White reign.

• Author: Rabb, Will
• Position: Jess White, director Southern Growth Policies Board - Capital - Company profile

White reign

When Jess White took over as director of the Southern Growth Policies Board in 1982, he stepped aboard a foundering vessel. The obscure Research Triangle Park think tank was more than $100,000 in the red. Created a decade earlier to come up with ways to get the South out of the economic cellar, it was barely known across the region it served. Worse, it depended upon grants for projects that were irrelevant to its mission. Even its founders conceded it had become little more than a lobbying agency.

"Staff members would lock their doors when they went home at night," one employee says. "It was almost secretive. We weren't proud what we were doing."

Within weeks, White slashed the staff from 15 to seven, closed the Washington office and began to steer the board back to devising long-term economic policy that worked. Within two years, it had a balanced budget. By 1986, the board and its Commission on the Future of the South produced "Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go," a regional call to arms for economic development that stressed education, entrepreneurship and an end to the "cheap-labor" approach to recruiting Northern industry.

Today, Southern Growth might not be a household name, but leaders from Baton Rouge to Burlington agree it has become one of the most-respected organizations of its kind in the nation. Some go so far as to claim it has changed the course of Southern history.

"There's no question that's true," says William Staton, the Sanford Democrat who chairs the state Senate Banking Committee." What Jess White has said to us is, we in the South are not only competing with each other but with the entire world economy now."

Others say White and the board could have done more to promote their recommendations. "He's really been able to bring the board into focus... but I still don't think it's as visible as it should be," says state Rep. George Miller, a Durham Democrat and member of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Now White, a 45-year-old Mississippian who earned degrees in political science in England and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is ready for a new challenge. He had planned to "retire" this fall after the board found his successor and write books at his Chapel Hill home. At least one would combine the board's recommendations into a handbook for economic policy, a sort of operating manual for the South for the next 50 years.

But he left early, at the end of January, to teach a course in Southern...