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A few years ago, I reported on outcry [ [link removed] ] to a deal cut behind closed doors for county and state officials to offer tens of millions of dollars worth of subsidies to RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) to set up a new Pratt & Whitney factory to make engine parts for the F-35 and other aircraft in Asheville, North Carolina.
Readers asked me to follow up on the deal, and we did just that. Economic development deals often produce records with a multi-year delay, and this year I was able to get hundreds of pages [ [link removed] ] of public records about the company’s performance under its contract to create jobs and invest in Asheville in exchange for tax refunds.
Among other things, the records show that Raytheon was allowed to claim about half a million dollars in tax refunds for jobs it did not create due to a loophole in its economic development contract with Buncombe County.
The records also show that the company took advantage of a curious, narrowly written provision tacked on to Hurricane Helene disaster relief legislation last year. In effect, that provision allowed it to bypass public comment as it applied for and got approved for a new round of millions of dollars in state job creation grants. I asked the Commerce Department for a list of all companies that applied for and received grants under the provision and got a remarkable answer: Just Raytheon.
We teamed up with North Carolina Public Press, a fellow member of the Institute of Nonprofit News, to dive into the deal. You can check out our companion reports here:
Read at Inkstick: Special Treatment Lines Defense Giant’s Pockets in North Carolina [ [link removed] ]
Read at Carolina Public Press: Defense contractor got special treatment in NC. But local legislators say they don’t know who did it. [ [link removed] ]
And we’ll probably be back for more, because there’s a new wrinkle.
While diving into the variety of state and local subsidies the plant is getting (see chart below), I came across a revealing tidbit in a recent Buncombe County Commission meeting.
That tidbit related to an expanded version of a proposed workforce training center to serve the Pratt & Whitney plant. The plant had been constructed on land donated by Biltmore Farms, operated by a wealthy and influential local scion, Jack Cecil, who descends from the Vanderbilts. Back when I reported my first story, I asked the County Commission chairman why Cecil would donate land to the likes of Raytheon. The chairman told me that his “general sense is that they considered it a sound business decision to donate the 100+ acres of land for the Pratt project with the belief that the donated value can be recouped from other projects that may move forward in the future once the infrastructure improvements are made in the area.”
Now Biltmore Farms is again donating land for a training campus dubbed the Western North Carolina Futures Factory, which is planned to serve Pratt & Whitney and other major employers. In a description shared with the Buncombe County Commission, which is being asked to allocate $5 million to construct the campus, the project’s proponents described the project in the following way:
A dedicated unit converts WNC Futures Factory capabilities into revenue through market intelligence, proposal writing, membership recruitment, and outreach — especially to the U.S. Department of Defense and the regional supply base — tracked by funded R&D, project backlog, and ecosystem expansion. (Emphasis added.)
All along, critics of the original Pratt deal feared that their town would be turned into a new hub for the military-industrial complex. That language suggests that Biltmore Farms and its allies in local government indeed imagine an industrial park for defense contractors on the premises.
We’ll be watching and keep digging.
What I’m Reading
This terrific Salt Lake Tribune article [ [link removed] ] covered a group of Utahns who are formally calling on the Mormon church to re-affirm its Cold War-era nuclear weapons opposition and to divest from Northrop Grumman, the largest defense contractor in Utah. I found it noteworthy that the Tribune asked church leadership to comment on its holding stock in Northrop Grumman. In our exposé last year, we described how doing so — being a faith-based investor with stock in the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturer — made the LDS church an extreme outlier among its peer churches.
Harking to the MX, Utahns call on LDS Church President Oaks to speak out against nuclear missile being developed in Utah [ [link removed] ]
Speaking of nuclear weapons, this reporting [ [link removed] ] from Matthew Gault in 404 Media about how the Los Alamos National Laboratory wants to build a data center — in a small town in Michigan that’s 24 hours away by car — is also a terrific.
A Small Town Is Fighting a $1.2 Billion AI Datacenter for America’s Nuclear Weapon Scientists [ [link removed] ]
Plus: We Need Your Help
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