(The Center Square) – When Bill Webb was a child growing up in southeastern North Carolina, the tobacco business was booming and there were 13 textile mills.
Then came the North American Free Trade Agreements in 1993 and everything started to decline.
“There’s one textile mill left in Richmond County,” Webb told his fellow board members of the state’s Rural Infrastructure Authority on Thursday. “There’s no tobacco being grown. It was a sucker punch to my county like no other.”
What the county does have, however, is a natural gas power plant which produces plenty of low-cost electricity.
The county also owns land next to the plant.
That created the perfect location for a new $10 billion investment by Amazon for a data center. The company made the announcement earlier this month.
The project, about 60 miles from Charlotte, may turn out to be much larger than Amazon initially announced, Webb told board members.
“What I can tell you is that Amazon has told you publicly – $10 billion – is the bottom end of what they’re planning,” Webb said. “We’ve got a county that has a $3.2 billion tax base.”
Amazon is planning 20 structures, each 250,000 square feet, Webb said.
“Each one of those will be worth $1 billion,” he said.
Amazon said the project will create 500 jobs but Webb told members of the board affiliated with the Department of Commerce the number will be “significantly” higher.
Land prices have already tripled in certain areas of the county, Webb said.
Richmond County has a population of 42,946, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The median household income in the county is $43,626, compared to the North Carolina state median income of $70,804, the Census said. The poverty rate of 25.2% in the county is more than double the North Carolina state average of 12.8%.
The state classifies Richmond as a Tier 1 county, meaning the most economically distressed.
But Webb on Thursday credited the Richmond County leadership with having the foresight to recruit a gas power plant to the county and to also purchase land next to the plant.
“It’s just a good example of how in every county, you’ve got to have leadership, even when you’re poor,” he said. “You’ve got to have people who think ahead. We were fortunate in having good leaders. There’s always hope, I’ll put it that way.”
