Rise to shine: Wake County uses its world-class educational, research and health care assets to solve the challenges that have come with its success.

• Author: Kinney, Ben
• Position: WAKE COUNTY ROUND TABLE

WAKE COUNTY IS POPULAR.

The U.S. Census Bureau says Raleigh-Cary was the 15th fastest growing metro area in the country from July 2013 to July 2014. Business North Carolina gathered a panel of county business and education leaders to discuss how Wake's assets, including world-class universities, research, health care and quality of life, are helping it succeed and handle its growth.

The round table was moderated by Ben Kinney, Business North Carolina publisher. Wake County Economic Development sponsored and hosted the discussion. McAdams, North State Bank, and Ward and Smith provided additional support. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Larry Barbour

president and CEO, Raleigh-based North State Bank

Whitney Campbell Christensen

lawyer, Ward and Smith P.A.'s Raleigh office

Adrienne Cole

executive director, Wake County Economic Development

Dennis Edwards

president and CEO, Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau

Michael Munn

president, Durham-based John R. McAdams Company Inc.

Billie Redmond

founder and chairwoman, Raleigh-based Trademark Properties Inc.

Stephen Scott

president, Wake Technical Community College

HOW HAS WAKE COUNTY CHANGED SINCE THE RECESSION?

[MUNN] We see pent-up demand growing our residential and commercial sectors. New housing starts, for example, are still half of what they were prerecession, but we're taking other shares of the market. We are doing more university work, and we are working with Charlotte-based Duke Energy Corp. and Gastonia-based Public Service Company of North Carolina. Utilities are investing in energy distribution to serve the state's growing population. That stopped during the recession.

[EDWARDS] About 14.2 million people visited Wake County last year, spending more than $2.2 billion. That's almost a million more than the year before. They are here for business; meetings and conventions; amateur, youth and collegiate sporting events; and leisure. Hotel occupancy is up almost 10% over last year. Hotel and lodging and prepared food and beverage tax collections are up about 12% from the more than $43 million collected last year. A hotel feasibility study is scheduled to be released this month. It will detail the types of hotels we need and where to build them.

[SCOTT] Enrollment for Wake Tech's fall semester was up about 5% two weeks before classes began. N.C. State University economist Michael Walden measured Wake Tech's economic impact at about $2.4 billion this spring. Wake Tech provides companies with workforce training, which is an incentive offered to new and existing businesses free of charge through the N.C. Community College System. It can be tailored to their core business, or of more general interest such as management techniques. It depends on the industry and, more importantly, what is needed. Graduates continue to get jobs. This past spring, instead of organizing one job fair as we did during the recession, we had five across three campuses. One was a virtual fair, where about 50 companies hosted chat-rooms, and people wanting jobs in cloud computing, data analytics and similar fields logged in.

[COLE] The county has the ingredients for success. There are colleges and universities --including three research universities. Raleigh has seen a 23% increase in information-technology jobs since the recession, the most in the country. Our life-sciences, clean-tech, information-technology and financial-services clusters are getting stronger. We have more people deciding to live here, then finding a job. More than 50% of our population has at least a college degree. We add an average of 63 people every day. Twenty-one of them are born here, but the balance is moving in. Seventy-five percent of [newcomers] have at least a college degree. We have about 50 projects that have had activity in the last 90 days. Four of those are companies considering expansions; the rest are looking to relocate here. They would mean more than 10,000 jobs and $3.3 billion in investment, if they all come to fruition.

[BARBOUR] Our business is not where it was before 2007, but it is improving, especially on the residential side...