Pieces of the puzzle.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: North Carolina's regional partnerships

Will the seven regional partnerships fit the state's needs for economic development?

They are North Carolina's new front-line troops in the battle to attract and retain jobs. The seven regional economic-development partnerships, ranging in size from 11 to 23 counties, share the goal of luring and landing new business. But they don't have much else in common. Some are elite strike forces, powerful, aggressive and focused. Others are hodgepodge platoons of struggling draftees. Some have a strong economic base. Others flounder in parts of the state with few economic assets to rally around.

Mike Mullis, a Tennessee-based site-selection consultant, isn't sure regionalism is what's needed. "Preparedness is the answer," he told the North Carolina Economic Developers Association at its quarterly meeting in October. "If locations are not prepared to do business, they will not do business."

Therein lies the dilemma for North Carolina. Its most successful areas are urban centers like Charlotte, the Triangle and the Triad, where low unemployment rates make it hard for new businesses to find qualified workers. Meanwhile, lagging rural areas struggle to land new industry because they can't get noticed or have little in the way of development sites or amenities to offer.

What Mullis was getting at is that the big economic issues in North Carolina may not be geographic, as regional partnerships suggest, but structural: finding and training labor, identifying sites for new industry, providing and improving basic infrastructure.

State officials don't quibble with that assessment, saying regionalism is simply a tool to help leverage economic assets and expertise rather than having neighboring counties competing against one another.

"Regionalism is not the solution to all our economic-development needs," says Brad Woodhouse, the Commerce Department's legislative liaison, whose job includes selling the partnership concept to the General Assembly. What it does offer, he says, is a new marketing tool that can help site-selection consultants shop an entire region rather than having to deal with each individual county.

In 1993, the General Assembly created the Global TransPark Development Commission to spur economic development around the proposed air-cargo center near Kinston. It appropriated $7.5 million and gave the commission's 13 counties the right to levy an annual $5 motor-vehicle license fee for five years.

The creation of state-funded partnerships in the...