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Gov, BD roll into JoCo
posted at 2010-07-19 21:14 | Last modified 2010-07-20 08:23
Medical supply giant Becton Dickinson (better known as BD) announced today it’s building a $38.4M distribution center near the small town of Four Oaks (pop. 1800) in southern Johnston County.
BD is a global life sciences company with substantial operations in NC already, including Durham, Mebane, Wilson, and RTP. The new warehouse and distribution center will anchor the new Four Oaks Business Park, near the junction of I-95 and I-40. It’s expected to employ 187 people when it’s up and running in 2015.
Governor Bev Perdue and Congressman Bob Etheridge were on hand to make the announcement today (and receive keys to the city from Mayor Parker) at nearby Four Oaks Elementary. Perdue said it's a big day for a small town.
A hundred and eighty seven jobs in Four Oaks and in this part of Johnston County can be compared to 500 or 600 in a more urbanized place. And so this is important stuff we’re seeing happen today. Those jobs will come between 2012 and 2015. They will put down more than 38 million dollars in an economic investment.
Perdue said BD’s expansion is proof that “we mean business” in NC when it comes to biotech and bioscience. She says the sector is worth big bucks to NC:
More than 247,000 jobs in this state, worth about 46 billion dollars a year to our economy. And this is another linchpin in that economy.
VP of Research Dr. Charles Goldstein represented BD at the announcement. He oversees its RTP operations and has lived in NC since 1988.
North Carolina is a very attractive place for growing research-based companies like BD and for places like BD to invest. It has world-renowned universities, a highly skilled workforce, and a location that can’t be beat, with excellent highways and infrastructure that contribute to a very, very favorable business environment.
Part of what made us so attractive is an incentive package that could be worth up to $1.2M if BD fulfills its end of the deal -- $600K from the state as a One North Carolina Fund grant (that’s cash, BTW), and about that much again on the local level. (Update: McClatchy's Alan Wolf says it could be $2.3M.) But after the event, Goldstein said the incentives weren’t the main driver in the decision.
That always plays some part, but that’s not the whole story, It had more to do with the location, and the workforce, and the spirit of the people in this particular area.
For an Eastern US distribution center, Goldstein said, you can’t do much better than Four Oaks, with a very nice highway interchange leading to a lot of available land.
How you get trucks in and out is a very important thing, because there’ll be a lot of them coming in with product, and lot of them going out redistributing the product to our customers all along the East Coast. So being adjacent to I-95 and I-40 is a tremendous consideration… Four Oaks is about equidistant between New York and Miami.
The average annual salary for the jobs at the BD warehouse will be about $28,800, which is 8% less than the Johnston County average of $31,400. Divided out, BD could get more than $6000 in state and local money per job that doesn’t even meet the county average. Still, it would come close to Four Oaks’ median household income of $29,427. And as Perdue sees it, bringing stable jobs into rural Eastern NC is worth the cost.
If you took these 43 counties and created a separate state, it would be the poorest state in America, right here east of 95. And so these jobs are critically important to change the fabric of the economy and the lives of the people of Eastern North Carolina. Jobs, jobs, and more jobs -- I’ll make any call, I’ll go anywhere to be sure we can continue to grow jobs in North Carolina.
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