State and business officials gathered in Durham on Thursday to discuss how North Carolina can maintain its momentum in attracting economic investment.
“There’s a lot of people and businesses moving into the state, and that clearly has driven a lot of the economic opportunity, especially in the larger metro areas in places like Charlotte and Raleigh. But also North Carolina’s known for having a very strong university system, strong community college system that’s also producing regular streams of talent,” said Dr. Laura Ullrich, the Director of Economic Research at job search website Indeed.
“We had to align the jobs of the time with the jobs of the future, with the demand that we knew was coming. Getting that alignment with our education and workforce systems, a number of things helped us to do that. The second piece was a competitive business climate. We didn’t rank very well on tax, torts, civil liability, or our regulatory environment. We were out of the top 20 in many of those, so we needed to get to the top five. Now we’re very competitive on any of those measures. The other (pillar) was infrastructure investment. We weren’t making the critical infrastructure investments necessary for communities to be healthy and grow jobs. We made landmark investments in our transportation and supply chain networks (with) over $10 billion over ten years to do that. Strategic investments in our ports that were critical, strategic investments in energy that were critical to keep it available, modern, and affordable going forward,” said NC Chamber President and CEO Gary Salamido…