The U.S. military takes pride in training soldiers for life after service. And the North Carolina Military Business Center works to make sure that talent stays in the state long after active duty is over.

The program is a collaboration between the state’s com­munity college system and the business community. It became fully operational in 2005, creating a network of 10 satellite offices on campuses around the state, including Coastal Carolina Community College in Jacksonville.

The organization has also gotten involved with the state’s 53 Small Business Centers to set up training programs, says Scott Dorney, executive director of the North Carolina Military Business Center.

“We want to provide the missing link between companies in North Carolina and winning federal opportunities from a business approach. It’s a very tactical type of operation,” Dorney says.

The NCMBC works with former military personnel as they transition to civilian life. By keeping this talent pool local, the hope is that the state’s business community will be more competitive in landing government contracts.

To further this goal, the NCMBC has created www.MatchForce.org, a Web site that connects the military and civilian worlds with regard to the workplace and job opportunities. While it’s still fairly new, Dorney says the service already is having the results its creators envisioned.

“It’s the online version of what our business development team does across the state in their locations,” he says. “It’s leveraging what we’ve already got, transitioning that military workforce with its terrific skills to our local employers, then engaging those employers to create and market opportunities. We want to keep those highly skilled people in-state because we’ll grow jobs more effectively that way.”

Having former military personnel on staff can seal the deal for both in-state work and contract projects elsewhere.

A major focus for the NCMBC is military construction, which is expected to be between $5 billion and $7 billion in North Carolina alone over the next five years, Dorney says.

“Our interest is to help North Carolina companies position themselves to compete and win those opportunities, both as prime contractors and subcontractors,” he says.

While the state’s small business centers offer a compre­hensive array of services, and other organizations such as the North Carolina Military Foundation work to procure more defense-related business for the state, Dorney says the NCMBC will play a vital role in growing this economic sector as well.

“We have a good presence on the ground and a very effective Web site, and now we’re going to take the next step, which is to connect opportunities with companies,” he says. “When they need help understanding a solicitation or bid proposal, we’re on the ground to provide that. We have areas of great capacity in North Carolina, so we’re putting extra effort into turning those opportunities into economic growth.”

A strong workforce and plenty of room for expansion recently helped Jacksonville double the size of one of its major industries.

Mine Safety Appliances Co., a manu­facturer of respirators, gas-detection instruments, fire helmets, body armor and other protective devices, supplies safety workers throughout the United States and around the world.

The Pittsburgh-based company has been looking at consolidating its U.S. operations in recent years, and last year chose its Jacksonville plant as an expansion location. It closed its Clifton, N.J., plant and shifted its fire-helmet manufacturing operations to Jacksonville, immediately doubling the local plant’s workforce, says Joey Carter, MSA plant manager.

“We now have about 380 total employees, and we were at around 190 before the announcement,” Carter says. “We had an extremely busy 2007 with all of that going on.”

MSA’s Jacksonville plant builds air-purifying respiratory protection products, in addition to assembling and building cartridges and the respirators them­selves. Inner-suspension materials for Canadian military helmets also are produced there, along with lens attach­ments and outserts for gas masks used by the U.S. military. With the Clifton integration, leather and plastic fire helmets are now in production.

A pretty lengthy list of products, to be sure, but the Jacksonville facility is around 105,000 square feet and had a lot of unused space. Once the new product lines came in, it was just a matter of integrating all of the production areas.

“We had to move some electrical and air lines and bring in a couple of additional pieces of equipment, but we didn’t have to do any major structural changes,” Carter says. “It took awhile to get it all reconfigured, but everything’s in place now.”

A few of the New Jersey employees chose to relocate to Jacksonville, but the vast majority of new workers came from the area. In fact, the deep manufacturing labor pool in Onslow County was another contributing factor to MSA’s decision to move the product line to the Jacksonville plant.

“A huge benefit to us over the years has been our relationship with Coastal Carolina Community College,” Carter says. “They have really been there for us in terms of specialized training on the professional and production employee level. We were in dire need of finding good, trained industrial sewers, and they worked with temp agencies and basically developed a program to create our own trained sewers.”

The speed with which the plant was able to bring trained workers online has meant a quick turnaround on orders that were pending during the transition, and that’s something that has made MSA officials very happy.

“They knew we’ve had success inte­grating processes into our plant over the years, thanks to the community college,” Carter says. “We’ve gotten caught up and have things off back order on those lines. We’re rocking and rolling here now.”

They may not make bacon at Gulfstream Steel & Supply’s facility anymore, but the steel service center is helping Onslow County bring home plenty of it.

Family-owned Gulfstream relocated to the county in 2004, when it purchased the shuttered Thorn Apple Valley meat-processing plant in Holly Ridge.

Gulfstream, which sells steel to military and government agencies as well as private vendors, set about implementing an adaptive reuse of the building, which now has several tenants and soon will be the anchor of a 140-acre business park.

“We bought it for the warehouse space, but we began to see a need for more commercial and industrial space in the area,” says Bernie Rollins, co-owner of Gulfstream Steel & Supply. “We leased out parts of our building to other contractors and then decided to start looking at expanding onto the land that we purchased along with the building.”

Gulfstream’s tenants to date include a hard­woods importer, powder-coating company, cable contractor and a builder of tugboats, dredges and barges. The 160,000-square-foot building was easily adapted to a wide variety of uses and will serve as the template for what will be known as Camp Davis Industrial Park.

As the name implies, the park will recognize the area’s history as a military testing site. Camp Davis was an anti-aircraft training camp, and its infrastructure system will be used in the development.

“All the roads and concrete runways are still out here,” Rollins says. “We had about 1 acre of wetlands that had to be evaluated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but the city of Holly Ridge and the county have been great about expanding sewer capacity and approving hookups for us. They have been incredibly receptive to work with.”

The new park is being laid out by Coastal Site Design out of Wilmington and will have nine initial buildings, each totaling around 2,000 square feet. When complete, the park will feature about 70 structures.

“The town doesn’t have the sewer and power capacity for a large park right now, and we can’t afford to put it up all at one time, so we’re going to start with a few, rent those out and create the income to go from there,” he says. “We’re in a great central location, so that’s a benefit to us as well.”

The decision to go into property development has been a big one for Gulfstream, but Rollins says the local support has made the process much simpler.

“When we moved here they sent a lot of people our way,” he says. “The economic-development people really try to find a fit in the county for businesses looking for locations, and they’ve been great about helping us. This area is headed for growth, and we’ve been able to take advantage of that.”

In the late 1990s, Jacksonville decom­missioned its Wilson Bay wastewater treatment plant. Nothing new in that – governments take buildings offline all the time. It’s what happened next that’s really interesting.

With input from the community, the county redeveloped the plant and its surrounding acreage as Sturgeon City, a bustling center for aquatic education and research. The visionary project has taken what could have been a neglected blight on the local landscape and turned it into a center for research, education and recreation.

“This whole process began with the Wilson Bay Initiative, which got started when Jacksonville closed the plant,” says J.P. McCann, executive director of Sturgeon City.
“After the plant was relocated, they needed to bring the habitat back to what it was before all the river discharge – the city really wanted to right that wrong. The com­munity wanted to transform the site and evolve to a more progressive use for public recreation and education.”

The 26-acre site has been in near-constant development ever since. A public park contains an amphitheater, shelters, walking paths, boardwalks and a playground. A renovated waste-treatment building contains applied science research programs coordinated in tandem with North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.

Fish, native oysters and salt marsh grasses are being grown on site, as well as submerged aquatic vegetation that will be used in restoration projects throughout the area.

There also is a strong education component on site, with summer workshops for teachers and students, including youth institutes for high school students.

In fact, as it continues to grow and evolve, the uses for Sturgeon City are only limited by space – and even that’s being addressed.

“Part of the challenge is our build­ing capacity,” McCann says. “We are working on more space for programs and other resources on site. We’ve been working on getting Riverworks, our civic and environmental education center, planned.”

When built, Riverworks will expand the programs already in place at Sturgeon City, including more research on the park’s namesake and other aquatic life that abandoned the area or died out during the years of waste discharge.

In the meantime, however, the existing park and study centers have not only become tourist destinations but also economic drivers for the area.

“We’re getting signage that shows our part of the Civil War trail,” McCann says. “We’re also working on some eco-signage with the county and doing tours along those routes – interpretive tours that talk about natural science, the cultural history of the area. We also have a lot of boat use and fishing here on the weekends, so we’re developing a recreational component for water access and water-related activity. We even have future plans for putting a floating dock out and renting canoes and kayaks.”

Economic development efforts often are spread across so many market sectors that they get watered down and become ineffective.

Not so at the Jacksonville-Onslow Economic Development Office, thanks to a new study that used comprehen­sive data to target specific industries for growth and expansion within the county.

Local business leaders were aware of the steady pool of trained personnel transitioning into the area from Camp Lejeune and New River Air Station every year. However, they knew more data was needed to accurately evaluate all of the county’s resources.

“We knew we had a good nucleus of skilled people, but we didn’t know the depth and breadth of it,” says Jim Reichardt, director of economic devel­opment for the Jacksonville-Onslow Economic Development Office. “We knew we couldn’t afford a shotgun approach to marketing to new businesses, but rather we needed an intelligent guess as to what types of businesses would have the greatest potential for locating here.”

Business Facility Planning Consult­ants of Atlanta put together a strategic economic analysis and workforce inven­tory, as well as a strategic marketing plan, for the county. Those reports were completed in January 2008 and show six major industries that would find success in the area: military and civilian transportation equipment; communication equipment; high-end back-office operations; inbound logis­tics centers; aircraft maintenance; and boat manufacturing and maintenance.

“They looked at a typical profile of those companies in terms of wages, benefits, building requirements, utility usage and more, then compared that to what we have available in Onslow County,” Reichardt explains. “It was quite an interesting exercise, and we were able to demonstrate that when you take the wages and capital costs, and the costs of doing business, in each category, they can realize a tremendous savings operating here.”

Data in hand, Reichardt and other county officials now are advertising to those specific industries, trying to identify the appropriate companies to target. Once companies looking to expand and/or relocate are found, then the numbers will come into play during meetings and site visits.

Some of the marketing will focus on the obvious, such as the county’s abun­dance of greenfield sites, as well as available buildings that will be coming online under a planned spec-building program. Then the county can bring out its big guns, which include the deep pool of workers as well as the ability to develop workforce-training programs.

“We’ll be giving them some business reasons why they can be successful here,” Reichardt says. “Our huge asset is our workforce. We have a lot of transitioning military people and their spouses, people who are highly skilled, self-motivated and with a strong work ethic. We believe we can attract more than our fair share of those manufacturers who are looking to continue operating in the United States.

“Our workforce is easy to market because these folks have high visibility,” he adds. “But we’re also one of the last great areas on the East Coast that’s not overdeveloped. We’ve got tremendous support from the business community here, now we’ve just got to get out there and make it happen.”