(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Major support for Carolina Business Review provided by Colonial Life, providing benefits to employees to help them protect their family, their finances and their futures, High Point University, the premier life skills university, focused on preparing students for the world as it is going to be and Sonoco, a global manufacturer of consumer and industrial packaging products and provider of packaging services with more than 300 operations in 35 countries.

- Closing in on mother's day, days away from the end of school, there is a lot of pent-up demand to get to normal but just as much pent up demand to get to the summer.

Welcome again to the most widely watched and longest running program on Carolina business, policy and public affairs seen each and every week for the last 30 years across North and South Carolina.

I am Chris William and thank you again for supporting this dialogue.

In a moment we'll kick off to almost the beginning of summer and later on he is the chairman of the UNC board of governors and August body in North Carolina that oversees 16 college campuses and has an over 200 year history in the old North state.

Randy Ramsey joins us and we hope you'll stay with us for the dialogue.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Gratefully acknowledging support by Martin Marietta, a leading provider of natural resource-based building materials, providing the foundation upon which our communities improve and grow.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.

Visit us at SouthCarolinaBlues.com.

The Duke Endowment, a private foundation enriching communities in the Carolinas through higher education, healthcare, rural churches and children's services.

(upbeat music) On this edition of Carolina Business Review, Aaron Nelson from the Chamber for a Greater Chapel Hill- Carrboro, Carl Blackstone from the Columbia Chamber of Commerce and special guest, Randy Ramsey, President of Jarrett Bay Boatworks and chair of the UNC Board of Governors.

(upbeat music) - It is hard to miss the opportunity that we have in front of us and that is people are anxious to get out.

Summer is right around the corner, end of school, et cetera, et cetera.

Carl, Aaron, welcome to the dialogue and good to have you both here.

Guys, let's talk about that.

So one of the big first world problems that we are facing in many of our communities is this issue about housing.

And now as we head into the spring selling slash buying season of personal residence is a seemingly Scott even hotter.

Carl, I'll start with you.

Urban core that Columbia is you've got Lexington and Richland counties, you've got housing exploding like the other markets, what are the bad sides of that?

- Growing pains are obviously showing signs right now with growth in schools and infrastructure costs, et cetera.

So lots of conversations on moratoriums on housing tracks, et cetera.

So we gotta find a balance between... We can't use the 1980s nineties for smart growth but we've gotta plan and we've gotta be thoughtful in what we wanna look like in about 20 years.

But the growth is coming.

The new census data is coming out.

It's exploding growth.

Both Carolinas are seeing significant growth.

So this problem is not a short-term problem.

It's a longterm strategy that we've gotta start thinking about.

- Carl, I don't wanna say the opposing politics and again in the Midlands, Richland and Lexington counties, but they can stand opposite of each other.

Does that exacerbate the situation when you're trying to find just housing or affordable housing initiatives?

- Yeah, it does because we make our mark in South Carolina on job creation and manufacturing but what is the point of giving?

So parts of South Carolina you gotta travel an hour to get to work or you have to be an hour away to find attainable housing.

And so there's gotta be a balance right now on where we can construct homes, but also where jobs are gonna be located.

And it is a balance act.

I don't know if we've gotten it right yet.

And I don't think we have quite frankly.

But the significant growth in coast as well as the upstate.

We're seeing it here as well, much like what Aaron's seen in the triangle for years.

It's no different but we just gotta plan and it's new to us.

- Aaron, the politics of your city centers and I'll just say Chapel Hill and Carboro are a little bit more aligned.

Does that help when it comes to this housing bubble this housing shortage, the challenge that you have?

- Throughout the triangle, Durham County, Wake County and Orange County have all pledged great commitments to building more affordable housing both in the rental market as well as the home ownership.

I think in order to attack it we've got to be really intentional, set clear goals.

In Orange County we've got a goal.

We're at 1500 more affordable units over the next three to five years.

We've decided it's super important.

It's really expensive if you're gonna have to import all of your workers from other places there's a lack of civic participation that comes from people as they commute further and further away.

And that we're gonna have to build more housing in our communities in order to meet this need.

And then we're gonna have to prioritize the affordable housing.

In Orange County all new developments must have at least 10% permanently affordable housing.

And setting policies like that and finding strategies to partner with the regulator, the government and the developer to bring more housing online I think that's gonna be where we're gonna need to focus.

- Let's mention a couple of issues and see how that overlays on it.

Aaron, I wanna stay with you.

The Apple announcement recently it's a big one and it's been speculated for a long time in North Carolina that economic developers were going to announce a major initiative with Apple and sure enough, 3000 jobs, a billion dollar initial investment squarely rooted in the research triangle park, RTP.

Does that exacerbate housing?

Does that exacerbate the employment situation?

Does that put a tailwind on all of this?

So how does this look now over the next three to five years?

- It's a great problem to have and we're so excited to have them but we're gonna have to work really hard as a community to make sure that we can provide the talent that they need in order to be successful.

Our universities, our community colleges are now preparing to provide that talent what their training needs.

And then on the housing side, it will also be a challenge.

We are gonna have a lot of pressure in this market with Google's recent announcement, also with Apple's.

But remember our housing is expensive to us but if you talk to anybody from California or Colorado or New York they're thrilled to relocate to this area and think that we have some good deals.

So folks coming from outside of market don't find our housing as expensive as we do.

But if we're gonna care for those live more regionally and make sure that they can afford to stay for a while again we're gonna have to prioritize workforce housing.

- Carl, same thing.

When it comes to jobs you may not have an Apple announcement but economic development across the state of South Carolina is almost as robust on a per capita basis.

Does the jobs situation...

Does the gap widen between those looking for a job and the jobs available?

- Yeah, I think this is gonna be interesting because since the recession, companies have located where there's talent and the question was what's gonna happen post COVID.

Will that change or will people move out of the urban market and metro markets?

The Apple announcement last week may have been in the works for a long time but it still is signals that companies are gonna locate where there's a population based, where there's employment base and much to the younger market, so college talent which is a good thing.

So what we've got to do is start planning as well to make sure that we capitalize and have those growth plans in place.

Charleston is struggling with this as well.

Greenville is struggling with this as well.

In South Carolina, Greenville's far with 85 corridor where I think it's just a part of the trends of population migration to the South.

- It also signals that the office is not dead.

That for Apple to invest a billion dollars and to build some physical workspace where people are gonna work.

Remote working is around for a long time.

We're gonna talk to each other just like we are right here for a while.

But smart companies like Apple do realize that you are gonna need headquarters and you're gonna need office in order to meet the needs of the workers of the future.

And I think it points also to the importance of education.

Our K-12 system, our community colleges and our universities, we are gonna have to continue to invest in them.

That is what has earned us this reputation and why we get companies like this but we're gonna have to continue to focus there.

- So Aaron, not to let you off the hook in about 30 seconds.

Do you get the sense there is well among educational leaders?

And there are a lot of education leaders and initiatives and groups in states like North Carolina for sure because that's your area of dominant influence that have the will to make that work and try to get politics aside but to press on toward a better arrangement?

- I think so.

We're gonna fight in the legislature and have arguments and other things, but we have 50, 60 years of tradition from Terry Sanford on forward that we decided the Ds and the Rs can work together.

Sometimes it is messy definitely and a little bit of name-calling calling in between but when it comes down to it education is a priority and everybody we've seen they will support it in the end.

- Carl, one-off for you.

When we talk about policy in the state house specifically, do you get the sense that the Senate is going to adopt some version of a hate crimes bill that is acceptable?

- I think so.

We're at an interesting point in our general assembly.

They're wrapping up.

They're finishing today and then hopefully they'll be back in June to finish the budget stuff.

I think the hate crimes, it may not pass but it'll pass this summer.

I do think they'll get something done.

We're one of the few States that don't have it and there's mounting pressure by the day to get something done.

- So again, do you get the sense that there's will among the Senate Republicans to hammer out something that would be acceptable and not just look good for the state, but have some teeth in it?

- I think they'll pass something by the summer.

Whether it will have teeth it'll be a compromise.

No question about it.

- So as we rapidly approach now what is called post COVID status and get back to normal or wanna get back to normal, we are joined now by a leader in the state.

He is a head of the UNC or the University of North Carolina systems Board of Governors.

And what is their job?

Well, is it's published planning, development and overall governance of the 16 campus system of one of the oldest systems in the oldest colleges in this country.

We welcome chairman, Randy Ramsey.

Chairman Ramsey, welcome to the program.

- Well, Chris, thank you very much.

I appreciate locked in to be here with you all day.

- Mr. Ramsey, as you look back on the landscape for the last 12 months as we all have, we live this new reality, whatever it is, and now we're emerging into something different, what is job one for the UNC system board of governors?

- The job one for our system more to go and frankly the leadership throughout our system is to get our students back in classes.

We need to return back to normal.

And to do that we need to vaccinate as many students as we can.

(clears throat) We need to serve as a servant to the state of North Carolina helping to facilitate those vaccinations.

And to date, we've got 6% of our campuses that are doing that and we've administered 79,000 vaccinations not including UNC Health Care.

I think that the sooner we can get the students back in the college experience that they were hoping for and expecting, I think the better off we all will be.

So I think that's job one.

With that comes the safety of the students and the faculty.

We have to ensure everybody that comes back is safe.

We certainly don't want to endanger anyone, but at the same time we know that learning experience in the vastly different when they can get back in the classrooms.

- Aaron, question.

- That get back to school were so grateful that UNC Chapel Hill is in Chapel Hill.

Of course, the UNC system calls Chapel Hill it's home.

That push and pull between the board of governors and local trustees and the local decisions, how are you managing deciding when the board of governors needs to decide that this is the policy and when the local school needs to decide?

- Sure, that's a great question, Aaron.

And I think it gets missed some times because there's is gonna be some confusion about that on occasion.

In 1971 the legislature delegated the governance authority to the more governors for the entire UNC system including the North Carolina School of Science and Math which we're all very proud of as our 17th campus.

We were at that point or those boards of governors there were able to delegate authority to boards of trustees at the board of trustee level.

So all those board of trustee and members are both advisory to the chancellor and advisory to the board of governors.

Now they are a critical component of the governance of each and every campus.

And we're very dependent on them.

I don't think there's anything more important than the boots on the ground.

And those board of trustees are literally the boots on the ground there.

They need to know what's going on on campus better than any of us ever will.

I speak from experience.

I was eight years trustee at NC state so I had a little experience doing that.

And frankly, one of the things that I was frustrated about was I thought we didn't have enough of talk at the board of trustee level.

So since I've been on the board of governors, we've been going through our guts, we've been ensuring that we've been pushing down some authority to the boards of trustees or we thought was appropriate because I think they sometimes can make better decisions.

When it comes back to reopening the campuses, that really falls on the present and that falls on his authority with the chancellors.

Certainly he's gonna be working with public health officials, both state and federal to ensure we make good sound decisions but that decision does come back to the system office in Chapel Hill.

- Carl.

- Hey, Mr. Chairman, post COVID growth since this data came out and not too long ago that showed tremendous growth, both in the Carolinas, what pressure does that put on the system itself and for future iterations of higher education?

Does that put pressure on the community college system and technical college system and how do y'all blend that going forward?

Because sustainable growth, you can't keep building schools and adding dorm space.

What does the future look like?

- Thank you, Carl.

Y'all please call me Randy.

I'm not Mr. Chairman, I'm not Mr. Ramsey.

That makes me nervous.

I think someone is gonna arrest me or something.

So your question is great 'cause it's really quite broad in my opinion.

What's going on in higher education.

If we take the Carolinas data we know there's gonna be decline in 18 to 24 year olds as we move forward.

We are focused as a system in North Carolina and with South Carolina as our partners.

We can't ignore the fact that we have campuses very close to South Carolina and we're dependent on our brothers and sisters of the state of South Carolina to help our system meet these strong just like we need to help South Carolinas be strong.

But as we look towards that, Carl, I think we have to think about how we deliver education.

We have to think about how we are going to educate people for the ever changing job market and how we're gonna move more nimbly.

And I think that your comment about the community college in that is critical, it's a critical piece of that.

The community college system is much more nimble than we are.

When I was going through town hall listening in advance, listening to what the people of the state wrench then in the present for our system, one of the things I kept hearing over and over was the UNC system is too slow to make change to what industry or manufacturing or agriculture or computer science needs that we sometimes take four and five years to change the degree program and that was stunning to me.

And it was an eye opener.

In the same sentence one person said, the community college can do it in a matter of weeks sometimes.

We've got to become more nimble like the community college and through your points of how we can deliver that education is gonna be a critical component that we work very closely with the community college system of North Carolina and South Carolina to ensure that that's happened.

- Randy, thank you.

Let's pivot a little bit.

In the Carolinas no doubt we love our sports, basketball, sport fishing, football, golf for sure.

But the other thing is politics.

And sometimes politics in the Carolinas is turned into a bloodsport.

UNC board of governors has taken its share of pressure and controversy and criticism.

And as stated, one of your initiatives is to get better governance.

When you look at diversity and inclusion and especially coming out of what happened last year tragically and what we're learning about all of these governance issues now, how do you get the board of governors to a place where you would feel comfortable about having that balance that does represent the people of the old North state?

- Well, Chris, I appreciate that.

I think that we do need to concentrate.

We need to work hard on diversity and inclusion across our entire system.

I think if you look at the recent more trustee appointments that have gone across our system, we have to be very thoughtful about how we bring that diversity into our board of trustees.

And I think we did a much better job this time.

I've got to give our chair of that committee, David Powers and our governance committee, a lot of credit.

He worked countless hours on vetting trustees and making sure that they were interested in being involved at the university level.

We don't need to figure heads at each university.

We need people who are willing to go to work and understand that they are not perfect.

And if we are to thrive a hundred years from now we all have to continue to work together.

At the board of governor level I will tell you that we haven't got people from Wilmington to Coley and from Beaufort in Raleigh and Charlotte and Greensboro and simply the diverse background of each and every one of our governors is really quite amazing.

We come from different backgrounds that are all highly successful people in their own field and they all have very different views on things.

I tell you, we're a pretty spirited group.

I would invite you to come and participate in some of our meetings.

(clears throat) Excuse me.

That security group makes each other better.

And what I would say is that every wall of 24 members that I work with every day had one single goal and that is to make the University of North Carolina better and the way the people of our state in the Southeast better.

- Thank you.

I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Aaron, go ahead.

- I had question about funding.

One of the upsides that should come with political appointments to the board of governors is they should have pretty good political relationships to turn back towards their appointee and ask for good funding.

We're worried about some state reduction in revenue probably over the last few years but it seems like the state's funding is now pretty healthy.

Are you all gonna be asking for more resources?

Do you feel confident that the legislature is gonna support you in the way that you need to be supported?

- Thank you, Aaron.

First of all, I wanna thank the legislature.

But then it's thanking the taxpayers of North Carolina.

If we look across higher education across our country that the legislature and the taxpayers of North Carolina have stepped up from the very beginning to ensure that higher education was a priority for members of our state and across the Southeast or across our country and even world.

They recognize that the path to a better life is through higher education.

And for more than 200 years they've proven that, As we move forward in the funding, you're right.

More of the more controversial things I did was when the pandemic first started I asked the university to show us what it looked like with 25% reduction or 50% reduction in revenue.

I think that many people thought I was threatening legislature members but I wasn't.

Frankly, I was worried about auxiliaries which is where we took the largest hit.

That is something that we ignore, but is a very large part of each campus's budget, dining, housing, bookstores, people being on campus and generating revenue for us.

They're very big businesses in each and every one of them.

I think that our relationship with our legislature is very good.

I think they trust our boards.

I think they are pleased with the boards of trustees.

And we've asked for a lot here.

Anyone who wants to, it's a public document.

We've asked for nearly a billion dollars in R and R funding.

We're not looking for big, shiny objects.

We're looking for ways to fix what we have to a question earlier.

We can't continue to build bricks and mortar because we haven't done a good job fixing what is there?

The legislative discussions I've had are with leadership have been very positive about that.

They've been very positive about continuing to fund NC Promise which has been very successful in three of our campuses.

They seem very focused on trying to help us to exceed in some campuses that may have been overlooked over the last 50 or so years.

And I'm very encouraged.

I think that relationship is stronger than it's ever been.

And I don't think that's because of the political part of that.

I think it's because they're seeing that we have taken the job we've been given very seriously and we've been thoughtful about our leadership that we're choosing on our campuses and that we truly are trying to improve things and we're gonna be good stewards of the taxpayer's dollars.

- Carl, I'm gonna have to button in front of you here for a minute 'cause we're gonna run out of time and I wanna get to the boat building business 'cause we literally have about three and a half minutes left.

Randy, you've got a passion of course around education and higher education of the state but you've been building boats for 35 years.

And anybody that talks to yo about it can tell you that you love it, you love the communities, of course, Morehead City, Beauford, Harkers Island, Atlantic beach, et cetera, et cetera down in coastal North Carolina.

If you looked at your business now what is it telling you about the economic landscape in Eastern North Carolina and just in general?

- Well, if you look at our business today it would tell you that the economy is booming.

The boat industry across the nation is busier than we can be.

We can't deliver the products that people want to order from us.

We have several companies and one of our companies is a sales company.

And we're in four States and we can sell other people's lines of boats.

Yesterday we inquired one of our manufacturers about a boat and they said we can receive in February of 2024.

So that gives you an idea of the backlog.

We are facing issues though.

We're facing workforce issues.

Anybody I talked to across the state who's in manufacturing or is in service industries are really struggling for labor.

And not just skilled labor, but even unskilled labor.

Most of the people who work for our company come here unskilled and we train them in house.

I'm proud to say some of them become some of the most talented carpenters and mechanics I've ever seen.

So from that perspective I would say on the surface you would say things are very good.

I do wonder in our business sometimes if we're seeing some sort of false economy and not really seeing what's underlined here.

I can't help, but be concerned about inflation.

I can't help be concerned about increase in interest rates which could stifle the economic recovery we're seeing.

So all those things, I think as business leaders and as university leaders we need to be very cautious about.

We're seeing expansion in the boat business and that's a rare positive - We've got about 30 seconds left.

Do you see that this summer is gonna be a good summer for the coastal communities?

- It's gonna be outstanding.

Last year during the pandemic coastal communities broke all records in occupancy tax.

People wanted to come to the coast and we've seen it throughout the winter.

I think it's gonna be terrific here.

And so I'm gonna spend some time with them in the mountains.

(laughs) - Chairman Ramsey, I think we're lucky to have you in the Carolinas and thank you for your volunteerism.

Thank you for joining us.

Stay safe.

Happy summer.

Carl, nice to see you.

Aaron, always nice to see you.

Good luck to you all.

Until next week I'm Chris William.

We hope your business and your summer is good.

Goodnight.

- [Narrator] Major funding for Carolina Business Review provided by High Point University, Martin Marietta, Colonial Life, the Duke Endowment, Sonoco, Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

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