Business View Civil and Municipal l December 2022

29 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 we’ve had great support from the Golden LEAF Foundation. Those are the folks that got the tobacco settlement money to help North Carolina’s rural, tobacco-dependent, and economically distressed communities. They’ve helped us put together some programs here. The U.S. EDA has supported programs here. We’ve also had a lot of success working with our electric membership cooperative partner, Four County EMC. They give us small grants to do zero-interest financing on our big industrial and commercial projects.” Another extremely valuable partner in meeting the challenges of living in a sparsely populated place is the North Carolina Department of Commerce, which connects local communities with the grants and funding needed to attract new businesses, ensuring future prosperity for the region. “We’re getting critical infrastructure investment in the Elizabethtown Airport Industrial Park, which is one of the coolest, most successful endeavors for economic development in the County,” shares Heustess. “We’re getting major road, water, and sewer expansions there. This is considered one of the nicest rural industrial parks in the state. We have six industrial incubators, so it’s a small space where industry can startup—they range from 4,500 ft right on up to 27,000 ft. We’ve been doing these for 20 years and we’ve never had a day of vacancy. In fact, we have one industrial bay that has graduated four, 1 million dollar businesses.” At the heart of the park is the unique Cape Fear Winery, Cape Fear Vineyard and Winery, which is becoming a destination unto itself and is connected to a green park with a paved pathway that circles through the winery’s property paths, petting zoo, gift shop, and lakeside cottages. “It’s a beautiful path that a lot of the locals use, even though it’s intended for tenants of the industrial park,” says Dennison. “Bladen is a wonderful area for grape growing and we have another BLADEN COUNTY , NC