Doing the best you can with what you've got.

• Position: Northeast Partnership: a North Carolina regional partnership

The luxurious new vacation homes on the beaches of the Outer Banks boast dreamy views from just about every room, even the oversize bathrooms with their whirlpool tubs and bidets. But to get to these exclusive enclaves, you have to drive through some of the poorest counties in the state, where you're more likely to find a house with a privy than a Jacuzzi.

Such is the mixed legacy of northeastern North Carolina, a 16-county region with a strong tourism industry but few signs of the industrial growth that the state as a whole has shown for decades. Isolated by poor roads and sparse air service, the region lacks much of the infrastructure other parts of the state take for granted. Indeed, the Northeast North Carolina Regional Economic Development Partnership, which markets itself as North Carolina's Northeast Partnership, has put upgrading basic water and sewer service among its priorities. "We have a long way to go to catch up, if we can catch up," Chairman Jimmie Dixon says.

According to a 1996 N.C. Commerce Department report, the region's per capita income and average wages have run about 20% below statewide levels. The limited availability of water, sewer and natural gas confines the region to "lower-wage, small employers, who do not have the financial strength to provide needed employee benefits," the Commerce report says. To generate money for infrastructure projects, the partnership has been encouraging its counties to adopt a $5 license-tag fee.

The region's statistical imbalance is precisely what the state was seeking to rectify when it launched the partnership in 1993. The problem for the northeast, though, is that it lacks the urban core other regions have. "There is not one major city in the northeast," Dixon says.

Initially, the state set up the partnership with two directors, one for tourism and the other for economic development. But the two-headed organization led to disarray. "Those two folks were supposed to be equals, and that didn't work. That was flawed from the beginning," says Larry Jones, Raleigh marketing director of the consulting firm Law Engineering and Environmental Services and former chairman of the North Carolina Economic Developers Association. "The region was having trouble serving two masters. It was very difficult to get consensus."

"About the middle of 1995, they kind of put this partnership in close to a dormant state," says Rick Watson, hired in early 1996 as executive director of the...