The $50 million project will add a fourth floor for a new maternity and delivery center. LEXTON National builder D.R. Horton plans a residential community here with more than 1,000 homes on a 436-acre tract.

The former Coble Dairy Farm in the Tyro community would become the largest new subdivision in Davidson County.

CHARLOTTE MATTHEWS Dollar Tree, which bought Family Dollar in 2015, sold the company’s former headquarters to The Silverman Group of New Jersey for $10.5 million. The 354,518-square-foot building formerly employed hundreds of people.

WINSTON-SALEM

COURTESY OF VANDERBUILT UNIVERSITY

Wake Forest University named Susan Wente, the interim chancellor of Vanderbilt University, president effective July 1. Wente, who will be Wake Forest’s first female president, succeeds Nathan Hatch, who is retiring after serving in the post since 2005.

Susan Wente

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To encourage employees to get the COVID-19 vaccinations, Harris Teeter will pay them $100 if they receive all doses. Those who cannot receive the vaccine due to medical or religious reasons will be offered an alternative. The grocer employs 35,000 workers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, Delaware, Florida and Washington, D.C.

BELMONT Gaston County’s two major business groups, the Gaston Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Gaston Development Corp., merged into the Gaston Business Association.

Patrick Mumford, chief of the Greater Gaston Development Corp., will serve as president, and Steve D’Avria, former CEO of the Gaston Regional Chamber, will be chief operating officer.

MOORESVILLE Home-improvement retailer Lowe’s is hiring 50,000 workers for the spring season and is distributing $80 million in bonuses. Since the pandemic took hold Charlotte Douglas International Airport reported a record-breaking drop in passenger traffic because of the pandemic; it saw a 46% decline in 2020 compared with the previous year. The airport had 27.2 million

Belk department-store chain is reorganizing under a Chapter 11 filing in Houston bankruptcy court.

Owner Sycamore Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, said it doesn’t plan to close stores or make major layoffs. A group of creditors led by KKR and Blackstone will gain a minority stake, while the plan calls for Belk to cut about $450 million of debt and extend maturities of loans. About $225 million of new capital is coming into Belk through the plan. about a year ago, the company has distributed more than $800 million in bonuses.

CHARLOTTE After 18 years with Premier, CEO Susan DeVore will retire May 1. President Michael Alkire will be her successor. DeVore has been CEO for 12 years at the company, which provides a variety of data and purchasing services for the health care industry. passengers last year, down from a record 50.2 million in 2019. It was the lowest count in 15 years. Raleigh-Durham International Airport recorded a 66% decline in traffic from 2019.

Carowinds will reopen its amusement park on May 22 after its closure because of the pandemic. Several safety protocols are expected to be in place, including advanced visit planning, required face coverings, health screenings and more.

Bright Hope Capital, a privateequity company, bought Gastonia’s Big Prime Hauling trucking business. It’s Bright Hope’s second acquisition since forming in January to invest in minorityowned businesses.

Dole Food is merging with Irelandbased Total Produce to form Dole plc.

The combined company’s U.S. headquarters will be here.

The city council approved plans for the developer of the Catawba Nation’s planned Two Kings Casino Resort to build nearly 600 homes and luxury apartments. The housing will be on 83 acres on the opposite side of Interstate 85 from the $273 million casino. Developer Wallace Cheves of Greenville, who is a partner with the Catawba Nation and Delaware North Cos., asked for the rezoning.

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE DOUGLAS AIRPORT, BELK

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STATESVILLE Austin, Texas-based AirBox Air Purifiers is moving its manufacturing facility here from Mount Pleasant, S.C., sharing a 30,000-square-foot building with AM Racing and Jordan Anderson Racing. HI

HICKORY

Transportation Insight acquired Syracuse, N.Y.-based Transaver Global Services for an undisclosed amount.

Transaver provides technology fulfilling Transportation Insight’s mission of helping thousands of businesses save money on transportation and warehousing.

EAST GREENVILLE The Golden LEAF Foundation awarded a $1.9 million grant to East Carolina University to build a pharmaceutical manufacturing training center. The Eastern Region Pharma Center will focus on training students and pharmaceutical employees in advanced manufacturing to address the need for pharmaceutical workers with four-year college degrees.

WILMINGTON Phillip Tarte, who was hired as New Hanover County health director in July 2016, was fired in January because of “unresolved patterns of leadership and performance failures,” according to a separation letter. David Howard, who served as assistant health director, was named interim director.

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ROXBORO Canada-based Capital Power Operations announced plans to close two power plants here and near Southport, resulting in a comPlans submitted to the city show another building is planned for nCino’s new headquarters. The 90,000-squarefoot building suggests the 700-employee financial-technology company plans to continue to grow. The company is also building a 640-space parking deck behind its property.

Live Oak Bank invested $2.5 million in partnership with Cape Fear Collective to bring affordable housing to the region.

The investment is part of a larger initiative by Cape Fear Collective Ventures, which allocates capital in communities with significant barriers to resources.

The Hampton Inn WilmingtonMedical Park has been gutted and refurbished in a $3.5 million renovation.

All 120 rooms in the 20-year-old hotel were updated. Renovations also included some pandemic-friendly changes such as an employee-served breakfast rather than a self-serve buffet.

Michael Jordan is opening two new medical clinics near his hometown after donating $10 million to Novant Health. The clinics are expected to open in early 2022.

He has invested $7 million in similar Novant clinics in Charlotte, where he owns the NBA team.

bined 73 layoffs. The closures are set to take place March 31. About 44 workers will be laid off at Southport with another 29 laid off here.

WEST ASHEVILLE The city council approved rezoning for a warehouse that is expected to be an Amazon project. The $30 million distribution center is expected to generate $130,000 in annual city property taxes and employ 355.

City of Asheville’s Community and Economic Development Director Sam Powers is retiring in April. Powers has served as director for 16 years. The city says it will name an interim director as a search for a permanent successor continues.

MILLS RIVER Bright Farms is hiring 55 people for what it says will be the largest indoor salad farm in the Southeast when it opens in April. Products will include packaged salads.

MORGANTON Catawba Brewing acquired Wilmington’s Skytown Beer. Financial details were not disclosed. The brewery plans to rebrand the 3,100-square-foot Wilmington building as Catawba.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CAPITAL POWER OPERATIONS

Catawba Valley Medical Center plans an expanded emergency room including more space for behavioral health patients and upgraded patient rooms through a $36 million bond. The bond, which would not require an increase in taxes, requires approval from the county.

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Greetings!

I am deeply honored to have been chosen to lead the North Carolina Community College System. I truly believe the NCCCS is the best community college system in the country – outstanding in its scope and transformative in the lives of all those it reaches.

Our 58 community colleges are tireless engines of opportunity and economic development. The quality education and training we offer allow thousands of people across our great state to grow personally and professionally and improve their circumstances. Our colleges nurture entrepreneurship and support the business community by providing employers, both large and small, with an unparalleled workforce.

We partner with business and industry on student internships and apprenticeships, and on customized corporate training. We produce skilled professionals with the ability to think critically and perform expertly – technicians, practitioners, leaders.

North Carolina community colleges have persevered in the face of the past year’s challenges, continuing to offer the programs and services our communities need – and maintaining our standard of excellence.

We know our community colleges will be critical in the coming months. I firmly believe North Carolina community colleges will be the key entity that leads us out of this pandemic – helping people get back to work, building back businesses and industry, and moving forward to economic recovery.

This is an exciting time, and I know we will do great things together. I look forward to working with all of you.

Sincerely,

Thomas A. Stith III President North Carolina Community College System

nccommunitycolleges.edu

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SERVING THE COMMUNITY North Carolina’s community colleges play a huge role in the state’s thriving economy. About 40% of N.C. workers received education or training at one of the state’s 58 community colleges during that last decade. In this section, we highlight a few of the schools that are making a difference in their communities and in the lives of their students.

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COMMUNITY COLLEGES ACROSS THE STATE ALAMANCE COMMUNITY COLLEGE Burlington, Graham | alamancecc.edu

EDGECOMBE COMMUNITY COLLEGE Rocky Mount, Tarboro | edgecombe.edu

RANDOLPH COMMUNITY COLLEGE Asheboro | randolph.edu

ASHEVILLE-BUNCOMBE TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Arden, Asheville, Candler, Marshall, Woodfin abtech.edu

FAYETTEVILLE TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE, Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, Spring Lake faytechcc.edu

RICHMOND COMMUNITY COLLEGE Hamlet, Laurinburg | richmondcc.edu ROANOKE-CHOWAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Ahoskie | roanokechowan.edu

BEAUFORT COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Washington | beaufortccc.edu

FORSYTH TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Kernersville, King, Walnut Cove, Winston-Salem forsythtech.edu

BLADEN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Dublin | bladencc.edu

GASTON COLLEGE Belmont, Dallas, Lincolnton | gaston.edu

BLUE RIDGE COMMUNITY COLLEGE Brevard, Flat Rock, Hendersonville blueridge.edu

GUILFORD TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Colfax, Greensboro, High Point, Jamestown gtcc.edu

ROWAN-CABARRUS COMMUNITY COLLEGE Concord, Kannapolis, Salisbury | rccc.edu

BRUNSWICK COMMUNITY COLLEGE Bolivia, Carolina Shores, Leland, Southport brunswickcc.edu

HALIFAX COMMUNITY COLLEGE Weldon | halifaxcc.edu

SAMPSON COMMUNITY COLLEGE Clinton | sampsoncc.edu

HAYWOOD COMMUNITY COLLEGE Clyde | haywood.edu

SANDHILLS COMMUNITY COLLEGE Pinehurst, Raeford, Robbins, Carthage sandhills.edu

CALDWELL COMMUNITY COLLEGE AND TECHNICAL INSTITUTE Boone, Hudson | cccti.edu CAPE FEAR COMMUNITY COLLEGE Burgaw, Castle Hayne, Hampstead, Wilmington cfcc.edu CARTERET COMMUNITY COLLEGE Morehead City | carteret.edu CATAWBA VALLEY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Conover, Hickory, Newton, Taylorsville cvcc.edu CENTRAL CAROLINA COMMUNITY COLLEGE Dunn, Lillington, Pittsboro, Sanford, Siler City cccc.edu CENTRAL PIEDMONT COMMUNITY COLLEGE Charlotte, Huntersville, Matthews | cpcc.edu CLEVELAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE Shelby | clevelandcc.edu COASTAL CAROLINA COMMUNITY COLLEGE Jacksonville | coastalcarolina.edu COLLEGE OF THE ALBEMARLE Barco, Edenton, Elizabeth City, Manteo albemarle.edu CRAVEN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Havelock, New Bern | cravencc.edu DAVIDSON COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Bermuda Run, Lexington, Mocksville, Thomasville | davidsonccc.edu DURHAM TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Durham, Hillsborough | durhamtech.edu

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ROBESON COMMUNITY COLLEGE Lumberton | robeson.edu ROCKINGHAM COMMUNITY COLLEGE Wentworth | rockinghamcc.edu

ISOTHERMAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Columbus, Rutherfordton, Spindale isothermal.edu

SOUTHEASTERN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Whiteville | sccnc.edu

JAMES SPRUNT COMMUNITY COLLEGE Kenansville | jamessprunt.edu

SOUTH PIEDMONT COMMUNITY COLLEGE Monroe, Polkton, Wadesboro | spcc.edu

JOHNSTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE Clayton, Four Oaks, Smithfield | johnstoncc.edu

SOUTHWESTERN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Sylva | southwesterncc.edu

LENOIR COMMUNITY COLLEGE Kinston, La Grange, Pink Hill, Snow Hill, Trenton lenoircc.edu

STANLY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Albemarle, Locust | stanly.edu

MARTIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Williamston, Windsor | martincc.edu

SURRY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Dobson, Elkin, Mount Airy, Pilot Mountain, Yadkinville surry.edu

MAYLAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE Burnsville, Newland, Spruce Pine | mayland.edu

TRI-COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Marble, Murphy, Robbinsville | tricountycc.edu

MCDOWELL TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Marion | mcdowelltech.edu

VANCE-GRANVILLE COMMUNITY COLLEGE Creedmoor, Henderson, Louisburg, Warrenton vgcc.edu

MITCHELL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Mooresville, Statesville | mitchellcc.edu MONTGOMERY COMMUNITY COLLEGE Troy | montgomery.edu NASH COMMUNITY COLLEGE Rocky Mount | nashcc.edu PAMLICO COMMUNITY COLLEGE Bayboro, Grantsboro | pamlicocc.edu

WAKE TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Cary, Morrisville, Raleigh, Wake Forest, Zebulon waketech.edu WAYNE COMMUNITY COLLEGE Goldsboro | waynecc.edu WESTERN PIEDMONT COMMUNITY COLLEGE Morganton | wpcc.edu

PIEDMONT COMMUNITY COLLEGE Roxboro, Yanceyville | piedmontcc.edu

WILKES COMMUNITY COLLEGE Sparta, West Jefferson, Wilkesboro wilkescc.edu

PITT COMMUNITY COLLEGE Winterville | pittcc.edu

WILSON COMMUNITY COLLEGE Wilson | wilsoncc.edu

C A R O L I N A

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2/22/21 11:16 AM

RENDERING BY HOLLAND & HAMRICK ARCHITECTS, P.A.

ON THE MOVE AT CCC Nestled in the foothills between Charlotte and Asheville, Cleveland County is a magnet for lovers of pork barbecue, bluegrass music, baseball —and Cleveland Community College (CCC). Established in 1965 as a technical school, CCC now serves as the county’s premier educational and workforce training hub. Across campus, there’s an air of excitement as President Jason Hurst leads the way forward.

Since arriving in 2018, Hurst has brought new energy and focus to key projects, including the construction of the College’s most ambitious capital project in years: the Advanced Technology Center (ATC), a home for collaborative, hands-on learning and innovation in manufacturing. He has also overseen the Fall 2019 launch of Yeti Athletics, CCC’s first-ever athletics program.

Students and employees take great pride in the Yeti motto—“Fierce, stealthy and a bit mysterious.”

The ATC is CCC’s response to local and statewide trends in the manufacturing industry, which has come increasingly to rely on sophisticated technologies.

The 44,000-square-foot ATC will house programs where students can gain the advanced skills they need to compete for well-paying jobs.

Those programs include Electronics Engineering, Automation Engineering, CNC Machining, Robotics and Mechanical Drafting. The Center’s high-tech purpose is reflected in its design: instead of being tucked away out of sight, the

training equipment will be very much in the spotlight. Visible from the building’s entrance will be several high-bay areas with floor-to-ceiling glass walls where local manufacturers can temporarily install their own equipment to provide tailored education and training for their employees and CCC students. The project broke ground in January and will conclude in summer 2022.

Across campus, construction of the Yeti Athletics Park is underway. The park will feature baseball and softball fields, running track, renovated fieldhouse and indoor pitching and batting facility. Here, Yeti softball and baseball players will compete against North Carolina Junior College Athletics Association rivals, and

Yeti cross country runners will expand their training regimen in preparing to defend their national ranking.

Why athletics? As Hurst explained, research shows a strong correlation between the presence of a vibrant athletics program and increased student retention and engagement. “Yeti Athletics not only strengthens the student experience for our athletes and nonathletes alike but also deepens the College’s relationship with the broader community.”

Hurst’s energy and efforts were recognized this past January when the NC State Board of Community Colleges selected him to receive the 2021 President of the Year Award.

137 S. POST ROAD, SHELBY, NC 28152 | 704-669-6000 | CLEVELANDCC.EDU M A R C H

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FTCC, THE SMART CHOICE Individuals considering educational options can easily see why Fayetteville Technical Community College is their smart choice—with over 280 credittransfer programs of study available; convenient, safe delivery of instruction; broad range of Corporate and Continuing Education courses; affordable tuition; and a caring, dedicated staff including success coaches to help students navigate the road to success in achieving their goals. In response to the pandemic, FTCC delivered over the past year—and continues to deliver— instruction mostly online but also virtual, where students participate in classes online but in real time while the instructor delivers course instruction.

FTCC also offers face-to-face classes as needed and incorporates strict safety protocols to protect students and everyone visiting our campus and office locations. Tuition expenses are considerably lower than at four-year colleges, yet the quality of education is high.

Graduates of FTCC who continue their education at four-year colleges perform exceptionally well. Whether a recent high school graduate, a transitioning soldier, or a workforce member seeking to upgrade or learn new skills, students find that FTCC helps them save money by completing a two-year education and then transferring to a four-year college or entering the workforce career-ready.

FTCC’s credit-transfer programs (where some academic credits transfer to some 4-year colleges and universi-

ties) fall under the broad areas of business, computer technology, engineering and applied technology, health, public service, arts and humanities, and math and sciences. Fayetteville Tech offers excellent options for students to enjoy and make the most of study times, such as the newly renovated Paul H. Thompson Library, computer labs with helpful assistance, and beautiful outdoor areas surrounded by nature.

FTCC offers Transition Tech, a no-cost educational program for transitioning soldiers, which provides credentials in various occupations to help soldiers succeed in the civilian workforce. FTCC is home of the All American Veterans Center, staffed by veterans and offering

a number of specialized services and educational counseling for veterans.

Students can pursue FTCC’s Corporate and Continuing Education programs of study to receive a high school equivalency diploma, to quickly gain the necessary job skills for career success, or to pursue a personal hobby or special interest.

With scholarship opportunities, financial aid assistance, and counseling services, FTCC opens its doors to all who seek education and paves the way forward to a brighter future. Join us and discover the extraordinary opportunities and experiences awaiting at Fayetteville Technical Community College, the SMART choice for education.

by Dr. J. Larry Keen, President

2201 HULL ROAD, FAYETTEVILLE, NC 28303 | 910-678-8400 | FAYTECHCC.EDU 38

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GUILFORD TECHNICAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Affordable, accessible, flexible workforce training and development Since 1958, Guilford Technical Community College has been committed to delivering innovative education, training and partnerships to meet the increasing demands of business and industry. GTCC is built for times like these when it is more important than ever to improve access to quality, affordable education and to take an active role in the region’s economic development.

GTCC is built for students: With more online courses and resources available than ever in 2021, plus low tuition, financial aid options and flexible schedules, students have more opportunities at GTCC to gain the skills and knowledge they need to compete and succeed in today’s most in-demand careers. Students can choose from more than 80 programs in top industries, including Health Information Technology, Law Enforcement Training, Aviation, and more.

Now GTCC offers high-quality training in the trucking industry, as well.

In late 2020, GTCC welcomed the first class in its new Truck Driving School, dedicated to helping local industry attract and train qualified drivers.

At GTCC’s 242,000 square-foot Center for Advanced Manufacturing, the college also continues to partner with area industries by providing flex lab space for installing equipment in order to train employees. The cen-

ter’s welding booths, robotic welding machines and 3-D printing lab provide cutting-edge training resources for the area’s industrial base.

Now’s the time to partner with GTCC to build an amazing future. Find out more about new opportunities for professional workforce development and training at Guilford Technical Community College. For more information, visit gtcc.edu.

GTCC is built for industry: GTCC continues to be a recognized leader in aviation training, meeting the hiring needs of county and statewide aviation employers. The program has a proven track record of student job placement with major employers like HAECO Americas, Honda Aircraft Company, Textron and large commercial airlines.

601 E. MAIN STREET, JAMESTOWN, NC 27282 | 336-334-4822 | GTCC.EDU M A R C H

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WINNING!

Sandhills Community College is home to two-time National Men’s Basketball Champions, the Flyers. Winners on and off the court, Sandhills students and graduates continue to achieve success.

Pinehurst and the surrounding area is a major retirement mecca, creating employment opportunities in hospitality and healthcare. Construction trades, engineering, landscape gardening, and advanced manufacturing are also popular career tracks.

Sandhills was the first comprehensive community college in NC to offer a transfer degree program. Today, the College offers five degrees that transfer to four-year universities and many 2+2 technical programs allowing students to take classes at Sandhills and move into a bachelor’s program at a participating university. The college also has partner programs with UNC, NC State, UNC-W, UNC-P, and ECU. Due to donors’ prodigious generosity, Sandhills offers two full years of classes free of charge to local high school students through The Sandhills Promise.

To qualify, students must successfully complete four SCC classes when in high school.

3395 AIRPORT ROAD, PINEHURST, NC 28327 | 910.692.6185 | WWW.SANDHILLS.EDU

THE N.C. HIGHER EDUCATION DIRECTORY IS COMING THIS MAY.

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WAKEWORKS APPRENTICESHIP: Wake County’s Key to a Skilled Workforce Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, Wake County employers have a powerful new resource in their push for renewed economic vitality. WakeWorks Apprenticeship, a unique partnership between Wake Tech Community College and Wake County government, prepares a strong workforce with the skills to help local business and industry grow and prosper.

Apprenticeships benefit both students and employers, while meeting the region’s workforce demands.

“The outcome has been that we have great employees far earlier than expected,” says Mark Bertoncino, Bühler Aeroglide Corporation. “and their wellroundedness makes them much more valuable throughout the company.”

As an employer, your responsibilities include paying the apprentices’ wages, providing training and mentorship, evaluating apprentices’ progress and providing a safe and productive work environment.

WakeWorks Apprenticeship funding provided by Wake County covers many expenses for pre-apprentice and apprenticeship students, including tuition, fees, books, uniforms and tools. Apprenticeship programs are increasing in number across North Carolina, and WakeWorks Apprenticeship is a great way to jump on board.

Now’s the time to hire an apprentice!

Contact John Wojcik at 919-335-1225 or email apprenticeship@waketech.edu.

Students seeking rewarding careers – and those retooling for new career ventures – find opportunities to learn sought-after skills in the most promising fields, and to earn industry-recognized credentials and degrees, while earning an income. Registered apprenticeships require 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and 144 hours of classroom instruction, and many result in permanent employment.

Businesses find that apprenticeships can offer a competitive edge, serve as a powerful tool in developing a workforce tailored to their unique needs, and provide a foundation for strength and longevity. Hiring an apprentice, in a small business or large corporation, can mean the difference between meeting market demand and lagging behind. It can be critical to future success.

919-335-1225 | APPRENTICESHIP.WAKETECH.EDU M A R C H

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Todd Collins sees community kitchens as a smart niche as food purveyors face a shifting market.

▲ Collins at Sun’s Kitchen

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BY MICHAEL SOLENDER

PHOTOS BY ALEX CASON

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t wasn’t long before chef Sam Diminich’s newly launched home-delivery meal service, Your Farms, Your Table, began to outgrow the capacity of his tiny apartment kitchen. Prepar-

ing and distributing fresh three-course meals daily across the Charlotte region proved wildly popular as the pandemic constrained restaurant dining when Diminich opened last March.

“I started with a couple dozen meals delivered daily, and demand quickly accelerated,” Diminich says. When he learned of a Queen City-based shared-use kitchen business called The City Kitch, he immediately saw growth potential. In October, he signed a multiyear contract at City Kitch’s new west Charlotte facility, which is close to Interstates 77 and 85, providing better access to thousands of potential customers.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a massive impact on the N.C. restaurant industry, inflicting considerable damage while creating new opportunities. In normal times, restaurants are risky with as many as 80% failing within their first five years. The pandemic caused revenue in the state’s overall hospitality industry, including bars and hotels, to slide by $4 billion between March and December.

Industry employment declined by 20%, or about 103,000 positions, and many favorite spots have closed.

Charlotte investor Todd Collins saw opportunity as the crisis forced food purveyors to become more innovative as they produce delectables for groceries, gourmet providers, convenience stores and others. Ghost kitchens, the industry term for shared kitchens supporting brick-and-mortar restaurants and those offering only carryout or delivery, started looking more attractive for people or operators seeking to establish a business without immense capital investment.

Former Johnson & Wales University senior culinary instructor Carrie Hegnauer opened City Kitch in 2013 as a shared kitchen near UNC Charlotte. Over the years, she helped food-truck clients gain permits and learn how to operate their businesses while developing a rapport with the local restaurant community. In January 2020, City Kitch partnered with Charlotte-based Red Hill Ventures, a real estate and technology investment firm owned by Collins. He has since invested more than $2 million, including in the west Charlotte kitchen. A Greensboro site is planned later this year, and Collins expects further expansion in North Carolina in an effort to become a market leader.

“How people access and consume food will change through

technology, and our business model is well positioned to play a large role in these shifts,” Collins says. “We thought this was an opportunity to take a successful business where we could implement deeper processes and deeper technology and help it grow in a repeatable manner. Although it’s not our standard investment profile, we can implement lessons we’ve learned in the past into this business and build even greater success.”

Collins had seen coverage in national media about rapid changes in the hospitality business because of the pandemic. High-profile investors have raised the status of ghost kitchens. Most notable is CloudKitchens, a startup by the founder of Uber Technologies, Travis Kalanick, who has invested more than $130 million in 40 locations across the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal.

“I’d read about the concept and seen where [it was taking hold] in cities like San Francisco and New York,” Collins says. “I believe in the vision and know this can be expanded throughout the Southeast. It’s not radically different from [commercial real estate development]. We’re providing space and a service and are effectively a landlord for our culinary clients.”

Postpandemic, restaurants are still likely to be operating differently, with social distancing and more takeout service becoming a norm, says Alistair Williams, a professor in the College of Hospitality Management at Johnson & Wales. “It is likely the focus of marketing will be microlocal and community-based,” he says. “Menus will be streamlined and simplified to reduce costs, technology will increase in importance, and food safety and hygiene will become drivers of business.”

Like most real estate, proximity to high-density areas can be a key for shared kitchens. The Greensboro location is a former cafeteria within 2 miles of UNC Greensboro and Guilford College, lending itself to restaurants that rely on DoorDash, Postmates and other delivery services. “In Charlotte, we’re in the university area, a mile away from UNC Charlotte. We’re in [the South End neighborhood], right in the middle of a rapidly growing area. We’re looking for the same sorts of locations in Raleigh, Durham, Wilmington, and Greenville, S.C.,” Collins says. About 15,000 square feet is the ideal size, he says.

Focusing on local restaurant-community cultures helps set City Kitch apart from 30 or 40 other commissary kitchens operating across North Carolina, says Dana Winstead, director of operations and a Johnson & Wales graduate. Many of those are focused solely on baked goods.

“We have learned to focus first and foremost on our communities and on our clients being able to support one another,” she says.

“These businesses are their babies. They appreciate and grow when they have the support of that community. It’s impressive how they share resources with each other.”

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▲ Hannah Neville of Honeybear Bake Shop, Corey Jones of Mad Dash, and Sam Diminich of Your Farm, Your Table are among the Charlotte food purveyors relying on City Kitch to grow.

Honeybear Bake Shop founder Hannah Neville says the community aspect of City Kitch was as big a draw as the state-of-theart kitchens. She owns an online cookie business that routinely

▲ Collins’ team includes Operations Director Dana Winstead, a Johnson & Wales University graduate and an Air Force veteran.

sells out its $3 cookies featuring flavors such as PB&J, apple crumb pie and cinnamon roll. “The team at City Kitch invested in my success, offering introductions to other entrepreneurs and [making] customer referrals,” says Neville, who signed a multiyear contract for a private prep suite in September.

She is using services such as open retail space allowing her to

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host pop-up sales, advice on pricing strategies, and kitchen cleaning and maintenance. That gives her time to focus on her core business of making cookies and customer service.

Collins says Red Hill Ventures has helped City Kitch broaden its revenue with expanded services. “We create a technical platform for client businesses, allowing them to post the menu online and integrate with third-party delivery services,” Collins says. “We help clients secure insurance. It’s a big deal because they can’t operate without the right insurance coverage. For many of our clients, this is the first time they’ve gone through the process.”

Collins worked for the Accenture consulting firm for nine years before starting Red Hill. Its offshoot, Red Hill Capital, is an angel investor fund Collins developed to support businesses historically overlooked by other funders. As one of Charlotte’s few Black commercial real estate developers, he knows the challenges that minority-owned businesses face in raising capital.

“One thing we’ve noticed with a lot of the culinary entrepreneurs is capital is a challenge,” Collins says. “I’m not talking large amounts of money. In some cases, it’s small amounts of maybe $2,000 or $3,000 worth of repairs preventing a food truck from getting permitted. The restaurant business is a super-risky business because it’s so capital-intensive. It’s shocking how much it takes to start up a small restaurant.”

There’s no typical cost for a new restaurant because style, capacity and other factors differ widely, but about $400,000 is in the ballpark, according to Williams. City Kitch’s offerings start at $640 a month for a 12-month contract, Winstead says.

“It’s less risky by working with us,” Collins says. “Which is why we’re willing to provide small amounts of capital for some of our clients and exploring this type of offering.” ■

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PHOTO COURTESY OF BRIAN STRICKLAND, UNC REX HEALTHCARE

PHOTO COURTESY OF BRIAN STRICKLAND, UNC REX HEALTHCARE

BY PETE ANDERSON ur annual list of North Carolina’s best hospitals examines data compiled from several sources to determine which medical centers provide the best care for their patients. We start by developing a comprehensive list of the state’s top-performing general acute care, adult hospitals with 50 or more beds.

The rankings are calculated using more than 25 metrics, including information provided by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. We look at patient-satisfaction surveys, as well as infection, readmission and death rates for common procedures. Other factors include safety report cards by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit The Leapfrog Group, distinction awards from insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield, and national performance ratings from U.S. News & World Report.

The prime challenge of 2020 for North Carolina hospitals was battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century. Many centers were at risk of being over-

whelmed with COVID patients needing intensive care, forcing restrictions on elective surgeries that provide key revenue for physicians and hospitals. While several hundred million dollars of federal relief funds has helped stabilize the N.C. hospitals, the crisis called for unprecedented flexibility.

Our methodology tends to skew in favor of larger institutions, which earn more points based on national awards and performance rankings. Smaller hospitals tend to come up short, largely because some procedures aren’t performed often enough to be considered. Other factors, such as health care system consolidation, had an impact on this year’s rankings.

Still, independent hospitals in smaller cities including Gastonia, Pinehurst and New Bern ranked highly this year.

Smaller operators can compete effectively.

The federal data and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina insurance distinctions were compiled in December 2020. Leapfrog safety scores and U.S. News & World Report rankings were updated in January.

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UNC REX HEALTHCARE RALEIGH

BEDS: 660 2020 RANK: T-2 PRESIDENT: ERNIE BOVIO

UNC Rex Healthcare, which returns to the top ranking, keeps expanding in its fast-growing market. Its 50-bed community hospital in Holly Springs is expected to open this fall, followed next year by a $65 million, four-story cancer center at its west Raleigh campus. The 145,000square-foot expansion doubles the hospital’s cancer-care space, improving efficiency and adding oncology urgent care and quality of life clinics.

Like every hospital, its past year has been consumed with battling COVID-19. The hospital opened an isolation unit in March, offering ICU-level respiratory care for its sickest COVID patients. In April and May, visitations were restricted and elective surgeries scaled back.

And at the end of the year, it began vaccinations, first for its employees then for the most vulnerable residents.

UNC Rex is led by Ernie Bovio, who joined the hospital as chief operating officer in 2018 and became CEO in late 2019.

DUKE UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL DURHAM

BEDS: 957 2020 RANK: T-4 PRESIDENT:

THOMAS OWENS

COVID response also took center stage at the Durham hospital, which had its 90th year of operation last year. It opened portions of its Duke Central Tower to accommodate more patients, and it started vaccinating its workers in mid-December and the state’s most vulnerable residents in January.

The hospital completed its 1,500th heart transplant in October, 35 years since its first such procedure. The latest was a donation after a circulatory death transplant, which Duke pioneered in 2019. It reanimates a still donor heart; the organ never stops during a traditional transplant. The hospital received a three-star rating for its adult cardiac-surgery program from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons for quality patient care and outcomes.

Duke Health partnered with San-Francisco-based 1Life Healthcare in August to use the technology administrator’s One Medical to expand primary-care access through clinical and digital integrations.

President Thomas Owens came to Duke in 1999 and took his current post in January 2018. He also serves as an associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at Duke University School of Medicine.

CAROMONT REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER GASTONIA

BEDS: 435 2020 RANK: 14 PRESIDENT AND CEO:

CHRIS PEEK

CaroMont Regional Medical Center’s jump — 11 spots — was the largest made by any hospital in this year’s top 10. Construction on a $90 million four-floor critical-care tower is underway. Each floor of the 146,000-square-foot project will have 26 patient rooms offering ICU-level care, all within view of nursing stations. It’s expected to open in 2023, when CaroMont Health also plans to open the 66-bed CaroMont Regional Medical Center-Belmont. It will have an emergency department, operating rooms, a labor-and-delivery unit and imaging services. Both projects are part of a countywide investment of more than $350 million.

On Dec. 1, the hospital and Minneapolis-based UnitedHealthcare Services parted ways.

The insurer claimed hospital-based services were too expensive, while the provider claimed reimbursements were too low. That put CaroMont out of network for about 11,000 local customers. Both indicated a willingness to negotiate, but a compromise had yet to be reached as of mid-February.

FIRSTHEALTH MOORE REGIONAL HOSPITAL PINEHURST

(TIE) BEDS: 390 2020 RANK: T-4 CEO: MICKEY FOSTER

FirstHealth of the Carolinas has 5,000 employees and treats patients from 15 surrounding counties. Moore Regional enrolled its first patient in a clinical trial that’s testing a combination of antiviral drug Remdesivir and a highly concentrated solution of antibodies, harvested from donated plasma, against COVID-19. It also approved interior plans for its $68 million Comprehensive Cancer Center, which will be built in Pinehurst, across from Reid Heart Center. The 120,000-square-foot building will consolidate the system’s multidisciplinary cancer care, bringing treatments closer to home for more patients, says system CEO Mickey Foster.

Construction should be complete in late 2022.

In January, Moore Regional Hospital advanced its robotic surgery capabilities with a second da Vinci Xi Surgical System. It gives surgeons more mobility within a patient’s abdominal cavity and uses an improved system for closing the tiny incisions that it makes. Offered since 2006, these surgeries reduce pain, hospital stays and recovery time.

In March, FirstHealth became the eighth N.C. health system to join Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina’s Blue Premier Program. Its shared-risk model makes both parties responsible for better outcomes and lower costs. Blue Cross estimates 15% savings over 10 years.

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MISSION HOSPITAL ASHEVILLE

(TIE) BEDS: 730 2020 RANK: 1 CEO: CHAD PATRICK

About a year after Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare finalized its $1.5 billion purchase of Mission Health in early 2019, its Asheville nurses began questioning working conditions, which were exacerbated by COVID. By the end of September, a majority — 70% of those who cast ballots — voted to join Oakland, Calif.-based union National Nurses United, which represents about 185,000 members nationwide. HCA says a union will impair communications between supervisors and staff. Nurses still need a collective bargaining agreement, which will cover working conditions, pay and raises. While state law says employees don’t have to join or pay dues to a union, the deal will cover Mission’s 1,800 nurses in Asheville.

The nurses’ vote attracted national attention because North Carolina has the second-lowest unionization rate, trailing South Carolina.

In May, HCA Healthcare Mission Fund was launched with $25 million to support businesses working to improve the quality or efficiency of health care in western North Carolina. An initial move was to support Venture Asheville’s 2020 Asheville Impact Micro Grant Program, including a $5,000 grant earmarked for a local startup in health and wellness. A board of local and hospital system leaders steers the fund.

ATRIUM HEALTH CABARRUS CONCORD

(TIE) BEDS: 457 2020 RANK: T-12

One of Charlotte-based Atrium Health’s 42 hospitals, Atrium Health Cabarrus started 2020 with a new facility executive, Asha Rodriguez. Her attention quickly turned to COVID response, including handing out more than 82,000 masks and using Atrium Health Mobile Food Pantry to feed more than 1,100 people in Cabarrus County by the end of December.

The hospital also has been implementing the Atrium Health Healthy Together program, which stresses healthy habits including exercise and diet. It’s working with five schools and more than 3,300 students in its home county. Cabarrus County Schools and Kannapolis City Schools are committed to implementing Healthy Together’s 5-2-1-0 program. The hospital released the Healthy Together Workplace Wellness Toolkit last summer, which has been used by local businesses more than 100 times.

FACILITY EXECUTIVE:

ASHA RODRIGUEZ

CAROLINAEAST MEDICAL CENTER NEW BERN

(TIE) BEDS: 350 2020 RANK: T-4 PRESIDENT AND CEO:

G. RAYMOND LEGGETT III

After starting 2020 by opening the $38 million, 80,000-square-foot State Employees’ Credit Union Comprehensive Cancer Center and adjacent $22 million diagnostic center, CarolinaEast Medical Center finished the year by unveiling a new procedure. Transcatheter aortic valve replacement — TAVR — uses a catheter such as those used to clear blocked coronary arteries. Four procedures were completed by December. While it was developed for patients who aren’t candidates for open-heart surgery, it has become more widely used. One benefit of the minimally invasive option is shorter recovery times. Patients undergoing traditional replacements spend as long as a week in the hospital and eight more days recuperating at home.

Most TAVR patients go home the same day and are back to normal activity more quickly.

The medical center’s cardiovascular care center was the first in North Carolina to achieve an excellence accreditation from American Heart Association, and it was one of 60 nationwide to receive American College of Cardiology’s NCDR Chest Pain – MU Registry Gold Performance Achievement Award in 2020.

MOSES CONE HOSPITAL GREENSBORO

(TIE) BEDS: 529 2020 RANK: T-2 PRESIDENT:

PRESTON HAMMOCK

In early August, Greensboro-based Cone Health’s board agreed to merge the system and its 13,000 employees with Norfolk, Va.-based Sentara Healthcare, which operates one other North Carolina hospital — Sentara Albemarle Medical Center in Elizabeth City. Sentara plans to use the merger to expand further into North Carolina. Cone Health CEO Terry Akin will depart upon the merger’s regulatory approval, which is expected this summer. Cone Chief Operating Officer Mary Jo Cagle will then take the reins as Sentara’s regional president. She has been with Cone for about a decade, originally hired as its chief quality officer. She will be the first woman and first physician to lead Cone.

In May, Cone Health exited talks to take over Randolph Health, which operates a hospital in Asheboro. That hospital had filed for bankruptcy protection and was seeking a $20 million state loan to cover expected operating losses. American Healthcare Systems, led by industry veteran Michael Sarian, acquired the Asheboro hospital.

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NOVANT HEALTH FORSYTH MEDICAL CENTER WINSTON-SALEM

(TIE) BEDS: 921 2020 RANK: 10 PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER:

CHAD SETLIFF

In mid-January, N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein signed off on Novant Health’s purchase of Wilmington’s New Hanover Regional Medical Center after a public sales process that involved the state’s four biggest hospital systems. Novant’s $4.5 billion bid included $1.5 billion for New Hanover County, which had owned the hospital, and pledges of more than $3 billion in capital expenditures over the next decade. The county commission approved the sale in October after considering bids from Atrium Health, Duke Health and others.

Novant also reached an agreement with UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine in November for a statewide expansion of medical education, clinical services and research. It includes access to clinical trials led by UNC School of Medicine researchers at Novant locations in Charlotte, Wilmington and Winston-Salem. The move followed the partnership between Atrium Health and Wake Forest Baptist Health that is leading to an expansion of the Wake Forest School of Medicine into Charlotte.

UNC HOSPITALS CHAPEL HILL

The sister organization of UNC Rex Healthcare ranks among the nation’s leaders in medical innovation. In October, its doctors were the first in the Carolinas and among the first nationwide to use cardiac contractility modulation therapy on a heart-failure patient. Its electrical pulses cause the patient’s heart to contract, pushing more oxygen-rich blood through the body.

BEDS: 929 In January, UNC Health and Boston-based Medically Home Group established the Acute Care at Home Program. It brings hospital-caliber care for chronic diseases, infections, sur2020 RANK: T-7 gery recovery and COVID to patients at home, aiming to lower costs and improve outcomes.

PRESIDENT: JANET HADAR Physicians and nurses remotely monitor patients, who traditionally would be hospitalized, and administer IVs, oxygen treatments, lab tests, X-rays, ultrasounds and other services. The program is expected to start this summer for UNC Medical Center and UNC Rex patients, eventually expanding to UNC Health’s 10 N.C. hospitals.

11 NOVANT HEALTH PRESBYTE- 15 WAKE FOREST BAPTIST RIAN MEDICAL CENTER MEDICAL CENTER CHARLOTTE

WINSTON-SALEM

BEDS: 597 | 2020 RANK: T-12 PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER: SAAD EHTISHAM

BEDS: 885 | 2020 RANK: T-16 PRESIDENT AND CEO: JULIE ANN FREISCHLAG

12 ATRIUM HEALTH CAROLINAS MEDICAL CENTER CHARLOTTE

BEDS: 907 | 2020 RANK: T-7 PRESIDENT CENTRAL DIVISION: VICKI BLOCK

13 DUKE REGIONAL HOSPITAL TIE DURHAM

BEDS: 369 | 2020 RANK: T-7 | PRESIDENT: KATIE GALBRAITH

13 WAKE FOREST BAPTIST TIE HEALTH - HIGH POINT REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER HIGH POINT

BEDS: 351 | 2020 RANK: T-16 PRESIDENT AND CEO: JAMES HOEKSTRA

16 ATRIUM HEALTH PINEVILLE TIE CHARLOTTE

BEDS: 235 | 2020 RANK: T-20 SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND MARKET PRESIDENT - SOUTH: MICHAEL LUTES

16 FRYE REGIONAL TIE MEDICAL CENTER, A DUKE LIFEPOINT HOSPITAL HICKORY

BEDS: 355 | 2020 RANK: T-22 | INTERIM CEO: JERRY DOOLEY

16 WAKEMED RALEIGH CAMPUS TIE RALEIGH

BEDS: 726 | 2020 RANK: T-20 PRESIDENT AND CEO: DONALD GINTZIG

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19 NOVANT HEALTH MATTHEWS 23 CAPE FEAR VALLEY TIE MEDICAL CENTER MATTHEWS FAYETTEVILLE

BEDS: 146 | 2020 RANK: 15 PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER: JASON BERND

BEDS: 666 | 2020 RANK: T-16 PRESIDENT AND CEO: MICHAEL NAGOWSKI

20 ALAMANCE REGIONAL TIE MEDICAL CENTER

23 CATAWBA VALLEY TIE MEDICAL CENTER

BURLINGTON

HICKORY

BEDS: 238 | 2020 RANK: T-26 | PRESIDENT: MARK GORDON

BEDS: 258 | 2020 RANK: T-32 | CEO: EDWARD BEARD

20 ATRIUM HEALTH UNION TIE MONROE

23 WAKEMED CARY TIE HOSPITAL

BEDS: 249 | 2020 RANK: 25 PRESIDENT AND CEO: MICHAEL LUTES

CARY

20 NEW HANOVER REGIONAL TIE MEDICAL CENTER

BEDS: 156 | 2020 RANK: T-22 SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND ADMINISTRATOR COMMUNITY HOSPITALS: THOMAS GOUGH

WILMINGTON

BEDS: 769 | 2020 RANK: 11 PRESIDENT AND CEO: JOHN GIZDIC

These are the top acute-care hospitals in the state with 50 or more beds based on the percentage of patients who would recommend the hospital to others, as of December 2020. The ranking is based on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, a survey completed by adult hospital patients between 48 hours and six weeks after discharge.

Rank

Hospital

Location

%

11

New Hanover Regional Medical Center

Wilmington

78

14

WakeMed Raleigh Campus

Raleigh

77

1

FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital

Pinehurst

85

14

Atrium Health Lincoln

Lincolnton

77

2

UNC Rex Healthcare

Raleigh

84

16

Moses Cone Hospital

Greensboro

76

2

Duke University Hospital

Durham

84

16

Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center

Charlotte

76

4

UNC Hospitals

Chapel Hill

83

16

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

Winston-Salem

76

4

AdventHealth Hendersonville

Hendersonville

83

16

Duke Raleigh Hospital

Raleigh

76

4

LifeBrite Community Hospital of Stokes

Danbury

83

16

Pardee UNC Health Care

Hendersonville

76

7

CarolinaEast Medical Center

New Bern

80

16

Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital

Elkin

76

7

Catawba Valley Medical Center

Hickory

80

22

Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center

Charlotte

75

9

Ashe Memorial Hospital

Jefferson

79

22

Novant Health Matthews

Matthews

75

9

Pender Memorial Hospital

Burgaw

79

22

Novant Health Huntersville

Huntersville

75

11

Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center

Winston-Salem

78

22

Watauga Medical Center

Boone

75

11

Duke Regional Hospital

Durham

78

22

Transylvania Regional Hospital

Brevard

75

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BLUE CROSS AND BLUE SHIELD OF NORTH CAROLINA

THE STATE’S LARGEST HEALTH INSURER RECOGNIZES HOSPITALS FOR THEIR QUALITY OF CARE IN CERTAIN SPECIALTIES, BASED ON CRITERIA INCLUDING PATIENT SAFETY AND RESULTS AND INPUT FROM THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY. THE HOSPITALS LISTED HERE WERE DESIGNATED AS BLUE DISTINCTION CENTERS AS OF EARLY JANUARY.

Alamance Regional Medical Center

Atrium Health University City

Duke University Hospital

■

■

■

Spine surgery

■

Adult bone marrow/stem cell transplants

Maternity care

Maternity care

Atrium Health Cabarrus

Caldwell UNC Health Care

■

Adult lung transplants

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

■

Adult pancreas transplants

■

Cardiac care

■

Maternity care

Cape Fear Valley Medical Center

FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital

■

Spine surgery

■

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Cardiac care

■

Maternity care

■

Spine surgery

Maternity care

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

CarolinaEast Medical Center

Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center

■

Cardiac care

■

Maternity care

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

■

Adult bone marrow/stem cell transplants

CaroMont Regional Medical Center

Frye Regional Medical Center, a Duke LifePoint Hospital

■

Pediatric heart transplants

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Adult liver (deceased donor) transplants

■

Maternity care

■

Spine surgery

■

Spine surgery

■

Pediatric bone marrow/stem cell transplants

Carteret Health Care

Atrium Health Cleveland ■

■

Maternity care

Catawba Valley Medical Center

Atrium Health Mercy ■

■

Bariatric surgery

■

Maternity care

■

Maternity care

Atrium Health Union ■

Maternity care

58

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Spine surgery

Duke Regional Hospital

Atrium Health Stanly ■

Maternity care

Duke Raleigh Hospital

Atrium Health Pineville ■

Bariatric surgery

N O R T H

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Cardiac care

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

■

Spine surgery

Haywood Regional Medical Center, a Duke LifePoint Hospital ■

Knee and hip replacement

Iredell Health System ■

Knee and hip replacement

Johnston Memorial Hospital ■

Maternity care

Lake Norman Regional Medical Center ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

C A R O L I N A

2/19/21 4:53 PM

Mission Hospital

Pardee UNC Health Care

■

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

Knee and hip replacement

Moses Cone Hospital

Rutherford Regional Medical Center

■

Cardiac care

■

■

Spine surgery

Knee and hip replacement

Scotland Memorial Hospital Nash UNC Health Care

■

Maternity care

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Knee and hip replacement

Sentara Albemarle Medical Center

■

Maternity care

■

Knee and hip replacement

New Hanover Regional Medical Center

UNC Hospitals

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Spine surgery

■

Spine surgery

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Cardiac care

Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center

■

Maternity care

■

■

Adult heart transplants

■

Adult bone marrow/stem cell transplants

Novant Health Kernersville

■

Adult liver (deceased donor) transplants

■

■

Adult lung transplants

Maternity care

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Novant Health Matthews ■

Pediatric bone marrow/stem cell transplants

Maternity care

UNC Rex Healthcare Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Cardiac care

Novant Health Rowan Medical Center ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

Novant Health Thomasville Medical Center ■

Maternity care

Onslow Memorial Hospital ■

■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Cardiac care

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Spine surgery

Vidant Medical Center ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

Vidant North Hospital ■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

Wake Forest Baptist Health - Davie Medical Center ■

Wake Forest Baptist Health High Point Regional Medical Center ■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

Wake Forest Baptist Health Lexington Medical Center ■

Knee and hip replacement

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Spine surgery

■

Adult bone marrow/stem cell transplant

■

Adult heart transplant

■

Adult pancreas transplant

WakeMed Cary Hospital ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

WakeMed Raleigh Campus ■

Knee and hip replacement

■

Maternity care

■

Spine surgery

Wayne UNC Health Care ■

Maternity care

Wesley Long Hospital ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

knee and hip replacement

Wesley Long Hospital ■

Bariatric surgery: Comprehensive center

■

knee and hip replacement

Wilson Medical Center ■

Knee and hip replacement

Knee and hip replacement

Maternity care

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U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT

Nationally ranked

AB

DO M IN

National rank High-performing in this specialty or procedure

AL AO AO RT RT IC IC AN VA EU L CA VE RY NC SM S U ER RG RE PA ER IR Y CA RD IO LO GY CH RO /H NIC EA OB RT ST SU RU CO CT RG LO IVE ER N PU CA Y L MO NC DI NA ER AB RY SU ET D ISE RG ES AS ER /E E EA Y ND R, OC NO R SE IN OL AN GA OG D ST TH Y RO R EN OA TE T GE RO RI LO AT GY RI CS /G IS GY UR NE GE CO RY LO GY HE AR TB YP HE AS AR SS TF UR AI GE LU HI RY RE PR EP LA CE KN M EE EN RE T PL AC LU EM NG EN CA T NC NE ER PH S UR RO GE LO RY GY NE UR OL OG Y/ OP TH NE AL UR M OS OL UR OR O GY GE TH RY OP ED ICS PU LM ON OL OG RH Y EU M AT OL UR OG OL Y OG Y

Hospitals listed here are ranked regionally or nationally by U.S. News & World Report, which assesses performance in various adult specialties and selected lower-acuity procedures that require a reduced level of care. Patient survival is weighted heaviest, while safety, staffing and other factors are also considered.

Alamance Regional Medical Center

Burlington

•

•

Atrium Health Cabarrus

Concord

•

•

Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center

Charlotte

Atrium Health Cleveland

Shelby

•

Atrium Health Lincoln

Lincolnton

•

Atrium Health Pineville

Charlotte

•

•

Atrium Health Union

Monroe

•

•

Caldwell UNC Health Care

Lenoir

•

•

Cape Fear Valley Medical Center

Fayetteville

•

•

CarolinaEast Medical Center

New Bern

CaroMont Regional Medical Center Central Carolina Hospital, a Duke LifePoint Hospital

•

•

50

•

•

•

•

•

•

Gastonia

•

•

Sanford

•

Duke Raleigh Hospital

Raleigh

•

Duke Regional Hospital

Durham

•

Duke University Hospital

Durham

•

• 41 35 •

FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital

Pinehurst

•

•

Frye Regional Medical Center, a Duke LifePoint Hospital

Hickory

•

•

Iredell Health System

Statesville

•

•

Johnston Health - Smithfield

Smithfield

•

•

Mission Hospital

Asheville

•

•

•

•

Moses Cone Hospital

Greensboro

•

•

•

•

Nash UNC Health Care

Rocky Mount

•

•

•

•

•

•

New Hanover Regional Medical Center

Wilmington

•

•

•

•

•

• 47

26 •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

• 19 29 7 22 32 13 34

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

• •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

• •

•

•

source: U.S. News & World Report’s Best Hospitals (2019-20), based on American Hospital Association data, Medicare data and physician surveys

60

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N O R T H

C A R O L I N A

2/19/21 4:54 PM

R,

HE

DO NO CR SE IN OL AN GA OG D ST T Y RO HR EN OA TE T GE R RI OL AT OG RI Y/ CS GI GY SU NE RG CO ER Y LO GY HE AR TB YP HE AS AR SS TF UR AI GE L HI RY UR PR E EP LA C KN EM EE EN RE T PL AC LU EM NG EN CA T NC NE ER PH S U RO RG LO ER GY NE Y UR OL OG Y/ OP TH NE AL UR M OS O UR LO OR GY GE TH RY OP ED ICS PU LM ON OL OG RH Y EU M AT OL UR OG OL Y OG Y

AR OB TS ST RU UR CT GE IVE RY P CA UL MO NC DI NA ER AB R YD SU ET ISE RG ES AS ER /E E EA Y N CO LO N

IO LO GY /

CH RO NIC

CA NC ER

CA RD

AN

EU

R

YS M SU RE RG PA ER IR Y

LA OR TIC

VA LV E

DO M IN A

AO RT IC

AB

Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center

WinstonSalem

Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center

Charlotte

Sentara Albemarle Medical Center

Elizabeth City

UNC Health Southeastern

Lumberton

UNC Hospitals

Chapel Hill

UNC Rex Healthcare

Raleigh

•

Vidant Medical Center

Greenville

•

Wake Forest Baptist Health High Point Regional Medical Center

High Point

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

WinstonSalem

WakeMed Cary Hospital

Cary

WakeMed Raleigh Campus

Raleigh

Watauga Medical Center

Boone

•

•

Wayne UNC Health Care

Goldsboro

•

•

Best Hospitals_List_March 2021.indd 61

•

•

•

•

•

•

• • •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

• 36 • • •

18 •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

• •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

• 39

•

•

• •

•

•

•

•

2/19/21 4:54 PM

MOUNTING

prestige Gastonia’s CaroMont Health foresees an independent future as it faces off against larger neighboring rivals.

BY EDWARD MARTIN PHOTO BY PETER TAYLOR

W

ith what felt like a grizzly in his chest, Jim Benfield’s legs buckled, and he crashed onto his living room floor. A Mount Holly policeman who had helped first responders break down doors to rescue ailing 911 callers, he frantically fumbled with his cellphone.

“Dummy me, why didn’t I call the ambulance?” he shrugs. “I knew I was dying, and all I could think was that I wanted to speak to my wife one more time.”

Fresh out of the shower, a clot blocked the left anterior descending artery of Benfield’s heart, triggering paroxysms of pain that he compares to the claws of an angry bear. He had one shred of hope left — his firefighter son found him and called for help. Soon, an emergency medical technician had stuffed nitroglycerin under his tongue, helping to ease the pain. Then came the siren and the sway of the big ambulance. After a 20-minute ride in the shrieking ambulance, the driver finally pulled up to CaroMont Regional Medical Center.

Four days later on an early May morning, Benfield walked out of the Gastonia hospital, a stent funneling blood through the artery his doctor called the widowmaker. Now 57, five years later and wiser about his diet and exercise, he’s the lucky one in slightly more than 10 who survive the deadliest of heart attacks.

“Amazing,” says the now-retired police captain. “Not only the care — no surgery, no cutting, just the stent — but the fantastic staff of the cardio rehab unit and the care I received months after I left.”

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C A R O L I N A

2/22/21 10:34 AM

▲CaroMont Chief Medical Officer Todd Davis and CEO Chris Peek say Gaston County’s growth can sustain the system for the long term.

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Benfield’s hospital is not among the state’s largest or most widely known. Nearby in Charlotte, Carolinas Medical Center, standard-bearer of Atrium Health, has double CaroMont’s 435 beds and nearly 16 times the employees systemwide. Regional competitor Novant Health — with 921 beds at its Winston-Salem flagship, Forsyth Medical Center, alone — dwarfs CaroMont with $5 billion in annual revenue. CaroMont had $661 million in the fiscal year ending June 2020.

This year, though, Business North Carolina’s annual rankings of Tar Heel hospitals show CaroMont in third place, trailing only Durham’s Duke University Medical Center, part of the Duke Health system, and Raleigh’s UNC Rex Hospital, which is part of the large UNC Health system, with a dozen affiliated hospitals.

“Do you have to be big to be good? Absolutely not,” says Shelby Lassiter, clinical performance improvement director of the 130-member N.C. Healthcare Association. Most Tar Heel hospitals belong. “CaroMont is an example. Frequently, smaller organizations don’t have the resources larger ones do, so they have to become masters of innovation and leaders in how to partner with their communities.”

Chris Peek, 50, grew up not far from the hospital, where he’s been president and CEO since 2017. “We’re part of this community,” he says. “It’s in our DNA.” CaroMont demonstrates that smaller hospitals such as Pinehurst’s FirstHealth Moore Regional and CarolinaEast Medical Center in New Bern can excel, analysts say. In recent years, CaroMont has joined Rex, Duke, Raleigh’s WakeMed and Mission in Asheville in receiving IBM Watson Health awards as one of the nation’s best 100 hospitals — there are about 2,800 — based on survival rates for heart attacks, infection control and complications, lengths of stay, and profit margins.

Its third-place ranking by Business North Carolina is a

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rebound from 14th in 2020. It was fourth, sixth and fifth in preceding years. Our formula weighs more than two dozen criteria such as readmissions, plus data from Durham-based insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the nonprofit Leapfrog Group and U.S. News & World Report.

CaroMont is not immune from difficult trends facing hospitals.

Minnesota-based UnitedHealthcare recently cut ties with the hospital, leaving about 11,000 patients facing higher, out-of-network bills — or going elsewhere for elective procedures. CaroMont insists the largest U.S. insurer refused to pay adequately.

Separately, seven physicians jumped ship last fall to join an independent practice created by former Atrium doctors.

Nevertheless, CaroMont’s performance reflects a dramatic turnaround of a hospital and health care system that, a decade

PHOTOS COURTESY OF CAROMONT HEALTH

▲ Maria Glenn, a CaroMont emergency room physician, received her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 18. Jasmine Wilson, right, is part of the hospital’s environmental services team.

C A R O L I N A

2/22/21 10:35 AM

ago, faced questions about its own health. CEO Peek and outside observers describe a system that sometimes defies industry conventional wisdom while thriving in a tough environment.

In 2012, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid slapped an “immediate jeopardy” status on CaroMont, citing potentially deadly patient-safety violations. Among other things, nurses were failing to properly administer medicine.

A Medicare spokesperson says the warning is the center’s most serious, issued when patients “are at risk of serious injury, harm, impairment or death.” It’s only a step away from a devastating loss of accreditation that would result in skittish physicians sending patients elsewhere and potential financial collapse. Typical of most hospitals, about 60% of CaroMont’s revenue comes from Medicare and Medicaid.

Within five years, by then back in Medicare’s good graces, CaroMont was winning accolades. Analysts rarely point to a single factor but describe cultural change as easier to see than define.

New day Behind the four-story glass front that welcomes visitors, CaroMont nurses, physicians and patients ply airy hallways and cluster under the bright lights of operating rooms. The hospital has been singled out by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina for excellence in knee and hip replacements and spinal surgeries.

One of those doctors is Todd Davis, executive vice president and chief medical director, who served briefly as interim CEO before Peek’s arrival.

“That reinforced for me that a CEO’s skill set is completely different from mine,’’ he laughs. In fact, in more than two decades here, he’s played a major role in establishing CaroMont’s cardiac program. He’s an anesthesiologist and critical-care specialist.

Like most of the nearly dozen doctors and nurses in governing and leadership roles at the hospital, Davis continues to practice medicine.

Peek has even deeper local roots. He grew up in Gastonia, attended a local private Christian secondary school, graduated from Gaston College and UNC Charlotte, and holds an MBA from Amberton University, a nondenominational Christian college in Texas that caters to working adults. He did follow-up studies at Cornell University, then gained nonmedical, humanitarian experience in Atlanta as human resources director for the regional Salvation Army. Later, in nearby Mecklenburg County, he became assistant county manager in 2006, helping oversee a budget that topped $1.5 billion.

During his stint in Charlotte, he helped the county work with the 2012 Democratic National Convention and, during the Queen City’s civil unrest in 2016, coordinated public-safety measures. Then he came home to Gaston County.

In the spring of 2017, Peek became the third CEO in five years after the 2012 Medicare threat, including one who left after a cringeworthy, aborted campaign to adopt the slogan, “Cheat Death.”

Peek was chosen by a search committee headed by Donnie Loftis, a former county commission chairman who called him

“uniquely qualified and familiar with our health system.” Loftis was forced to resign as CaroMont’s board chairman last year after calling COVID-19 restrictions “tyranny” and hinting on social media that the pandemic is a global conspiracy.

Board members are unpaid volunteers whose private statements don’t represent system policy, spokeswoman Meghan Berney notes. Like all hospitals, CaroMont staffers have been treated for the virus, and officials favor public distancing, masks and other precautions.

Peek is close-cropped, with an easy manner. He’s an ordained minister who sometimes fills in as a pastor at local churches, and he knew the turf when he took CaroMont’s top spot. His most recently reported annual compensation was $995,585 — a fraction of the $7.9 million that Atrium counterpart Gene Woods received in 2020 at a much larger system.

“This is quite personal for me,” Peek says. “The decisions I make may be a little different from those of the typical health care CEO, who could have come from anywhere around the country. Many of the people we take care of are family and friends I grew up with and have great affection for.”

Berney adds that the heavily local staff is strongly connected to the community. “We have to be, because we not only work here, we live here,” she says. “That brings a different sense of responsibility and accountability.” A third of employees have been on staff 10 years or longer.

Without the geographic diversity and scale of its larger rivals, Peek faces some unusual challenges. CaroMont faces stiff sailing in remaining independent, but that fits Gaston County’s long role of existing in the shadow of Mecklenburg, which has four times the population.

“We’re certainly aware of the changes we’ve undergone here,” Peek says. When he was a youngster, “we were the textile capital of the world.”

Charlotte’s home county began its transition from blue-collar manufacturing to white-collar jobs generations ago, while textiles continued to dominate Gaston’s economy into the early 2000s.

Gaston and neighboring counties are dotted with former mill towns such as McAdenville, Cherryville, Stanley and Belmont that today feed about 250,000 patients annually into CaroMont.

Starting in the 1990s, NAFTA and other global forces decimated the textile industry, but old health habits such as smoking and poor diets lingered. Environmental issues from former chemical manufacturers and other industries create cancer hot spots, according to research.

Studies by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington show Jim Benfield’s heart attack shouldn’t have been a surprise. About 230 men per 100,000 in Gaston County and the surrounding area die of ischemic heart disease every year, compared with a rate of 185 statewide. Male life expectancy is 72.7 years, nearly three years less than for the state, and there are 38 deaths from suicide and violence per 100,000, compared with 32.2 statewide.

“For me,” Peek says, “it’s a question of long-term strategy. How can we use our influence in this community to transform the future?”

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▲ Gaston Memorial Hospital opened in Gastonia in 1973 and was renamed CaroMont in 2013. An adjacent four-story critical care tower and a 54-bed hospital in Belmont are slated to open in 2023.

Today, eastern Gaston County is experiencing rapid spillover growth from Charlotte, prompting the development of a second campus in Belmont. The hospital there is part of a $350 million building spree that includes a new four-story, $90 million tower on the main campus to house intensive-care rooms. Both are expected to be completed in 2023.

“We’re the beneficiary of being in a region that’s close to a rapidly growing metropolitan area, and Gaston’s positioned for significant growth in the next decade,” Peek says. “Until now, we’ve grown our market share mainly in our primary service area” of Gaston and adjoining Cleveland and Lincoln counties.

CaroMont Health grew out of Gaston Memorial Hospital, which opened in 1946 and was replaced with a new structure in 1973. The name was changed in 2013. While the hospital may look like dozens of others in the state, the strategy isn’t identical.

Peek and Davis say CaroMont shuns the kind of marriages sweeping Tar Heel health care. Atrium linked with Wake Forest Baptist Health last year, while Novant bought New Hanover Regional Medical Center.

CaroMont welcomes partnerships but doesn’t court them.

“The reporting and labor it takes provides no value for our patients,” Davis says. “What provides value is outcomes.” Peek adds that CaroMont is content with its status as one of the 19 remaining independent acute-care hospitals not affiliated with larger groups.

“We’re often referred to as an independent hospital system,” Peek says. “I don’t support that nomenclature. I prefer to call us a community-based system. CaroMont Health is not currently

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Tech advances Like most hospitals, CaroMont has been hurt financially by the pandemic, which curtailed elective procedures and discouraged frightened patients from visiting emergency rooms and seeking other care. Operating revenue increased 2.2% in the year ending June 30, 2020. More recent results haven’t been reported.

CaroMont’s performance refutes the conventional wisdom that hospitals must have billions in annual revenue to stay abreast of technology trends, according to Lassiter of the health care association. They cite CaroMont’s contract with Epic Systems, a national medical-records database that provides data

PHOTO COURTESY OF CAROMONT HEALTH

Path of progress

interested in any type of consolidation in the foreseeable future.

Our mission is centered here in this community.”

CaroMont was only large N.C. hospital to support state Treasurer Dale Folwell’s effort in 2019 to change reimbursement rates for the State Health Plan. The plan never took effect.

Fitch Ratings gives CaroMont a strong investment-grade rating of AA-minus. “Many large systems don’t have that strong a rating,” Peek says. In its latest financial report, CaroMont had about $160 million in debt on assets of $1.3 billion.

Many business interests believe CaroMont’s independence is more important than just civic pride, says Bob Hovis, a Gaston County commissioner and former Bessemer City mayor. “CaroMont’s a vested business partner in our community,” he says.

“They are a cornerstone of our positive outlook for the future.”

The hospital has adapted business principles benefiting both finances and patient care, he says. “They focus on their core competencies, analyze weakness and have a plan of action to improve them.”

C A R O L I N A

2/22/21 10:36 AM

STEADY GROWER CaroMont Health

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

$650.6

636.4

602.7

552.4

529.5

Operating income

$20.2

26.90

24.8

12.1

16.3

Non-operating income

$34.2

31.90

38.5

62.8

(19.6)

Revenue less expenses

$54.4

58.8

63.3

74.9

(3.3)

$1,294.3

1,192.3

1,159.7

1,083.1

1,013.2

$160.4

168.20

175.8

180.5

187.4

(million)

Program service revenue

Total assets Total debt Fiscal years ending on June 30 source: CaroMont Health Inc.

from more than 250 million patient records, including Novant and Atrium.

“It has the capacity and potential to provide more information than anyone could possibly use,” Davis says.

Artificial intelligence and emerging technology called precision medicine could level playing fields for small- and medium-sized hospitals that prize independence, Lassiter says. “Artificial intelligence can help clinicians analyze massive amounts of data on a single patient to predict outcomes and recommend interventions much better than we as humans can.”

CaroMont’s Davis says the hospital has ventured into nonmedical-management theory, which he credits for meeting or exceeding Medicare’s norms for infection control, readmission rates and control of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a potentially deadly bacteria.

“One is an unsexy term coined in the auto industry by Toyota and the military called ‘limited variability,’” he says. “We try to standardize everything, and the idea is [that] failures happen when there’s variability. You standardize to protect from human error.”

The hospital also prods its staffers with, among other things, bonuses of as much as $500 for exceptional work. “CaroMont’s employees get care at CaroMont by CaroMont providers, so it’s more of a family-type situation than at some larger hospitals,” Lassiter says. “They know their outcomes will impact themselves and the people they love most in the world.”

About 8 miles north of CaroMont Medical Center, a program at East Gaston High School is another reason the system maintains strong community ties. As many as 150 freshmen will get their first taste of health careers, such as nurse’s aides, dietary managers and pharmacists, at the initial wave of the CaroMont Health Sciences Academy. Their training will be transferable to higher levels of college or jobs.

The academy, in cooperation with the county schools and Gaston College, is one of dozens of CaroMont community programs, including smoking-cessation programs, diet counseling, cancer support, and even burial services for infants of poor families.

Many programs underscore efforts to push care out of hospitals. The system has a growing telemedicine program, enabling its doctors and nurses to diagnose and, in some cases, treat patients remotely, doubly important in the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When it comes to the determinants of health, you realize only a small portion — the government says 20% — is access,” Davis says. “Social determinants drive overall health. Sure, our community has been challenged, and we’re trying to do what we can through selective partnerships.”

A key partnership is in Belmont, a melding of Gaston County’s past and future. Within sight of the brick spires of circa 1886 Belmont Abbey College and monastery, as thousands of cars a day barrel along adjacent Interstate 85, is CaroMont’s new $196 million, 66-bed hospital. It sits on land owned by the abbey.

“It’s a game changer,” says Abbot Placid Solari, who is head of the abbey’s Benedictine monks. The hospital will cooperate with the college’s health care training programs.

The Belmont hospital is on the fast-growing eastern side of Gaston County across the Catawba River from Charlotte and positioned to compete for maternity and other potential Atrium patients. Peek downplays competitive aspects, but the location, only minutes from Charlotte Douglas International Airport, is an obvious bulwark against Atrium.

The Charlotte system has two dozen clinics, physician practices and urgent-care sites in Gaston, Lincoln and Cleveland counties. Since 2015, it has owned the 241-bed Atrium Health Cleveland hospital in Shelby. But Atrium agreed to change some of its practices after a 2018 settlement with federal and state authorities over anti-competitive measures that had restricted access to CaroMont and other providers.

Peek says the Belmont location pushes CaroMont deeper into the community it serves, bringing crucial health care closer to patients such as Jim Benfield. ■

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ATRIUM gets SCHOOLED

Wake Forest School of Medicine’s growth lifts Charlotte’s spirits.

Winston-Salem crosses its fingers.

BY DAVID MILDENBERG

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ore than 25 years ago, a Chicago-based consultant told the Forsyth Medical Center trustees in Winston-Salem that North Carolina probably didn’t need four medical schools. The comment might have gone unnoticed except he added that Wake Forest University’s highly regarded Bowman Gray School of Medicine most likely had the weakest outlook.

His point was that Duke University’s medical school had an international reputation, while UNC Chapel Hill and East Carolina University had strong financial and political backing from state government. Bowman Gray was an outstanding private school in a relatively small city that lacked similar muscle, the consultant said.

The comments upset people in Winston-Salem, some of them blaming Forsyth Medical Center CEO Paul Wiles for stoking controversy at a rival. Then as now, Forsyth, now part of the Novant Health system, is the publicly chartered competitor of Wake Forest Baptist Health, a not-for-profit hospital system affiliated with the university’s medical school.

“It sent some Wake Forest people over the edge, but I never said it,” says Wiles, who retired as Novant CEO in 2011. “Consultants do what they do. But it probably made the environment more competitive than it needed to be.”

Late last year, the renamed Wake Forest School of Medicine finally got the financial backing that the consultant deemed necessary. But the new operator, Charlotte-based Atrium Health, has much bigger ambitions than maintaining a status quo. As he takes charge of the medical school and Wake Forest Baptist Health, Atrium CEO Gene Woods is promising a “nationally leading environment” to develop breakthrough technologies, new cures and explosive economic growth. He envisions a Silicon Valley-type region for health care entrepreneurship.

The combination “creates an academic medical center with the potential to be a national leader in research, education and the innovative delivery of health care [that] our communities need and deserve,” said Bill Warden, chair of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center’s board, in a release. He is a retired Lowe’s executive who lives in Wilkesboro.

Warden, Wake Forest University President Nathan Hatch, university board Chairman Gerald Roach and other officials were so

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The combination of Charlotte-based Atrium Health and Wake Forest Baptist Health will lead to the Wake Forest School of Medicine campus in the Queen City.

smitten with Atrium’s potential that the 98-year-old institution with $3.6 billion in annual revenue essentially changed hands without any money transferred.

That mirrors the 1997 transaction involving Forsyth Memorial and Charlotte’s Presbyterian Hospital, which led to Novant Health, now the state’s second-biggest system behind Atrium in terms of revenue. “There was no payday, just a merger of two balance sheets,” says Wiles, who negotiated the deal at the invitation of his former Duke University graduate school classmate Paul Betzold, then CEO of Presbyterian.

Wake Forest Baptist was then cresting, having grown significantly during the 23 years that Richard Janeway led the medical school.

Coinciding with an era when tobacco, banking and apparel profits made Winston-Salem unusually wealthy, the neurologist-turnedexecutive helped Bowman Gray grow “from a small regional medical school to a sprawling medical complex that is a national leader in many research fields,” the Winston-Salem Journal wrote in Janeway’s obituary in 2019. During his tenure, the faculty tripled to 700 and staffing nearly quadrupled to more than 2,300.

“Wake Forest Baptist always focused on research, which means spending a lot of money on researchers, while there was hardly any

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research going on at Forsyth Medical,” says Bob Conn, a Charlotte Observer medical reporter whom Janeway hired in 1986 to work as a hospital publicist. Conn retired in 2006 after 20 years. “Because of that spending, research findings came out that might have been incidental to many people but really changed the way that medicine was practiced. The school had a pristine reputation.”

Over the last decade or more, though, Novant grew faster and more profitably than its better-known competitor. Novant’s Charlotte expansion put it in a lucrative oligopoly with Atrium in one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, helping finance acquisitions of hospitals in northern Virginia and coastal North Carolina. In February, Novant outbid Atrium in the fight for New Hanover Regional Medical Center, though Atrium had longstanding ties with the Wilmington hospital.

Under leaders Richard Dean, John McConnell and current CEO Julie Ann Freischlag, Wake Forest Baptist tried to keep pace, expanding in suburban markets and buying High Point Medical Center in 2018. But it essentially broke even in the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years while Novant and Atrium were earning hundreds of millions of dollars. The Atrium deal was announced in April 2019 and, with minimal public debate, received regulatory approval late last year.

Novant has a very different culture than Wake Forest Baptist, says Zagros Madjd-Sadjadi, an economics professor at WinstonSalem State University. “Novant has been solely focused on health care. Wake Forest is a teaching hospital and affiliated with a university, which is going to be a huge complication given the bureaucratic nature of universities. It just moves a lot more slowly because there is an extra layer of complexity.”

Winston-Salem “is a small town to have all the health care capacity that it has, and medical schools need huge populations to be really good,” Wiles says. Wake Forest Baptist was “sitting between a bunch of good organizations including Moses Cone [Hospital] in Greensboro, Mission [Health] in Asheville, and they didn’t really have a big draw area.”

GIANT COMBO

A combined Atrium Health-Wake Forest Baptist Health

Full-time employees: 57,405

Total operating revenue: $11 billion

Inpatient admissions: 232,486

Operating income: $295.9 million

Emergency visits: 1.09 million

Excess income: $661 million

Inpatient surgeries: 63,143

Unrestricted reserves: $8.4 billion

Outpatient surgeries: 109,442

Long-term debt: $3.4 billion

Reflects Atrium’s Dec. 31, 2019, and Wake Forest’s June 30, 2020, fiscal years. source: Standard & Poor’s Corp.

Atrium doesn’t move slowly. It has bought hospital systems in Georgia and made unsuccessful bids for UNC Health and New Hanover Regional in the last three years. Its Wake Forest Baptist deal commits $3.4 billion for capital projects over the next decade, including a new patient tower in Winston-Salem and a medical school campus in Charlotte. The Queen City’s status as the largest U.S. city without a medical school has long rankled local leaders, so Wake Forest Baptist’s expansion plans sparked strong endorsements from Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and others.

Winston-Salem benefits from the transaction too, Chamber of Commerce President Mark Owens says, suggesting the deal can’t be compared with ego-busting headquarters moves to the Queen City by brand-name employers such as BB&T/Truist, Krispy Kreme and Wachovia. “For Forsyth County, we have two amazing health care systems, and this adds options and activity,” Owens says. He quotes Atrium Chairman Ed Brown saying, “‘Atrium is willing to invest in [downtown Winston-Salem’s] Innovation Quarter.’ They see an opportunity to grow there.”

Madjd-Sadjadi says the transaction favors Wake Forest Baptist because “it gets to expand without having to build buildings, buy doctors and go through the certificate of need process — Atrium will do that for them.” While Atrium hasn’t pledged publicly to retain jobs in Forsyth County, the two systems have little overlap, so few layoffs will be necessary, the professor says.

Closer ties with Charlotte aids Winston-Salem, Owens says.

“The main thing for me is that this can unlock the next phase of growth for the Innovation Quarter to get an injection of capital and resources,” he says.

Compared with Charlotte, health care competition is more fragmented in the Triad, where Novant, Wake Forest Baptist and Greensboro-based Cone Health have fairly even market shares.

Norfolk, Va.-based Sentara Health, a large system with an insurance subsidiary, has a letter of intent to acquire Cone Health. A combined Wake Forest-Atrium is “better suited to respond to, and in many cases drive, the region’s competitive dynamics,” according to a November report by S&P Global Markets.

It also puts Wake Forest School of Medicine on a firm foundation with third- and fourth-year medical students set to rotate at Charlotte’s Atrium facilities. Eventually, 3,200 medical students are expected to be trained there by 1,600 Wake Forest educators, Atrium’s Woods says.

Novant, which has shown less interest in owning a medical school than Atrium, has formed a partnership with UNC School of Medicine at its Forsyth, Mecklenburg and New Hanover county locations. That will replace existing programs between Atrium and UNC. Freischlag has said she and a majority of the school’s medical faculty will remain in Winston-Salem. Wiles isn’t so sure. “If Atrium puts up hundreds of millions of dollars for a Charlotte medical school, where might the faculty want to go? I think the story will take a while to be told.” ■

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DESTINATION NORTH CAROLINA

ON THE ROAD AGAIN Stay-at-home orders meant to curb the COVID pandemic hurt North Carolina’s travel and tourism industry last year. But attention to stopping its spread and vaccinations have its businesses feeling better about this year.

The year 2020 will go down as one of the most challenging in history. The COVID-19 pandemic affected nearly every facet of life, including travel and tourism. Washington, D.C.-based American Hotel and Lodging Association says only 33% of Americans have traveled overnight for leisure since March 2020, when most states enacted stay-at-home orders and occupancy restrictions at restaurants and other businesses to slow the virus’ spread — an all-time low.

The travel downturn was felt across North Carolina. “Our strategic mission and funding are rooted in driving hotel occupancy, but like so many organizations worldwide, Visit Winston-Salem was dealt a significant economic blow due to COVID-19,” said the tourism group’s president, Richard Geiger, in June. “Beginning in mid-March, Winston-Salem, like every place, experienced a steep

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decline in travel, and correspondingly we saw hotel occupancy and revenue plummet. In less than 90 days, we went from experiencing our strongest stretch of economic growth and executing our largest budget to developing a new sales and marketing plan with a 34% budget reduction.”

But there are better times on the horizon. As more attention is paid to safety protocols — including wearing face coverings, limiting capacities, disinfecting regularly and maintaining social distancing — and more people receive COVID vaccines, life should return to something resembling what was considered normal prepandemic this year. And as that happens, North Carolina’s travel and tourism industry expects a rebound.

Marcheta Cole Keefer, Visit Winston-Salem director of marketing and communications, says local travel and tourism businesses are working with

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state and county officials to make sure that happens. Many are part of the Count On Me NC health and safety campaign. It helps businesses and visitors take the necessary steps to stop the spread of COVID and keep people — guests and members of host communities — safe, whether that’s wearing a mask, staying home if you feel sick or, on the business side, properly disinfecting common spaces.

Visitors can search for participating businesses at countonmenc.org.

While grants distributed through Visit North Carolina — the tourismpromotion arm of Raleigh-based Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina — helped convention and visitors bureaus last year, Cole Keefer says attracting more paying customers is this year’s priority. A combination of promoting safety measures and marketing efforts will be used to bring them back.

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Visit Winston-Salem is highlighting its namesake city’s historic downtown, which is home to the recently renovated Benton Conference Center (with as much as 120,000 square feet of meeting space), hip dining and nightlife spots. She says business conventions and travelers account for a significant portion of its members’ business and having options within close proximity of each other is a big selling point.

While safely reopening travelrelated businesses is a big step forward, it may not be enough to bridge the economic hole created by the pandemic, which fundamentally changed how business is conducted.

In response to and support of stayat-home orders, many employees worked remotely, connecting with colleagues locally and globally with the help of technology, especially videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While the move ensured business continued, many people are anxious for the return of in-person meetings and conventions.

With more vaccinations happening daily, industry experts expect in-person events to begin returning this year, though to what extent remains to be seen.

The reopening timeline remains unclear, too. Cole Keefer says the industry never completely closed; rather, it adapted to COVID regulations.

“At some point, we will switch back to a campaign designed to inspire people to travel to and around North Carolina,” says Wit Tuttell, executive director of Visit North Carolina. “That will come when [weekly surveys of traveler sentiment] tell us that people are ready to travel.” Readiness to travel also depends on income, and many people have taken a financial hit since the pandemic began. The N.C. Department of Commerce reported the state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate hit 12.9% in April, falling

to 6.2% in December.

While the pandemic has been problematic for large portions of the state’s travel and tourism industry, there are places that have prospered from it. North Carolina’s mountain region remained a destination as people sought activities that easily incorporated social distancing such as hiking. There was a similar push at beaches on the coast. The state’s 41 parks and recreation areas saw record attendance — 19.8 million visitors — in 2020, a 1.2 million increase from 2019 and about 400,000 more than the previous record year, 2017. Seven state parks welcomed more than 1 million visitors; Jockey’s Ridge State Park in Dare County had the highest attendance with 1.9 million guests. The attendance bump also was attributed to recently completed improvement projects, including more campsites, new trails and visitors centers, and better parking, all funded through the Connect NC Bond, a $2 billion investment in education, agriculture, parks,

safety, and sewer and water infrastructure that voters approved in 2016.

Despite 2020’s challenges, businesses that make up the hospitality and tourism industry remain optimistic about the coming year.

“We look forward to 2021 and are planning for a bright future as the world moves past COVID-19,” says Christina York, director of sales and marketing at Grandover Resort and Spa in Greensboro. Its staff will continue extra safety measures as long as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines are in place, including providing hand sanitizer at the entrance of meeting rooms and buffet stations, as well as specific cleaning protocols in guest rooms.

She says that the resort is preparing for an influx of people, companies and associations as the vaccine becomes more widely available.

— Heath Pulliam is a freelance writer based in Charlotte.

200 Brookstown Avenue Winston-Salem 336.728.4200 VisitWinstonSalem.com SEE OUR AD ON PAGE 5

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DELIVERY DRIVERS North Carolina’s agriculture industry has found innovative ways to deliver products during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those include selling directly to consumers, donating to those in need and implementing technology.

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in North Carolina last spring, steps were taken to slow the spread of the virus. Restaurateurs were forced to close dining rooms and offer takeout, and grocers had to limit occupancy. Those moves created an unexpected crisis for farmers, food producers and consumers.

While the economy is still reeling a year later, partnerships between public and private entities, along with technology, offer cures for the economic woes that COVID introduced into food production and distribution. “I think it is about getting together with the right people to come up with new ideas,” says John Hammond, N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer

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Services international marketing specialist. “We put together a team, and we talked to farmers and industry representatives to figure out ways to make things work.”

Fearing prolonged stay-at-home measures, frenzied consumers met the pandemic with panic-buying sprees, emptying store shelves of normally plentiful items. While toilet paper received the most headlines, availability for foods such as chicken, seafood and vegetables was also scarce. Supply chain issues were compounded by food-processing plant shutdowns, leaving many food producers with products and no ways to move or sell them. “With food retailers such as restaurants and

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grocery stores shut down or operating on a limited basis, chickens were sitting at farms, growing large and multiplying,” Hammond says. “Poultry companies were trying to keep their folks employed, keep the trucks rolling and keep the supply chain moving, because if you stopped everything, there would be high mortality in the poultry population.”

One solution was bulk sales.

“Among the benefits of the bulk-sales program was the opportunity to help keep the supply chain moving and to put cash directly into the hands of the producers,” Hammond says.

House of Raeford Farms is one of a handful of companies that fashioned such a program to deliver fresh

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PHOTO FROM WILD HOPE FARMS BY ZAN MADDOX

chicken products directly to customers, says Dave Witter, spokesman for the Rose Hill-based company.

It sold chicken — everything from fresh boneless breasts and thighs to tenders and wings — at a bulk rate from refrigerated trailers parked near its processing plants. “We knew it was difficult for people to not only find but also, in some cases, afford certain food products,” he says. “We hoped this opportunity would be helpful to families as our nation faced these challenges.” The program, which started in North Carolina, has expanded across the Southeast, averaging 10 sales locations per day, and it will continue this year.

Some members of the state’s seafood industry took a similar bulk-sales tact. Raleigh-based Locals Seafood, which sources its offerings from the North Carolina coast, and Waynesville-based Sunburst Trout Farm partnered to offer frozen seafood and fish at events statewide. They invited local produce farms and breweries, including Fortnight Brewing in Raleigh, to participate at some, adding to the variety of offerings.

The bulk deliveries were organized so customers could remain in their vehicles, keeping participating parties socially distant. Touted as “safe” events, the deliveries didn’t result in any reports of COVID infections or outbreaks, Hammond says.

While chicken and seafood producers sold their products directly to consumers, other initiatives are providing food at no cost to families in need. Farmers to Families Food Box is a federal program that feeds people and creates one more market for struggling food producers.

The program, which started in April, connects U.S. Department of Agriculture partners to national, regional and local distributors. They purchase fresh produce, dairy products and meat from producers, package them in family-sized portions, and transport

them to food banks, community and faith-based organizations, and other nonprofit groups. The USDA reported four rounds of food purchases totaling $4 billion and 132 million food boxes distributed nationwide in 2020. A fifth round of as much as $1.5 billion was recently announced for this year.

Richard Brunson, director of North Carolina Baptist Men / Baptists on Mission, recalls when Hammond called him, suggesting the Cary-based nonprofit agency apply to be a foodbox distributor. It wasn’t the group’s typical type of response, which is usually triggered by a natural disaster; it’s still supporting volunteers helping communities rebuild from 2018’s Hurricane Florence, for example. “The pandemic presented a totally different kind of disaster than what we’re used to, and it required a local response,” he says. “So, we applied with the USDA to become one of the distribution contractors.”

Baptists on Mission received its contract and participated in the first four rounds of food distribution, which were held May 15 through Dec. 31.

Volunteers at 30 locations served people from 81 counties.

Brunson says it was an exercise in advanced logistics. “Picture a full tractor trailer, which would contain over a thousand food boxes, pulling up to a site, where nonprofit organizations would pick up boxes to distribute to people they served,” he says. He estimates his crew delivered about 630,000 boxes statewide. The Produce Box of Raleigh, which has a service area that stretches from the Piedmont to the coast, and Flavor 1st of Mills River, a produce grower and distributor in western North Carolina, were the designated packagers.

In addition to bulk sales of chicken and seafood and delivery of food boxes, technology is being used to directly connect producers and consumers. First launched as a pilot project in Orange County in 2017, smartphone app Visit N.C. Farms is now live or being developed in 37 counties. Free and easily downloaded for Apple and Android devices, it helps residents and visitors find local foods and outdoor experiences at participating agribusinesses.

Early last year, the app was lightly populated — about 500 agribusinesses — but growing. The state Agricul-

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FARMING

NORTH CAROLINA ture Department was aggressively pursuing expansion statewide but had yet to market it to the public, says Annie Baggett, the department’s agritourism marketing specialist. The pandemic forced its hand. As more consumers sought local sources of food and outdoor activities to abate their health and safety concerns, the app’s user engagement increased more than 50%, and downloads increased more than 40% in March. Those numbers skyrocketed when media outlets began reporting on the app. “We found ourselves on every television station, radio station and in print media, and we saw an 842% uptick in user engagement,” she says.

The app features 52 communities and four state farmers markets.

Baggett says it also offers details and locator maps for products and services, including produce stands, win-

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eries, farms, fisheries, tours and trails, and agricultural events. While many farms have a vibrant digital presence, whether on social media or their websites, others struggle to find ways to connect with consumers. She says the app puts participating farms on equal footing. “This app is another means for helping to ease their marketing burdens,” she says. “We know most people have access to a smartphone, and apps offer endless opportunities.”

Michelle Patterson is treasurer and “director of fun” at Patterson Farm in Rowan County, which is one of more than 65 farms, restaurants, wineries and breweries that adopted the app last summer after the county convention and visitors bureau began sponsoring it. “It’s a great asset to our ongoing marketing efforts, and we have enjoyed using it over the past six months,” she says.

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Patterson Farm is one of the state’s largest tomato growers, and its strawberries are popular locally. The family-owned farm also grows six varieties of vegetables and about 15,000 poinsettias annually. It has embraced agritourism, offering tours, movies and other activities to add revenue.

The app helps supply customers. “It’s a great tool to have in our marketing toolbox, with endless possibilities,” she says.

Based on feedback from farmers about their needs and how they planned to pivot in the face of COVID, the state Agriculture Department fine-tuned the app to directly connect growers to consumers. “We updated all the content and added the ability to do push notifications so customers could start placing orders directly with small farms,” Baggett says. “It has been stunning.”

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Visit N.C. Farms also needs support from local organizations such as agriculture extension bureaus, chambers of commerce and economic development agencies. The groups provide local administrators who promote and manage the app and help users get on board. There are more than 120 local administrators in communities statewide. They meet monthly to continuously improve the app. “Visit N.C. Farms has grown into a robust agribusiness and agritourism resource to connect people to farms they might not have otherwise known even existed,” Baggett says.

Hammond marvels at the ingenuity that the agribusiness sector has displayed during the COVID pandemic.

While not every effort has been a resounding success, farmers, food processers and communities at large are adapting. “The coronavirus has

Hundreds of tomato plants grow on a farm near Asheville.

been a terrible thing for families who have lost loved ones, those who have been sick, those who have lost their job, and for the economy,” he says.

“But I think when we come out on the other side, we will see some upsides

for innovation and some steps we’ve taken to adapt that could be beneficial and long-lasting.”

— Teri Saylor is a freelance writer from Raleigh.

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GROWTH POTENTIAL The COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for many problems. But it brought some opportunities, too, including stirring many people’s desire to live healthier lives. That’s translated to increased demand for plant-based protein products, whether they’re from internationally known El Segundo, California-based Beyond Meat or Weaverville-based startup No Evil Foods.

Creating plant-based proteins requires relatively new technology, which continues to evolve and expand.

Bill Aimutis, executive director of the North Carolina Food Innovation Lab in Kannapolis, and his team are helping food entrepreneurs keep pace. “I think we’ve made a niche for ourselves in this plant-based protein area, and people are starting to find out about some of the things we are doing,” he says.

“And that’s bringing in more possibilities for us.”

The 16,000-square-foot state-ofthe-art lab’s roots stretch back almost a decade. The N.C. General Assembly got the ball rolling in 2014, when it commissioned an economic feasibility study to evaluate the potential of developing food manufacturing in North Carolina. It predicted that the sector could create 38,000 jobs and an annual economic impact of $10.3 billion in less than 10 years. A food-manufacturing task force assembled by Gov. Pat McCrory recommended establishing and funding the lab the next year.

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Aimutis calls the lab a full-fledged business accelerator, an $11 million investment in the state’s economy and workforce development. “The goal is for the state to increase its food processing and manufacturing capacity,” he says.

Though not a teaching space, the lab is managed by N.C. State University and wears many hats. It can test clients’ product ideas or manufacturing processes, produce limited test runs, improve existing processes and manufacture products for clinical studies.

The lab also can process food items for clients while they’re on-site or ship them the desired finished product.

The lab was poised to start its pilot production a year ago, but the COVID-19 pandemic canceled those plans. It remained locked down until July 1. “I brought my team back in August,” Aimutis says. “We held back on bringing in our clients until October and then started letting in just one or two people at a time.” It has since been able to conduct some of its business-development training programs and provide consulting services.

The lab generates interest locally, nationally and internationally. Clients are finding their way to Kannapolis despite COVID-induced travel challenges such as reluctance to fly commercially. A startup team from New York, for example, is driving down to take advantage of the lab’s offerings. And

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there’s capacity to help others. It’s only limited by the size of Aimutis’ staff, which includes himself and three others. “We are working with about 10 clients now, and we just came online four months ago, so that’s a high volume for us,” he says.

As the region’s only federally inspected food-manufacturing pilot plant, all of the lab’s work is done under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Current Good Manufacturing Practices, which ensure food quality and safety.

Those cover personal hygiene, building design and maintenance, sanitation, and production and process controls.

Processing plant matter is done in many ways. The lab’s wet area, for example, can blanch, juice or slice and includes an industrial peeler and centrifuge. Its extraction technology pulls oil, sugar, proteins, fibers and other materials from plant and other materials, which then can be dried by freezing, convection or spray or have its particle size reduced or blended. There also is a drying room, product-development lab, test kitchen and collaboration studio.

The lab also helps clients write business plans, build sustainable business models and market their products. It’s a fee-for-service operation from start to finish. “We have to recover our costs,” Aimutis says. “We are not a for-profit, but we are a cost-recovery unit, so we charge a fee for service. We don’t charge flat rates. Rather, we use cost

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES, NC STATE UNIVERSITY

Despite delays caused by the COVID pandemic, North Carolina Food Innovation Lab is up and running. It’s helping entrepreneurs cash in on current trends, including plant-based proteins.

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accounting principles to put together a budget and a financial plan that is reasonable for a startup company.”

New products have a 99% failure rate, so Aimutis and his staff can’t guarantee success. But to put the odds in their favor, entrepreneurs are encouraged to think bigger than a single-product launch. “You really need to have multiple products to launch into the marketplace because the failure rate is so high,” he says. “If you’re going to seek investors, they will be more likely to consider funding you if you have more than one or two products.”

The lab teams with Raleigh-based Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina for corporate and entrepreneurial resources. It works with its host and fellow hometown research hub — the North Carolina Research Campus, 350 acres dedicated to studying how nutrition affects human health — on research advance-

ments and applications. In addition to financial support from the N.C. General Assembly, the lab recently received a $2.2 million grant for equipment from the Rocky Mount-based Golden LEAF Foundation, which distributes the state’s portion of the national tobacco settlement to economic-development projects. In a statement, Golden LEAF President Scott Hamilton called the lab a “valuable asset to our state’s farmers, the agriculture industry and food manufacturers.” He hopes it will help rural communities thrive and farmers create markets for their products.

There’s potential for big growth.

More than 90 varieties of crops are grown in North Carolina, making it one of the country’s most agriculturally diverse states. “Depending on our climate and depending on the types of produce we can use to extract plant-based protein, we could potentially grow new crops here,” Aimutis says. “And we’re

taking a look at some of that with the Department of Agriculture.”

At the lab’s November 2019 ribboncutting, N.C. Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler called the launch a defining moment for the state’s agricultural future. “Agriculture drives North Carolina’s economy, and this initiative can help build on this strength to broaden the economic impact.

Through our partnerships and the work of this innovation center, we can capture more value for what we grow and can add new food manufacturing and agricultural jobs to the state for generations to come.”

— Teri Saylor is a freelance writer from Raleigh.

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TRADE-WAR CASUALTIES North Carolina farmers have been hurt by the ongoing trade war with China. But easing economic tensions and expanding infrastructure are healing their wounds.

Looking into the camera, Jeremy Flowers aimed his words directly at members of North Carolina’s timber industry: “Whoever made it through the trade war and still has a business deserves a medal.” His honest message, featured in a recent N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services video, summed up a difficult situation.

Flowers is president of Seven Springsbased Flowers Timber Co., a second-generation log supplier and sawmill that opened in 1976. While its forest products are sold worldwide, most ended up in China until recently, when a trade war eliminated that market. “When China stopped buying, the light switch was cut off, and most producers lost 70% of their market,” he says. “The only direction it can go now is up.”

North Carolina’s timber industry, which includes forestry and logging operations, sawmills, furniture factories, and pulp and paper mills, is among the country’s largest. It contributed $33.6 billion to the state’s economy and supported about 150,400 jobs in 2018, according to an N.C. State University Extension report. But the timber industry and another North Carolina agriculture staple — tobacco — took big hits in 2019. While producers and farmers are still waiting for a recovery, they’re hopeful it won’t be far in the future.

The state Agriculture Department reported $443 million in wood and wood products were exported to China in 2018.

That fell 31% by the end of 2019 and 15% further to $243 million by November 2020. The decline only slowed after China placed a one-year moratorium on enforcement of the forest-products tariff, says Tony Doster, North Carolina region

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manager for Birmingham, Ala.-based forestry-centered investment manager Resource Management Service. “Things are not great right now,” he says. “But at least our producers are able to hang in there and survive, and if we can get the tariffs removed, or get better trade terms, then the market will improve.”

While forest-products businesses were hit hard, the U.S.-China trade war has been worse for North Carolina’s 2,000 or so tobacco farms. They exported $162 million in tobacco to China in 2017, says Peter Thornton, the state Agriculture Department’s director of international marketing. “But in 2018, that number dropped to $4 million,” he says. “And in 2019, there was virtually no tobacco going to China. Our government and [China] reached a stalemate in trade negotiations, and when that happened, their government stopped buying U.S. tobacco.”

Most North Carolina tobacco farmers could only watch as their production contracts were slashed or canceled, says Hank Mozingo, president of Raleigh-based industry group Tobacco Associates. “As a result of the trade war, the bottom line is that we lost our No. 1 export customer overnight,” he says. “As you can imagine, it has been devastating for our farmers, farm families and farming communities.”

Help is hard to find. Antismoking regulations prohibit tobacco farmers from receiving federal aid, including any of last year’s $14 billion earmarked for farmers affected by China’s shrinking appetite for agricultural products, including soybeans, pork and grains. “If you have extra tobacco, it is hard to find a new market unless you are willing to significantly discount it,” Mozingo says. “Most of it, I’m guessing, is on C A R O L I N A

the shelf waiting for the Chinese market to return.”

Tobacco farmers were hopeful that last year’s partial trade deal would reopen the tobacco export market. “Farmers remain optimistic that China will come back onto the market and start buying again in 2021,” Mozingo says. “But it is almost too late for some.” Their options are limited — switch crops or stop farming.

While dark clouds hang over the state’s forest-product suppliers and tobacco farmers, Port of Wilmington is a bright spot in the state’s export efforts. It’s investing $200 million in an expansion to handle larger ships and more containers.

Updates include a bigger turning basin, more berth space, and better ingress and egress for truck traffic. The moves will double its capacity for shipping containers, including three times as many refrigerated containers.

In January, the N.C. State Ports Authority received N.C. Council of State approval to lease a site where more agricultural products can be placed in containers for export. Omaha, Neb.-based Scoular will help develop and operate it.

Scoular has more than 100 years of experience in agricultural supply chains. Its strong relationships with shippers will add and diversify exports from Port of Wilmington, says state Ports Authority Executive Director Brian Clark. “The transload facility will be used primarily for soybeans but has the capability to support other feed and food products,” he says. “This partnership enables North Carolina farmers to serve new customers around the globe.”

— Teri Saylor is a freelance writer from Raleigh.

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ELECTRIC CITY

+ TALKING POINTS

As the auto and battery industries shift gears, Bessemer City is a hot spot for lithium.

B E S S E ME R C I TY

5,471 POPULATION

ELLA MAY WIGGINS FAMOUS TEXTILE-STRIKE MARTYR WAS A RESIDENT

CITY WITH A HEART NICKNAME

▲ Bessemer City is breathing new life into its historic downtown with community events and new storefronts, parks and outdoor art.

LITHIUM ONE OF THE LARGEST LITHIUM REGIONS IN THE WORLD

BY BRYAN MIMS

MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME

1892

YEAR INCORPORATED

CENTENNIAL PARK REVITALIZATION PROJECT WON BEST OUTDOOR SPACE IMPROVEMENT AWARD FROM N.C. MAIN STREET PROGRAM

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF BESSEMER CITY

T

$41,389

angles of brown vines cling to three strands of barbed wire atop the old factory’s perimeter fence. The no-trespassing signs lend an air of austerity to this leftover from the longago textile boom. A smokestack towers over the brick shell, though it hasn’t exhaled in decades. The boom these days comes from the worldwide rush on quiet, electric vehicles. And this former mill town sits near a mother lode of lithium, a key component in many EV batteries. With the construction of a lithium mine and the expansion of a lithium plant, involving an investment of more than $500 million, this metal is sure to shine as an economic lodestar for Bessemer City in Gaston County.

But across the railroad tracks from the textile factory, at a cafe called Blossom, a 26-year-old entrepreneur looks out on the hollow grounds and sees his bread and butter. Jonathan Fioritto came to Bessemer City to open this coffee shop in 2019 with the expectation that the abandoned Osage Manufacturing Co. would reawaken — not as a mill but as a millennial magnet.

“Our main reason is that over there,” he says, gesturing toward the town’s historic hub. “That’s why I’m in Bessemer City, so I need them to get started.”

The $40 million project has had a sluggish start. In 2015, Bessemer City leaders began promoting a vision to revive the Osage mill. Built in 1896, it was one of the town’s first textile plants. It stayed in operation until 1995 and has stood lifeless ever since. Osage Mill Residential, a limited partnership, bought the 245,000-square-foot building in 2018 but ran into delays in securing federal funding for the project. City officials say no taxpayer dollars are involved; rather, investors are relying on federal and state historic tax credits.

In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic and a sickened economy further stalled groundbreaking.

Joshua Ross, the town’s economic development officer, expects work to begin this year, possibly

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▲Central Drug pharmacy, top, opened in 1927, boasts an old-school soda fountain and ice cream shop. Before COVID, crowds would gather for the annual Community Concert & Cruise-In series downtown.

by spring. “It will have a tremendous impact on our downtown and really the community as a whole.”

The development will feature 150 apartments and roughly 30,000 square feet of retail and commercial space. Ross, 30, grew up in Bessemer City and knows how venerated the mill is in the town just west of Gastonia. “It resonates with people a lot,” he says. He sees the Osage Mill project as the spark that will make his hometown a hot spot. A few doors down at Blossom, Fioritto imagines his cafe as a hangout for the mill’s residents — a place to grab a soup, salad, sandwich, cupcake or beer. He has his own loft apartment above the cafe. What he needs now is some more verve on Virginia Avenue, which passes as the town’s Main Street. “There’s not a lot of foot traffic in Bessemer City right now,” he says.

And yet, it is a wonderfully walkable town. You can stroll from Blossom to Centennial Park, with its perfectly green lawn and stage where summer concerts (before COVID) had people singing and swaying in the evening sun. Bordering the park is Central Drug, its brick wall splashed with old Sun ▲Osage Mill, built in the Drop ads. The decor inside is an 1890s, was one of the city’s antidote to the lookalike chain first textile plants. pharmacies anchoring busy street corners across the country. It’s pure Americana, replete with a soda fountain and a museum’s worth of vintage medicine bottles.

Townsfolk have treasured this store since it opened in 1927.

Step inside and sit in one of the swiveling chairs at the counter, topped with jars of candy. Order an orangeade or a milkshake or two scoops of butter pecan ice cream, all while watching the husband-wife team of Robbie and Melissa Putnam fill prescriptions.

“I’ve known most of the people all my life,” says the soft-spoken Robbie, who took over the business from his father in 1997.

From Central Drug, it’s an easy walk to Pennsylvania Avenue and 13th Street for burgers and beer at Whiskey Mill — part Western bar, part sports bar and part beach bar. You can saunter

through the green space of Uptown Park, where the Norfolk Southern railroad track divides the business district in two.

A TALE OF IRON, LITHIUM AND TEXTILES

Before the railroad and cotton mills arrived, James Ormand settled the area in 1754 after receiving a land grant from King George II. He mined iron ore and developed the Ormand Furnace, heating rock and sediment to extract iron for making a variety of implements. The furnace churned out iron products that were sold across the state until the 1850s, when a new technology rendered the furnace obsolete. An English engineer named Henry Bessemer developed an inexpensive technique for making steel from molten crude iron. Patented in 1855, his process drastically reduced the cost of steel and vastly increased its use around the world. Without his invention, steel girders for railroads, bridges and skyscrapers would have been a pipe dream.

Eight cities and towns across America are named in his honor.

The founder of modern-day Bessemer City bought land owned by the Ormand family in 1891. After moving his family from Reidsville, John Askew Smith wanted to establish a well-laid-out town with walkable neighborhoods and a park along the railroad.

In 1893, he and other locals petitioned the state legislature for a town charter. Once granted, they named the town after the man who revolutionized the steel industry. While mining has made a definite mark on the area’s economy, Bessemer City would never be known as a steel town. The pay dirt for local mining operations since the 1950s has been lithium — and Gaston County has some of the richest deposits in the country.

This area is what geologists call the Carolina Tin-Spodumene Belt. From the 1950s until the 1980s, mines in the belt supplied most of the world’s lithium, until cheaper deposits turned up in South America and Australia. With the burgeoning demand for lithium batteries, especially for electric vehicles, cellphones and cordless tools, it’s a much sought-after metal. And this belt is getting back in business: A new public company called Piedmont Lithium Ltd. is building an open-pit lithium mine north of town that is expected to begin production in 2023. It also plans a chemical-processing plant.

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▲ Artist Allan Potter’s downtown mural “Bessemer Bees” has a Crowders Mountain backdrop.

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270. During the groundbreaking in October 2019, Livent CEO Paul Graves said, “Bessemer City is one of the cornerstones of Livent’s business and is becoming increasingly more important to many of our customers who want the flexibility of sourcing their lithium products from the Western Hemisphere.” Livent’s Bessemer City plant makes three types of lithium, including the lithium metal that’s used in high-performance batteries.

Making a comeback

Given the surge in lithium demand, the growth at the business park, the snazzy plans for the old textile factory, and the town’s prime location along Interstate 85 only 30 miles west of Charlotte, Town Manager James Inman says, “We feel like we’re just on the cusp of getting to the mountaintop.” On top of all that, Bessemer City is banking on the 40-acre Stinger Park to be another game changer. Still under construction, it will include three tournament baseball and softball fields, along with two multipurpose fields. Town leaders see it attracting regional baseball tournaments and spurring housing developments on surrounding land.

“Even though we’re a small community, we can still attract some pretty big players,” Inman says, noting that three buildings were bought in late 2020, with two of them to become restaurants. He’d like to see a brewery come to town and tap into the outdoorsy crowd that flocks to nearby Crowders Mountain State Park, one of the busiest state parks in North Carolina.

The mountain, with its craggy ridgeline and wooded slopes, looms on the southern horizon — a tangible, ever-present metaphor for Bessemer City’s aspirations. The smokestack of the old factory also looms, a daily reminder of how yesterday can be refashioned into today and carry a forward-thinking town into tomorrow. The brown vines and weeds will be cleared, and new growth is sure to take root. ■ Bryan Mims is a writer and reporter at WRAL-TV in Raleigh.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BESSEMER CITY

But through most of the 20th century, Bessemer City’s signature industry wasn’t mining, it was textiles. Smith went down in history not only as the town’s father, but as founder of the Osage Mill.

Several other textile mills wove themselves into the fabric of Bessemer City for decades. By the 1980s, however, international competition began heating up, and jobs headed overseas. This is about the time Bob McDonald, owner of McDonald’s Restaurant — not to be confused with the golden arches franchise — felt the hunger pains. “When all the mills closed up in the ’80s, that’s when we saw a big drop-off in business for a while,” he says. All these decades later, his burgers remain local favorites, garnished in the Carolina style with chili, slaw and mustard.

McDonald, 64, has closed his indoor seating because of the pandemic, but at midday, cars are stacked in the drive-thru and the staff is darting from kitchen to window. Although the daily shift changes and lunch breaks of mill workers no longer feed his cash register, new industries are bringing a steady diet of fresh patrons. Just east of downtown is the South Ridge Business Park, home to five manufacturers, including the town’s largest employer — Dole Fresh Vegetables. Opened in April 2007, the plant has a workforce of about 900 and primarily churns out bagged salads. Also in the park is Dhollandia Manufacturing, a Belgian company that makes hydraulic liftgates for trucks and employs about 200 people.

Other businesses in the park include Tosaf, an Israeli company that produces additives and compounds for the plastics industry, with a payroll of more than 100. Hunter Douglas employs about 200 people at its plant that manufactures designer window shades. And Advanced Drainage Systems, with a staff of about 200, is one of the largest polyethylene pipe and fittings manufacturers in the country.

Outside the business park, on the west side of town, is a 900acre lithium plant owned by Philadelphia-based Livent, formerly FMC Lithium. It opened in the 1950s. In late 2020, the company completed an $18 million expansion to boost lithium production by 50% and create 30 jobs, bringing total employment to about

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