Mark Binker

Officials with the Commerce Department have officially formed the private side of the state’s new public-private economic recruiting partnership that is scheduled to go into effect next year. Incorporation papers for the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, Inc. were filed with the Secretary of State’s office last week. The new group will be a 501(c)3 nonprofit that will handle business recruiting functions for the state. “It’s still our intent by the first quarter of next year we will have the business development organization in place,” Commerce Sec. Sharon Decker said during a conference call with reporters last week....

North Carolina’s Commerce Department is moving ahead with plans to create a private nonprofit to handle many of the job recruitment functions now carried out by state employees. Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker said she hopes to hire an executive director for the new nonprofit sometime in the next 45 days. “We are moving forward,” she confirmed Thursday, adding that the department would likely be ready to report its progress to lawmakers two months from now. As the General Assembly session wound down in late July, lawmakers declined to pass a bill giving instructions on how to revamp the Commerce...

Lawmakers dealt Gov. Pat McCrory’s plan to reorganize much of the Commerce Department into a public-private partnership a setback in the early hours of Friday morning. The state Senate adjourned for the year without taking up Senate Bill 127, a bill aimed at streamlining the state’s job retention and recruitment process. Although the Commerce Department provisions were not very controversial, lawmakers attached a controversial environmental provision during the waning days of session. That measure would have lifted a key safeguard on hydraulic fracturing in the state, ending a moratorium on the procedure used to extract natural gas before rules...

A plan to turn North Carolina’s job recruitment functions over to a public private partnership appears to have hit a snag in the state Senate, where skeptical lawmakers say they want to “thoroughly examine” the ideas behind one of Gov. Pat McCrory’s key priorities. McCrory, a Republican, has been pushing the legislature to create a private nonprofit that would contract with the state to handle everything from tourism promotion to the recruitment of new businesses. Proponents of the idea say it would allow the state to move more quickly when a company asks about relocating here and would allow...

Reducing North Carolina’s corporate tax rate won’t allow the state to cut all incentive programs, Commerce Sec. Sharon Decker told the House Commerce Committee Wednesday. Decker appeared before the committee to provide more details about a planned reorganization of the Commerce Department that will turn many of the state’s job recruiting functions over to a public-private partnership. She cautioned lawmakers that the Senate budget dismantled North Carolina’s existing rob recruiting network too quickly. Senators have voted to end funding for the state’s regional economic development partnerships effective July 1, 2013. Decker said those partnerships would need to remain until...