How to keep the engine running.

• Position: Research Triangle Regional Partnership: a North Carolina regional partnership

The Research Triangle Regional Partnership is one of those organizations blessed from birth. The Triangle is among the most robust economic regions in the nation, so when the counties around it first started talking about a partnership, the idea was to build on a history of success.

But all that success can make it tough for a new economic-development agency to establish its own identity, particularly when it is in the shadow of well-known Research Triangle Park. The park does extensive marketing on its own, and partnership President Charles A. Hayes says part of his job is just to get out of the way when the deals come tumbling in.

Having RTP as a focus makes the job of marketing neighboring counties much easier, Hayes says. "The park is our 800-pound gorilla, and we like that. It gives us a positive identity. It's the engine that drives growth and economic activity for at least a 75-mile radius, and probably a 150-mile radius. We love it. We do back flips. We do handstands. That's what we sell on."

The business deals brokered in the Triangle are among the biggest in the state: a $50 million new plant for Biogen Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.; a $50 million expansion for Tacoma, Wash.-based Weyerhaeuser; a $40 million new plant for Eisai Pharma-technology Inc. of Tokyo.

According to a 1996 state Department of Commerce report, the region has led the state in population and employment growth in recent years. The business start-up rate is the highest in the state, the unemployment rate the lowest. Per capita income and average wages are well above the state average, while the poverty rate is below.

There is so much activity going on, Hayes says, that it's tough to separate salesmanship from the simple inertia of success. The partnership is a fairly new addition to the economic-development scene in the Triangle. The idea first surfaced in 1990, when leaders from Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill got together to discuss a regional approach to marketing their communities and formed the Raleigh-Durham Regional Association. It was funded by the Research Triangle Foundation and the chambers of commerce in the three communities.

It accepted three more counties in 1994. When the General Assembly started providing funding in 1994, it expanded to 13 counties and took on its current name. The 1996-97 budget of $813,000 is one of the lowest among the seven regional partnerships. It gets about half ($435,000) from the state. The rest comes from county...