Easley, Dole and Dems
Welcome to those of you following a link from Sunday's Q+A with Gov. Mike Easley. (Link here.) We posted some audio from the interview earlier this week. You can hear him opine on this year's elections here and his thoughts on gas taxes here.
One of the first things I asked him about was the failure of Skybus, the discount airline that North Carolina offered a gob of money to locate a hub here less than a year before the carrier went belly-up. We also discussed RF Micro, a company that has gotten state incentives but has also sent jobs over-seas.
Click here to listen to his answers.
If you're not digging the Easley interview, you might want to catch up on some other non-presidential political news:
- * Republican candidates for governor debated in Greensboro Friday night.
- * Afterward, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole offered a few thoughts.
- * Democrats running to replace Dole talked to our editorial board last week.
Comments (3)
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Mark,
A bit of a tangent, and perhaps not your beat, but I'm wondering if RF Micro is in danger of forfeiting any of the promised incentives because of moving local jobs to China. Were the incentives written in such a way that RFM can say, "Sure, we sent x number of jobs overseas, but we still hired the y number of people we promised locally to qualify for the incentives." In other words, were the incentives based on a net addition to the gross number of people employed locally or just a promise to hire a certain number locally regardless of net losses to the remaining workforce?
Posted on April 20, 2008 9:15 AM
I notice that Easley side-stepped your direct question of whether or not the Department of Commerce does due diligence on companies awarded incentives.
Posted on April 20, 2008 9:19 AM
One of the first things I asked him about was the failure of Skybus, the discount airline that North Carolina offered a gob of money to locate a hub here less than a year before the carrier went belly-up.*Mark
Did Governor Easley say when he would pay back the Taxpayers personally for his amazing business decision to give Skybus a million dollars for nothing? And it is true that he will be a airline consultant for the prepose Delta and United Airlines merger?
Posted on April 20, 2008 6:53 PM