Elizabeth City city councilors have set a public hearing for later this month on whether to adopt a resolution of support for business incentives for a new manufacturer that promises to bring 23 new jobs to Pasquotank County.
City Council voted unanimously last week to hold the public hearing at its regularly scheduled meeting on Monday, May 13. The hearing is required before city leaders vote on whether to support resolutions and business incentives for LMFakro, which manufactures attic ladders and other attic accessories.
The hearing could have been held as early as April 22, but at their April 8 meeting, councilors voted 4-3 to hold off on setting a date and instructed City Manager Montré Freeman to learn more about LMFakro’s hiring practices.
Voting in opposition were 4th Ward councilors Johnnie Walton and Ronnie Morris and 3rd Ward councilors Katheryn Felton and Kem Spence.
Voting to set April 22 as the date for the public hearing were 2nd Ward councilors Javis Gibbs and Rose Whitehurst, and 1st Ward Councilman Joe Peel. Not in attendance at the meeting were 1st Ward Councilman Johnson Biggs and Mayor Kirk Rivers.
Council’s initial vote was 3-3, but Spence, who is mayor pro tem, broke the tie against setting the public hearing date.
At the April 8 meeting, Walton expressed opposition to setting the April 22 date, saying he wanted more information about LMFakro’s hiring practices. Walton said that based on the city’s racial makeup, LMFakro’s 23 job opportunities should be even for everyone.
“If you’ve got a makeup in your city that’s 50% one race and 50% another race it should be somewhere close to 50% employment,” Walton said.
According to U.S. Census figures, 49.4% of the city’s July 1, 2023, population of 18,756 was Black, 39.9% was white, 8.5% was Latino, and 6.5% were two or more races.
During the public comments portion at council’s April 22 meeting, local businesswoman Holly Audette voiced concerns that city council was potentially jeopardizing the LMFakro opportunity by questioning the business’s hiring practices. Audette pointed out there are already several state and federal labor laws, as well as the U.S. Constitution, that protect against unfair hiring practices.
“We don’t need to be questioning people on the basis of what the law already protects us from,” said Audette, who along with her husband owns and operates the Culpepper Inn on Main Street. “We have the 14th Amendment, the equal protection aspect of the U.S. Constitution. We have federal labor laws. We have state labor laws. All of which address the issue of how you hire, and I can assure you that every one of them is specifically targeted to what people look like.”
Audette is a former board member of the Northeast Alliance, a regional economic development commission. She opened her comments by telling council “it is very, very, very difficult to recruit jobs to northeast North Carolina.”
Audette, who also is a member of the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Tourism Development Authority, said she has no doubt that each member of city council “genuinely cares about bringing new job opportunities to our residents.”
“But what I do want to ask you to do is be responsible when you are considering the impact of decisions you make that delay possibilities on the basis of things that are already resolved,” she said.
Audette questioned the city’s own hiring practices.
“You don’t meet your own standards of employment. Do you know that?” Audette asked. “For example, Blacks in the city of Elizabeth City, residents, make up just under 50% of the population. But your employment in the city of Elizabeth City for Blacks is well over that. You don’t meet you own standard that you expected of this other company. That’s not good.”
Audette next posed the following scenario.
“If you are a company coming to the area where you have everybody begging you and you hold all the cards, why wouldn’t they say, ‘I don’t need this?’” she said. “The law already requires me to comply. Many laws. I just don’t need this. I’m going to go next door to Gates County where these kinds of issues are not raised, that don’t have any significance given today’s laws.”
Freeman reported at the April 22 meeting that he had the hiring information Walton had requested but he was not asked by council to present it.
The office of Gov. Roy Cooper announced Thursday, March 28, that LMFakro had selected Pasquotank as the site of its first-ever U.S. location. The 23 new jobs created by LMFakro will boast an average salary of $47,391 and include supervisors, packaging operators and warehouse and administrative positions. The average salary in Pasquotank is $44,457, according to the governor’s office. The new jobs could potentially have an annual payroll impact of more than $1 million in the region.
According to plans, LMFakro will occupy the former Davis Yachts building off Kitty Hawk Lane in the city-county owned industrial park off Halstead Boulevard. In April, Pasquotank County was awarded a $200,000 state grant to help LMFakro repurpose the 44,000 square-foot Davis Yachts building.
According to terms of the $200,000 grant, Pasquotank must pay a cash match of 5% of the grant amount, or up to $10,000. The second grant is a One N.C. Fund Grant worth $60,000 that requires a county match of $1 for every $3 of the grant amount, or up to $20,000.
The city and county will split the cost of the local matching funds, Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Economic Development Director Scott Hinton has said previously.
In early April, the Pasquotank Commissioners voted unanimously in favor of two resolutions of support and to apply for two N.C. Economic Development Incentive Grants to lure LMFakro to the county.
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