Every time Governor Mike Easley announces he’s created some more jobs, I cringe. It always means the same thing — another horde of corporate executives has raided the state treasury.
This time, they made off with $4 million in incentives. That’s how much Harris Microwave Communications will get from the state for moving its corporate headquarters from California to Keystone Park in Durham — for what may be the second time in two years. It’s all part of an ongoing scam I first wrote about two weeks ago in which a company that’s already planning to move here tells the state it won’t come without incentives. Then Easley and other state leaders who are up for reelection fork over millions so they can take credit for “creating jobs” through the grant program.
Easley stood by Harris Microwave Communications division President Guy Campbell’s side at a press conference this week.
“It was competitive,” Campbell told reporters. “We were looking in North Carolina, Texas and Florida. Our decision to come to North Carolina was based on this grant.”
That made reporters at the Carolina Journal curious about what kind of deals Texas and Florida had offered the company. So they called those states’ incentives offices and asked. It turns out that the folks in Florida had had no contact with Harris Microwave and had no idea the company was looking to move its headquarters. Officials in San Antonio were equally surprised to learn that the division was relocating its headquarters, the Journal reported, but they were quite familiar with the company. It seems an incentives deal between Harris and San Antonio in the 1990s went bad after the company failed to create the jobs it had promised. Now Harris is making similar promises here — including one that says it will create 258 new jobs in the Durham area over five years. When grilled, Campbell said he couldn’t recall the terms of the “deals” he’d been offered by Texas or Florida.
It gets worse. Just five days after the giddy press conference with Easley and state officials, Florida Today reported that Harris Corp. had announced it would be eliminating 200 jobs in its underperforming Microwave Communications and broadcast divisions.
Of course, the Florida news report made no mention of the fact that just one week before, company executives had promised North Carolina leaders they would create 258 new jobs in the Microwave Communications division in Durham in exchange for the $4 million in incentives. That’s probably because what Harris execs say depends on what state they’re standing in.
“The broadcast and microwave divisions have had disappointing results the past few quarters,” Ari Bensinger, a telecommunications-equipment analyst for Standard & Poor’s told Florida Today. Turns out, it’s part of a long pattern of financial instability that goes back several years, a pattern that’s easy to document if one spends a little time on Google.
In a budget year when there’s not enough money to hire a coordinator for the state’s child fatality task force, when tuition will go up $608 per semester at the state’s community colleges, and daycare and healthcare programs for children may be slashed, you’d think the Easley administration would take the time to check out Harris’ record.
After all, they wouldn’t have had far to drive. Harris’ Microwave Communications Division already has a facility at Keystone Park in Durham, the spot it claims it will be moving its headquarters to in exchange for the incentives. That’s right — the company has been there for two years.
In 2002, the company told the Raleigh News & Observer it had consolidated its research and development sites in Washington and Redwood Shores, California, into a single Durham facility. No incentives were involved. Last week, the new move was described to the media in North Carolina as a “relocation” of the company’s “divisional headquarters” from Redwood Shores to the site in Durham. But once again, that’s not exactly how corporate bosses described it to Florida Today a week later, when the publication reported that Microwave Communications “division administration and support functions, now in Redwood Shores, Calif., and Montreal, will be consolidated at its Research Triangle Park facility in Durham, NC.” About 10 employees will transfer from the California site to Durham.
Equally odd is the fact that shortly after the North Carolina press conference, a switchboard operator at Harris’ company headquarters in Florida told the Carolina Journal that the Microwave Communications division headquarters was located in Durham, and had been for some time.
The whole thing leaves me baffled as to what, if anything, we’ve accomplished here, but I do know this. If this is what it takes to create jobs in North Carolina, it’d be better for everyone involved if we just encourage the unemployed to move somewhere else.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2004.
