Economic development officials are proposing a regional marketing campaign to attract new advanced manufacturing industries to the Twin Counties.

The Carolinas Gateway Partnership proposes creating a “Technology Corridor.” The tag would be used as part of a multi-county promotional campaign to persuade technology-driven companies to scrutinize the region, including Nash and Edgecombe counties.

The effort would involve a collaborative effort with counties stretching from the Research Triangle Park near Raleigh-Durham to East Carolina University.

The corridor would cover Durham, Wake, Wilson, Nash, Edgecombe and Pitt counties.

“The corridor is a branding process,” said Frank Harrison, chairman of the Carolinas Gateway Partnership, which is a public-private industry recruitment agency for Nash and Edgecombe counties. “It is not a process of (building) infrastructure. We’ve got the road systems. We’ve got most of (needed) Internet capacity.”

The concept is being evaluated as officials search for ways to reinvent the Rocky Mount economy, which is in transition after the loss of thousands of textile and tobacco jobs in recent decades.

The down economy has made the situation worse, with the Twin Counties’ unemployment rate consistently being ranked near the top of the state.

Harrison said Rocky Mount is not alone.

“I think it is real important that people realize that Rocky Mount is no different than a bunch of communities across this whole country of our size that are manufacturing-based,” he said. “They are all having the same problems we’re having.”

Textile plants and others that don’t require highly skilled labor have been moving overseas for cheaper labor.

“There has been a lot of displacement and shifting of manufacturing-type jobs,” Harrison said.

Harrison said the Technology Corridor would recruit new companies in advanced manufacturing industries that already are in this area and doing well. Examples include pharmaceutical company Hospira, Honeywell Aerospace, Cummins Rocky Mount Engine Plant and food distribution company MBM Corp.

“You are trying to take the universities and the Research Triangle (Park) near Raleigh and take a conceptual corridor that would flow down through Wilson, Rocky Mount and Greenville,” Harrison said.

A high school diploma combined with additional technical training at a community college would suffice to staff the new jobs that would be created, Harrison said.

“We would create a corridor that would be advanced manufacturing technology that all of us already have, but brand it,” Harrison said. “That way, you get national recognition, a state recognition, having the commerce department and the governor’s office thinking conceptually.”

Creating the corridor is not a quick fix, Harrison said.

“We have to basically work on our present strengths. We are very strong in distribution and food processing,” Harrison said. “We are very strong in advanced manufacturing, and advanced manufacturing is tech.”

Even though thousands of textile jobs have been lost in recent years, the Carolinas Gateway Partnership has helped create 8,000 jobs during the past decade, and many of those are tied to advanced manufacturing, Harrison said.

“As we’ve lost the lower-tech (jobs), we’ve created new clusters, and they are growing,” he said.

Already A Tech Site

The Rocky Mount area recently was recognized as a “high-tech achiever.”

In 2008, the Milken Institute, a publicly supported, nonpartisan independent think tank, ranked the area first among all small cities in its domination of high-tech firms relative to the national averages.

John Gessaman, CEO of the Carolinas Gateway Partnership, said a good example of this technology can be found at the Ossid Corp. in Edgecombe County, which has numerous patents on its machinery.

“They supply processing machinery to the food industry, and they have a bunch of patents to do different types of things,” said Gessaman, who heads up the public-private industrial recruitment agency for the Twin Counties. “You don’t think of food processing as technology, but there is an example of how technology goes into all of this stuff.”

Pitt County Eager To Join

Wanda Yuhas, executive director of the Pitt County Development Commission, said there are enough different kinds of companies along the proposed corridor to make the package deal alluring to companies.

“It is only when we are looking at this as a team that we can really make the whole thing work,” she said.

A corridor branding campaign could accentuate the assets of the region, which is a better selling point than one county’s assets, Yuhas said.

“Different companies have different needs,” she said. “With this kind of comprehensive approach, all of us will be able to both look at more companies and have more companies look at us.”

For example, she said, reference material could be developed about the aggregate assets of the entire corridor.

“If we are able to say in the region, ‘We have 15 companies doing bio-processing,’ then there is an automatic external endorsement that companies are already doing things in this region,” she said.

She said the corridor could help sell the area.

“It’s like anything else you talk about in terms of critical mass,” she said. “If we talk about ACC basketball, we know we always have a number of good teams, so people across the country watch ACC basketball.”

Likewise, bioprocessing and technology companies would be more likely to take a serious look at the counties included in the corridor, she said.

“Just the aspect of seeing us function as a team makes a big difference,” she said.

Under the corridor concept, if a company found a site in one county unacceptable, it could look at a site in another county, Yuhas said.

A Collaborative Effort

Working together can only benefit all the counties, Yuhas said, noting that people may live in one county and work in another.

Evidence of the rewards of collaboration can be found in the BioEast Alliance, which was formed a few years ago to accentuate the positive business qualities of Nash, Edgecombe, Wilson, Pitt and Wayne counties, she said.

Yuhas said Pitt County has had a spike in new businesses since the alliance was formed.

“We’ve certainly seen a number of our bio-processing — even medical device and biotechnology projects — increase in Pitt County,” she said.

The BioEast Alliance website, www.nceast.org, lauds the area’s resources to prospective new businesses.

“Situated just east of Raleigh, North Carolina and the world famous Research Triangle, the BioEast Alliance is a five-county area that is emerging as a major life science region in its own right,” the website states. “North Carolina is the third leading state in the U.S. in terms of the number of biotech firms and employees.”

The website adds that the BioEast Alliance area employs about 5,000 of those workers and is home to major life sciences firms such as Hospira, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, DSM Pharmaceuticals, Merck & Co., Fuji Silysia Chemical USA, Metrics and Becton Dickinson Medical Devices.

To get the Technology Corridor off the ground, officials from the Twin Counties need to inventory the assets they offer, such as the Interstate 95 corridor, and point those out to other counties to sell them on joining the corridor branding effort, said Ted Abernathy, the executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board, a think tank that advances economic development in 13 Southern states and Puerto Rico.

“The first thing they need to do is a complete asset inventory of what they have before they go to the first meeting so they know what they are bringing to the table,” he said.

A new Technology Corridor is a sound idea, he said.

“I think that the key is for communities to figure out what they want to do, map a course, and then devote their energy and resources to making it happen,” he said. “I don’t think that passive works. There are too many other people coming for jobs and investment in the world.”