August 16, 2006

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            By the close of 2003, there were none, although the empty buildings remained. The Athey building has been recreated as The Factory with ice rinks, shops, a soccer field and restaurants. The Weavexx buildings are being pulverized and used to fill in a valley to create flat land for the future car dealership there. The Parker-Hannifin building will be razed in the near future to make way for an upscale shopping mall.

            Tiny Holly Springs has been able to attract a large new industry, Novartis, though admittedly by promising millions more than the town can afford.

            Wake Forest leaders will find out more about their chances for luring industry next week when Ken Atkins, the economic development director for Wake County, will be a guest of the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce’s economic development committee.

            Mark Fleming, the chamber’s executive director, leads the town’s economic development activities. This year the town will pay the chamber $32,000 for those efforts. Two years ago the cost was $42,000, $36,000 a year ago, and Fleming will ask for $32,000 next year.

            “We work with the Wake County Economic Development Commission,” Fleming said.

            “Right now our big challenge is we don’t have large tracts of available land. There really isn’t a lot out there.” Fleming said industries today need 100 acres or more, and it is preferable to have just one owner.

            Atkins will talk about the Certified Site Program, Fleming said, in which a town or individuals provide all the inspections, permits and utilities so a company only has to have a ground-breaking ceremony before construction can begin.

            “One of the things that held us back in the past was water,” Fleming said. From about 2002 on, the town was unsure where its future water supply would come from. And, Fleming said, biotech industries and drug companies that appear to be the future of the Triangle area need lots of water.

            One of the questions Wake Forest leaders have to answer, Fleming said, is whether the town should begin offering incentives to industry to locate here or whether “we should be about investing in our downtown and small businesses.”

            The town board will soon select the members of the steering committee that will redo the land use plan and provide a roadmap to the town’s growth in the next 20 years. This is the time to talk about incentives, Fleming said, “and the answer may be we don’t want to do it. Our future rests in the land between here and Rolesville.”

            When Athey laid off its employees in December of 2000, the chamber organized a toy drive for the affected families. The amazing thing to him, Fleming said, was the large number of employees who lived in Franklin, Granville and Vance counties.

            The Novartis plant in Holly Springs will pull its employees from Harnett County and farther south. “We have that same labor force advantage,” Fleming said, but the people who have moved and are moving to Wake Forest are not blue-collar employees and our local workforce is much different.

            When realtor Dick Monteith, a former mayor, looks at Wake Forest in terms of industry, he notes that land is less expensive around Holly Springs and is flat while this area is mostly sloping or hilly.

            He still sees the Shearon farm land along Burlington Mills Road as a good industrial site although it is presently zoned for residential, retail and commercial use.

            Holly Springs also is connected to the Harnett County water system “and has an abundance of water.”

            Falls Lake, the only source of water in Wake County, “would be problematic” for an industry that is a heavy water user, Monteith said.

            He thinks the future industry in Wake Forest will be small businesses and professional offices to serve the needs of the 25,000 to 50,000 residents.

            “I think the twenty-plus acres in the south end of Wake Forest are prime space for an office park,” Monteith said. One company that looked at the town “really liked the idea of being in downtown Wake Forest.”

            The town has lured industry to town in the past by using two private entities.

            In 1964 the town created the independent Industrial Development Commission which sold bonds, bought the Jenkins farm, built the large brick building and leased it to Schrader Brothers (which became Parker-Hannifin after a number of sales). Schrader paid the taxes and all maintenance while paying off the bonds.

            The Business and Industrial Partnership, a nonprofit that began in 1994 and depended on business and community volunteers for its operation, at first tried to market area land to industry and ended up developing the South Forest Industrial Park.

            In 1997 the group put together a three-way deal that involved the land owners, the Town of Wake Forest which loaned BIP $286,000 for grading, utilities and street, and BIP, which had a nest egg of about $20,000 from dues. The town had already extended water, sewer and electric lines nearby for the Kidde factory, which soon left to be succeeded by The Body Shop.

            BIP was able to pay back the town its money and later, in 2002, donated $40,000 to the town from a contingency fund that was never used. BIP is not active now.