Regional Business
Reports
High Point
Bigger Crowds, More Buyers at Furniture
Market
Furniture
industry executives had an extra bounce in their step after the spring
International Home Furnishings Market exceeded even their high
expectations. “The market was extremely strong,” says Judy
Mendenhall, president of the International Home Furnishings Market
Authority. “It was probably one of the largest markets in terms of
attendance that we’ve had in several years, and everyone was very,
very positive about the results. There were a lot of orders taken, and
I think there’s no question this industry is coming back strong.”
The spring market, the industry’s largest trade show, was held April
18-25 in High Point. There was a noticeable change in the mood
compared with last October’s market, when most estimates indicated
attendance was down 20 to 30 percent. The combination of a slumping
economy and the trauma of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks created a
somber atmosphere.
However, an improving economy and positive changes implemented by the
market authority, created last summer to coordinate local efforts to
make the stay in the Triad as pleasant as possible for 80,000 or so
visitors, have made a big impact.
In addition to naming Mendenhall, a former mayor of High Point, as
president, the authority has worked to improve transportation and
parking. Expanding shuttle routes helped put more people on buses and
out of the scramble for precious parking spots. The market authority
has continued to upgrade other market amenities and functions.
Although attendance figures aren’t released, officials estimated
about a 15 percent increase (and 30 percent more international buyers)
than the April market a year ago. And, of course, last April was much
better than the October market.
Exhibitors added that the crowds were doing more than just attending.
They were buying. “It was a very, very good market,” says NCCBI
director Charlie Greene, president of Classic Gallery of High Point.
“It probably ranks among the top markets that our company has had
over the years. We were very pleased with what happened.”
— Jim Buice
Charlotte
Partnership
Launches Branding Campaign
Charlotte
is already home to eight Fortune 500 companies, and local economic
development boosters are planning a campaign to attract more. Bank of
America and Wachovia Corp., which rank 19th and 90th on Fortune’s
list, bolstered efforts to recruit new businesses recently by
contributing $2.5 million toward a war chest that will be used to
promote the region.
By the end of the summer, corporate executives across the globe will
begin seeing advertisements and getting emails promoting the Charlotte
U.S.A. brand, says Angie Lawry, director of communications and
investor relations for the Charlotte Regional Partnership.
The partnership, an umbrella group for economic development in the
16-county region, developed the Charlotte U.S.A. brand in 2000. The
name denotes the entire region, which includes four counties in South
Carolina. With financial help from the city’s two banks as well as
other corporate contributors, the partnership plans to take the
message about the region’s strengths to a hopefully receptive
corporate public.
The message will go to print, TV and radio media as well as site
selection trade media on the West Coast, Northeast and Midwest as well
as Europe — places from where Charlotte has recruited a healthy
number of companies in recent years. Lawry says as many as 50 percent
of the new business leads the partnership tracks are from
international companies, mostly in Germany and Britain.
A benchmark study conducted in the first quarter of the year to assess
the region’s strengths found that despite some recent major setbacks
the city is still seen as a pro-business location with an
attractive climate, good corporate base and a high quality of life,
Lawry says. — Laura Williams-Tracy
Winston-Salem
Entrance
Road Opens New Section of Business Park
Winston-Salem
Business Inc. has started work on Phase 3 of Union Cross Business
Park, a 400-acre complex in the southeastern corner of the city just
off I-40. This phase, which will provide a second entrance to the
park, is expected to cost about $1 million, says Bob Leak Jr.,
president of Winston-Salem Business, an economic development agency.
The cost covers road paving and curbing, water- and sewer-line
installation, storm drainage and other related work.
The city board of aldermen approved spending $500,000 on the project
in April. Winston-Salem Business will cover the remaining costs.
“Phase 3 is important because it will give us a second entrance to
the park and open up 55 additional acres that currently aren’t able
to be used because there’s no road,” Leak says. That will leave
another 50 to 75 acres still to be developed, he adds, within the next
18 months.
Businesses housed in the park include Alo North America, Bekaert
Textiles, Fed-Ex Ground, Hutchison-Allgood Printing, Liberty Hardware,
Salem Collection and Salem Furniture. Also, Samet Corp. constructed a
speculative building in the park. All totaled, nearly 700 people are
employed by companies in the park.
Bekaert Textiles, which has its U.S. headquarters and production
facility at Union Cross, was the first tenant.
Liberty Hardware also has its corporate headquarters at Union Cross.
The second entrance and exit will help Liberty and other tenants by
diverting traffic from the main road to the new secondary road. In
addition, FedEx Ground just opened its Triad Regional distribution
center at Union Cross. — Jim
Buice
Raleigh
Commuter
Rail Line Clears Major Hurdle
A
potential aid to the capital city and its suburbs’ growing
transportation woes cleared a major hurdle recently when the Triangle
Transit Authority received the go-ahead to build a commuter rail
system next to the tracks of the private, state-owned railroad
company.
The N.C. Railroad Co. agreed to allow the TTA to use 27 miles of its
corridor extending from downtown Raleigh through Cary and Research
Triangle Park to the Duke University Medical Center in Durham.
The agreement was required before the Federal Transit Administration
would consider allowing the TTA to build its system, which could be up
and running as soon as December 2007.
The agreement stipulates that the TTA can construct train stations and
two sets of tracks and use them for commuter trains for 50 years.
It also was seen as good news by Raleigh city developers who believe
that a rail station on the west side of downtown could spurn the
transformation of nine acres of industrial warehouses into
condominiums, shops and nightclubs. The TTA says it expects to buy at
least half of three acres owned by the Dillon Co. for its downtown
transit station, and could end up buying the entire tract.
Developers have long coveted the Dillon site because, as one of the
largest private tracts under single ownership in downtown, it is among
the rare sites remaining for large-scale redevelopment. The entire
Dillon site is valued at $4.6 million, according to county tax
records, but the property is pricier now that developers have turned
other nearby warehouses into clubs and offices.
The commuter rail system is expected to cost upwards of $600 million,
with the federal government flipping half of the bill and state and
local governments covering the rest.
The costs could rise later if the TTA has its way — it is
negotiating with the CSX Corp., which owns the North Raleigh segment
of the planned commuter route, to purchase that rail corridor from
downtown Raleigh to Spring Forest Road. -- Kevin Brafford
Charlotte
Talks
Turns to Attracting Baseball Back Downtown
With
its pro basketball team bound for New Orleans, sports talk in the city
has turned to the possibility of bringing the city’s minor league
baseball team to an uptown stadium.
The city’s failure to reach an agreement with the Hornets to build a
new arena has damaged the city’s civic pride, and Charlotte’s
political leaders have indicated they want to move quickly to
recapture excitement about new developments in the center of the city.
That could mean that plans will be under way as soon as this summer to
design and finance a $40 million complex for the Charlotte Knights of
the Triple-A International League.
Under a plan proposed by the team, the City of Charlotte would
contribute $25 million toward construction of an 11,048-seat stadium.
The team, owned by Hickory businessman Don Beaver, would pay for $5
million of infrastructure and cost overruns. Another $10 million would
be needed to buy land, most likely in the city’s trendy South End
district, which was home to the city’s baseball team from the 1940s
until the stadium burned in 1985.
Since 1989 the Knights have been playing in Fort Mill, S.C., just over
the state line on Interstate 77. But the team has struggled to attract
crowds to the suburbs. The team’s lease in Fort Mill expires in
2003, and if ground is broken on a new stadium this fall, the team
could play there in the 2004 season.
“It would be awesome to have baseball back in the city,” says Tim
Newman, a former general manager of the Knights who recently took the
position of president of Charlotte Center City Partnership, the uptown
development corporation. “If Durham can do as well as they have with
their in-town stadium, we can recreate what we had with Crockett Park
years ago.”
A new baseball stadium was part of a $342 million bond package
rejected by voters last June — the bulk of which would have built
the new basketball arena Hornets owners said they needed to make the
team profitable in Charlotte.
The Knights would play 71 games a year in a new stadium, plus it would
be used for other events. —
Laura Williams-Tracy
Greensboro
MIT
Team Analyzing Future Growth Industries
Four
graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
are conducting a research initiative for the Forward Greensboro
Economic Development Partnership and Action Greensboro. The project is
designed to complement an industry cluster analysis done by the
Natelson Co. that chose 19 industry clusters with the potential to
push future economic growth in the Triad. Forward Greensboro officials
then picked what it considered to be five of the most promising
clusters for future study.
“We’re pretty excited,” says Dan Lynch, senior vice president of
Forward Greensboro. “As we are in this recessionary time, typically
what you do is get your program in order and plan for the future. Our
traditional industries of textiles, apparel and tobacco are in
somewhat of a decline. What we’re trying to do is identify what the
growth industries of the future will be.”
And Forward Greensboro is thrilled about getting help from the MIT
team. It began due to the efforts of Michael Mascia, who practiced law
in Greensboro with the Smith Helms law firm (now Smith Moore). He
volunteered for Action Greensboro last summer before leaving for the
MBA school at MIT. Mascia, whose family lives in Greensboro, later
proposed to put together a project team, which includes himself and
three classmates.
He was directed to meet with Andy Burke, president of Forward
Greensboro, which had just received information on the cluster
analysis, and Roger Dale from the Natelson Co.
“We discussed how a project team from MIT may be able to
contribute,” Mascia says. “We decided that input from the local
firms would be beneficial and that our team could try to take the
cluster analysis to the next level by evaluating the value chains of
the existing firms and seeing which functions were underrepresented in
the Triad. Forward Greensboro could then use this information to
target firms and industries that will then make the clusters more
robust.”
Burke and Lynch selected what they considered to be the five most
promising clusters: 1) pharmaceuticals, biotech and medical
technologies; 2) transportation, shipping and logisitics, and aviation
maintenance; 3) information technology, software and communication
services; 4) motor vehicle and motor vehicle parts manufacturing; and
5) chemicals and plastics. The MIT team then put together a survey,
which was sent to leaders of the most prominent firms in each industry
cluster.
In addition, the team is conducting phone interviews with selected
companies and other institutions, such as universities and industry
associations. The findings then will be provided to Forward
Greensboro. — Jim Buice
Cary
SAS
Buys Naming Rights to New Soccer Complex
SAS
Institute, the world’s largest privately held software company, has
bought the naming rights to a 150-acre soccer park developed by the
Capital Area Soccer League (CASL) — one of the country’s largest
recreational soccer programs — for $200,000 a year for the next
three years.
The SAS Soccer Park, which includes seven fields and a 7,000-seat
stadium, is expected to draw international attention with major games
and tournaments. The stadium’s primary tenant is the Carolina
Courage, a second-year women’s professional soccer team that played
its inaugural season in Chapel Hill while the Cary facility was being
built.
The purchase adds to SAS’ sports partnerships. The Cary-based
software company brought a Senior PGA Tour event to Prestonwood
Country Club last year by stepping in as its title sponsor, and
recently signed a three-year deal to underwrite the Carolina Classic,
a minor-league PGA Tour event that was held last month at the
Tournament Players Club at Wakefield Plantation.
The park was built on state land with $14.5 million from Wake
County’s interlocal fund, money that is generated by taxes on hotel
occupancy and restaurant meals. The Courage, which pays the CASL
$75,000 annually for use of the park, is also contributing $1.7
million for upgrades. The stadium, which will host the 2003 and 2004
NCAA Division I Women’s College Cup national semifinals and
championship games, includes two 40-person luxury boxes and 2,606
parking spaces. — Kevin Brafford
Wilmington
Red-light
Cameras Cut Collisions by a Quarter
It’s
been a little more than two years since Big Brother began watching
over drivers who run stoplights in the Port City, and statistics
reveal that Safelight Wilmington is accomplishing its intention:
reducing the number of collisions at high-traffic intersections.
Cameras mounted approximately eight feet above ground at 10 of the
city’s most dangerous intersections started snapping photographs on
March 15, 2000, as Wilmington followed Charlotte’s lead among North
Carolina cities implementing safelight programs.
Fayetteville implemented its program at about the same time as
Wilmington and Greensboro and High Point have since followed suit.
Similar programs are in the planning stages at more than 15 other
cities in the state — all aimed at increasing safety at
intersections.
“We measure our success by the reduction in angle collisions,”
says Jim Flechtner, a senior engineer for the city who oversees
Safelight Wilmington. “The program has unquestionably worked. Since
it started, our angle collisions are down 23 percent.”
Most cities’ initiatives will mirror each other in that the
municipality solicits bids from private vendors and no public money is
used. In Wilmington’s case, the city struck a deal with Sarasota,
Fla.-based Peek Traffic, which installed and maintains the cameras.
Revenue is split between the vendor and the city, with violators
funding the city’s administrative costs.
The city’s collection rate is above 80 percent, which doesn’t
surprise Flechtner. “We’ve done citizen surveys and more than 80
percent of those who responded say they support Safelight,” he says.
Cameras are placed about 55 feet from one line of traffic at an
intersection and take three pictures. The first shows the vehicle
running the light after it’s turned red; the second is a closeup
that captures the license plate; and the third shows the vehicle in
the middle of the intersection.
“Drivers are getting the message,” Flechtner says. “During Year
1, we’d issue about six citations per day per site. We now issue
about four.” -- Kevin Brafford
Return to magazine index
|
|
