12 minute read
Roundtable: Chambers of Commerce Adrienne Cole, President & CEO, Greater Raleigh Chamber Geoff Durham, President & CEO, Greater Durham Chamber of
®oundtable:
Chambers of Commerce
Chamber leaders discuss business support within their regions as well as trends underlying their economies.
Adrienne Cole
President & CEO Greater Raleigh Chamber
How has the chamber helped the business community to face the challenges of the last year? The Raleigh Chamber is the largest nonprofit organization in the Greater Raleigh region and we serve a large membership base of small and large businesses. Our approach to assisting our members was immediate and we worked to meet them where they were. We shifted to a virtual setting, refocused our efforts on response and, eventually, recovery as well as supporting those companies that found themselves in a rapid growth mode. Two of our largest initiatives in response to the pandemic resulted in the creation of a rapid response website with 24/7 monitoring of questions from the community and critical resources for funding, PPE, PPP and informational virtual events. Additionally, we worked in partnership with the business community and local government leaders to raise money to support our small business community.
How is the Chamber helping to ensure companies have access to talent? We’ve been focused on growing and nurturing our local talent pipeline and driving talent recruitment. We launched the Work in the Triangle platform (a talent attraction website) in 2011, with a 2.0 version coming in fall 2021. The platform is geared toward recruiting and retaining talent in the market. It’s our goal to help companies access a diverse talent pipeline. We are surrounded by tier-one research universities, three historically Black universities and colleges and numerous colleges and universities that are producing world-class talent. It’s very important to work with all those partners to make sure our companies can source the talent they need today and in the future.
Geoff Durham
What economic wins would you point to that reflect economic diversification in the Triangle area? There is a tremendous amount of pharma manufacturing that comes along with our primary industry clusters like life sciences, biotech and the healthcare research space. Last year, Eli Lilly made a huge investment announcement of almost $500 million in their pharma manufacturing. They will be located in the Durham side of Research Triangle Park. Biotech firm GRAIL is another one that is now starting to hire in the park. When talking about diversification, we’re primarily focused on the diversification of our strong life sciences industry. There is a significant level of expansion into gene therapy work. That subcomponent of the broader life sciences is expanding rapidly. The other industry cluster that we are watching is our clean tech and how that continues to evolve. Embedded as a partner industry is our ag tech. The history of agriculture is strong in North Carolina, especially considering that this region is so driven by our three tier-one research institutes. The ag tech piece is continuing to evolve and grow.
What will the revitalization of the Durham American Tobacco campus mean for Downtown Durham? The re-activation of the American Tobacco Campus is one of the largest new-market tax credit projects that has ever been done in the state of North Carolina. That project was the catalyst for a significant portion of what we are seeing around the rest of our Downtown community, centered around the redevelopment of old warehouses. This adaptive reuse is really what established Durham and put it on the map.
Mark Lawson
Vice President Cary Economic Development – Cary Chamber of Commerce
Which industries have been attracted to the region in this new landscape? A significant portion of activity we saw came from the life sciences and gene therapy sectors of the economy, along with warehousing and distribution. Those were the types of opportunities that came our way. We also interacted with several advanced manufacturing firms throughout the year, as that industry sector is very active as well. When I look back, many positives occurred in 2020. As an example, we brought Amazon here. They took about 350,000 square feet of industrial space to operate a delivery center. Another key company was Circle Graphics. They took the other 160,000 square feet of industrial space beside Amazon. Another area in which we saw a lot of growth was healthcare. Our local hospital, WakeMed, added 300 jobs in 2020 alone, along with the commencement of construction of a new Health Care Campus by Duke in west Cary. A lot of that was due to expansion occurring at Wake Med, which is great.
What makes Cary a desirable place for these companies? First, the educational component. We really have a unique, organic system. We have one of the best and largest public school systems in the country, along with some great private schools. When you think about the amount of high-quality educational opportunities in Cary, from early childhood learning opportunities through high school followed by our three local tier 1 research universities and the best technical college in the country, Wake Tech. Another strong point is the quality-of-life component. What makes Wake Forest stand out in the Triangle area? The Wake Forest area has been growing exponentially, particularly in the last 10 years. Our population has more than doubled. We used to be a bedroom community, primarily for Raleigh, but we’ve taken on a life of our own well beyond relying on the bigger cities. We have lots of people who have moved to work, live and play here. Growth from the residential construction perspective has not slowed down at all. The pandemic has not affected that. We have new homes and housing going up everywhere. We have excellent schools and excellent healthcare, plus accessibility to Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. It’s just a very attractive place all around for people to come in and live. We’ve seen a sizable influx of active older adults moving to the area from the Northeast, primarily because they have adult children and grandchildren who have moved here and they want to be near family. Our growth has not skipped a beat even amid the pandemic.
How are you preparing to meet talent needs? Several years ago, we created our Chamber Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Through our foundation, we’re developing the leaders of the future. The Wake Forest Area Chamber is a business development center and the Chamber Foundation is a leadership development center. We run programs for youth and high-school students, such as our young entrepreneurs fair, where they create their own products and sell them. We have youth leadership and a career readiness academy. Our whole goal through our foundation is to be creating a pipeline for the future, not just for jobs, but for leaders in our town.
Ann Welton
President Wake Forest Area Chamber of Commerce
( ) to use augmented reality to solve real problems that exist in the region.
Employment Like other regions across the country in the last year or so, certain sectors in the Raleigh-Durham region also felt the pain from the pandemic. Hospitality and leisure are still suffering, although they have recovered many of the job losses seen at the beginning of the outbreak. RaleighCary preliminary figures for May registered 62,900 jobs in the sector, still lower than the February 2020 highs of 72,700 but a vast recovery from the 37,500 registered in April 2020. Conversely, professional and business services have added 5,700 jobs since February 2020 and 6,000 jobs have been added in trade, transportation and utilities during the period.
But while North Carolina’s unemployment rates for May look impressive at under 5%, some economists say the figures are misleading. According to one economist, the labor force fell by 16,000 and there are 55,000 open jobs in the Triangle alone. This phenomenon can perhaps be partly explained by the continued reluctance of some to return to work for a variety of reasons. For some, there is still uncertainty surrounding the virus and its spread while others have family concerns and commitments that complicate leaving the home. Some attribute the reluctance to the continued federal support packages that have increased unemployment benefits by $300 per week and are due to expire in September. A June jobs fair hosted by the Mountain Area Workforce Development Board had an initial 60-employer slots available but were soon maxed out as demand for workers soared.
Recruitment patterns also vary depending on the
Raleigh-Durham’s robust educational ecosystem feeds a pipeline of the region’s future leaders.
Wake County Economic Development: foreign-owned firms have created 17,000 new jobs in the Research Triangle since 2007
sector. According to NC Tech’s IT Job Trends report, high-tech sectors gained over 1,000 employees from April to May, while hospitality firms are struggling to fill openings. But the phenomenon is not just limited to Raleigh-Durham, or even North Carolina. Nearly half of America’s small businesses can’t find workers, according to the National Federation of Independent Business. And the sectors suffering most seem to be retail and hospitality. Campaigners in North Carolina have been pressuring companies to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 per hour for several years and it seems that workers and businesses have now reached an impasse. After a recent strike by McDonald’s workers in North Carolina, the fast-food chain is now raising the minimum wage up to $20 per hour.
Global factors The Triangle’s attractiveness as a research and advanced
Christopher Chung
When people think of economic development, they usually think that means recruiting companies. International trade does not always come to mind but it’s very important. A lot of our work is helping small and medium-sized companies, particularly manufacturers. Selling outside the United States makes good sense for a business because the United States makes up only 5% of the world’s population. If companies can crack the door open to international trade, that is a tremendous economic opportunity. North Carolina’s export of goods and services has typically supported more than 400,000 jobs in the state. For us, that is economic development.
manufacturing hub has not only been identified by national firms, many international conglomerates have set their sights on the area. Data from 2019 illustrates the state of pre-pandemic foreign direct investment (FDI), with almost $4 billion spent by overseas investors on acquiring, establishing or expanding a business in North Carolina, representing a 66% year-over-year increase. By comparison, FDI nationwide in the same period slumped by 38% to $195 billion. Some examples of big wins for the Triangle area are the expansion of Spanish pharmaceutical Grifols’ facility in Clayton and a major investment made by Indian forger Bharat Forge in Sandford. In Wake County, U.K. biosciences group Gilead Sciences said in February that it plans to add almost 300 jobs to the county.
The Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina is a development engine that works to attract and facilitate firms’ entry into the state and support the needs of small businesses. Of the current pipeline of 177 projects the agency is trying to lure to North Carolina, just 22% involve foreign businesses, which is lower than past years. However, this can be explained by the pandemic and travel limitations. If the state wins all 177 projects, the estimated investment could total $14.7 billion and 50,000 new jobs could be created in manufacturing, food and beverage, agriculture, biotech, pharma, life sciences and IT.
According to Wake County Economic Development, since 2007, foreign-owned firms have announced 17,000 new jobs and more than $5 billion in investment in the Research Triangle. The Triangle is now home to more than 700 foreign-owned companies. But the authorities and development agencies are not stopping there. Wake County Economic Development has created an international business strategy with a committee of 20 key members from its local business community. This committee’s expertise is being used to market the Research Triangle’s competitive advantages, as well as to identify gaps in competitiveness.
Public sector initiatives Given the budget shortfalls facing all state and local governments as they draft their 2022 budgets, it would
The Research Triangle Park is the largest research development in the United States.
Veronica Creech
When a company is interested in our municipality the Chamber of Commerce will contact us. We work hand-in-glove with the project, looking at its compatibility with our policies to see if there’s a match to our economic development policy. It’s not just about a financial incentive. We also want to be thoughtful about creating partners, how to leverage our communication and incentives that might support a large development and to be more thoughtful about a larger infrastructure investment option. When it comes to finding a specific location in the city, that’s when our office teams up with the Chamber to bring that across the line.
have been easy for Wake County or Durham County to hike taxes or cut back on certain spending areas. Wake County experienced a $28.8 million budget shortfall for FY21 due to COVID-19 measures and the $193 million the county received in federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding could not be used to supplement lost income. Despite this, the FY22 budget was approved at $1.57 billion compared to $1.45 billion in FY21. The county expected lower income from property and sales taxes but demand for both housing and goods is robust and has produced strong revenues.
Wake County’s FY22 budget is focused on rebuilding businesses badly impacted by the pandemic and restoring funding cuts. The first budget allocation was to set aside funds for high-dollar investments and capital projects. The county has increased its capital commitment by $410 million year over year in its most recent budget, showing that the county is not shying away from spending to stimulate economic growth.
Likewise, Durham County has hiked its commitment to its capital improvement plan by 7.4% to $82.6 million for the coming fiscal year beginning July 2021. Durham County’s total approved budget reached $736 million, up from $686 million in the previous fiscal year. ( )
