Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina

6 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 10 ECONOMI C DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHI P OF NORTH CAROL INA (EDPNC) in North Carolina. The best way to do that is by making sure they are aware of all the different employment opportunities available in the state. At the same time, we have to make sure that North Carolina companies are aware of this existing military population, so they can look at them for their own talent needs. Military service members tend to have a lot of great skills – soft and hard – that they bring to the workplace.” BVM: The EDPNC reaches out to attract new businesses, but do they come to you, as well? Chung: “A lot of them do find us. I have done this in three states over a 25-year career (North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri) and North Carolina easily gets the most looks without us necessarily having to do anything. Corporate surveys, CEO surveys, tend to show that North Carolina enjoys a pretty lofty perception as a place to do business, a place for high quality of life, it’s business friendly. That perception, which is grounded in reality, gets us on a lot of lists before we even know that those companies are looking. So, frankly, 80 to 90 percent of our activity is a result of being contacted by companies that have launched a search for a new location and want to include North Carolina as one of several options they’d consider. “The other 10 to 20 percent, we try to get ourselves. We’re running a marketing campaign and a business development effort, really trying to find those companies that haven’t yet finalized their growth plans but are getting close. We want to reach them before they get to that point where they’re contacting multiple states; to develop a relationship with those companies beforehand, so we can have a bit of an inside track in convincing them that North Carolina is the best place for them to put their future operation.” BVM: Do environmental and climate issues come into play for the EDPNC? Chung: “Yes, in a couple different ways. Energy is where you see some of these climate change considerations factor in for the companies that we’re working with. Often, a manufacturing company will tell us: We’re planning to consume millions of kilowatt hours of electricity each year to produce our product, however, we want to make sure that not only is the power reliable and affordable, we would like to see that as much of it as possible is sourced from renewable