Stories - WIRED Helps Piedmont Triad Take Off

These have been hard times for the Piedmont Triad, the twelve county region nestled between North Carolina’s more robust economic centers of Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte.

 

Between 2000 and 2004 the Triad experienced a net loss of more than 40,000 “insured jobs,” i.e., jobs covered by unemployment insurance, as the region’s once mighty apparel, textile and furniture industries all suffered the effects of increased global competition. In some areas, a full fifty percent of the students in the local schools were eligible for free or reduced lunches.

 

One recent development, however, has brought a dramatic ray of hope to the region. On October 22, Skybus, the up-and-coming low-cost airline with routes spanning the country, announced that it would locate a new hub base at the Piedmont Triad International Airport. Skybus will bring a much-needed infusion of 375 new well-paying jobs – but the airline’s decision to relocate might never have happened if the WIRED team had not already been in place, ready to respond when the opportunity presented itself.

 

In January 2007, regional leaders brought together by Don Kirkman, WIRED’s President and CEO of the Piedmont Triad Partnership, agreed to formalize a group of representatives drawn from each of the Triad’s three major cities, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point. At that time, they pledged to put aside traditional inter-city rivalries and work together to bring their region back to economic life. So when Skybus announced it was looking for a second hub airport in June of that year, the WIRED committee was prepared to respond at lightening speed.

 

Within 24 hours, a delegation of three – including one representative from each city -- was assembled. They soon traveled to Skybus’s home in Columbus, Ohio, where they found that the airline’s business model – based on serving an entire region rather than a single city – was a perfect fit for what the new Triad leadership had to offer. 

 

“It was critical that we had all three cities heavily involved,” says Allen Joines, Mayor of Winston Salem. They liked the economic package of incentives the region put together, which were similar to those offered to other airlines operating out of the airport. While no WIRED funds were used to directly attract Skybus, Joines believes that the fact that Skybus saw this as a regional effort was “even more important than the actual dollars.”

 

“Without WIRED and the group it assembled in place, this kind of regional cooperation wouldn’t have been possible,” says Jim Melvin, president of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation. “WIRED enabled us to trust each other,” he explains, pointing to a recent squabble about a hospital's plans to build a new wing in High Point. “Turns out many of the major players were part of our WIRED group, so we said one morning at a meeting, ‘Why can’t we just solve this problem without suing each other?’ Now they’re all doing joint projects together.”

 

“The world is flat,” says another WIRED participant, President Nido Quebin of High Point University, “and we’ve come to the simple recognition that we have to work together if we’re going to compete globally, and that business and education are going to have to work side by side to build a better future.”

 

That’s all part of the “holistic” WIRED model, says Don Kirkman, one that not only focuses on “industry clusters” across regions but also includes a much broader engagement of the education community. “Everything we’ve done through WIRED,” he explains “is to connect people in ways they would not have otherwise been connected. Under the WIRED model, everything matters. We’re using some of our funds to directly support K through 12 and four year college institutions in order to develop new models of how you train the workforce for higher wage jobs. We touch on everything from quality of life to education to entrepreneurship and leadership.”

 

Kirkman and his WIRED colleagues have even bigger plans for the future, such as developing a new strategy around the five interstate highways that transect the region and the new FedEx cargo hub that will begin construction in 2009. “We truly believe we can be the central logistic and communications center for the entire East Coast,” Kirkman predicts.

With Skybus’s new hub promising to make Piedmont Triad the fastest growing airport in the nation, the WIRED group is certainly moving in the right direction to make Kirkman’s bold vision a reality.