Making up for lost time.

• Position: Southeastern North Carolina

Southeastern North Carolina is one of the state's lagging economic areas, and true to form, it was late getting into regionalism.

In its review of the fiscal year ended in June, its regional partnership noted that "because of delays in appointments to the commission, North Carolina's Southeast was one of the last of the state's seven economic development regions to get its effort under way."

But once started, it moved quickly with advertising campaigns, a home page on the World Wide Web, trade-show appearances, support for a regional film commission and a successful campaign to get new interstate-highway sections approved. The commission got $670,000 from the state for 1996-97. Revenue for the year is $1.7 million, which includes carry-over, interest income and sales-tax refunds.

The region needs all the help it can get, particularly in its rural counties, among the poorest in the state. According to a 1996 state Department of Commerce report, the 11-county region's per capita income and average wages are below the state's, and the unemployment and poverty rates are higher. But population and employment are growing faster that the state average, a sign of improvement.

While large corporations are well-represented, including B.F. Goodrich, Black & Decker, DuPont and Campbell, corporate downsizing has left the landscape littered with empty factories. The partnership is trying to turn that into an asset by carrying a listing of available industrial buildings, with photographs, on its World Wide Web site. Many of the buildings listed in October were large: including a 700,000-square-foot complex in Fayetteville formerly used by Western Publishing, a 500,000-square-foot former Broyhill plant in Sampson County, a 465,000-square-foot textile plant in Wilmington and a 255,000-square-foot former boat manufacturing plant in Rocky Point.

The task of filling those empty buildings and spurring new development is made more difficult by the lack of a marquee asset like Charlotte or Research Triangle Park and by limited infrastructure.

The result is a region that lives in the shadows of North Carolina's economic giants and has to scramble for any opportunities it can find, always cognizant of its richer and more powerful neighbors. Asked about the region's greatest challenges, partnership Director Paul G. Butler Jr. ticks off the competition: "Charlotte is not going away. The Piedmont Triad is not going away. The Research Triangle is not going away. The...