(2 of 11)
"When we need to...build a plant, say, in Jonesboro, [we] look at a 150-mile radius to the center of the market," says Markley. "We knew we needed a plant in the Tennessee-Arkansas-Missouri area. So with very detailed information, we contacted those states and gave them very specific details on what we needed... [And] based on that, the states compete."
Meanwhile, in Evansville the campaign for clean water goes on, and the citizens cope as best they can. Says Janie Watkins, who along with her husband runs the town's only grocery store: "If we take a bath, we don't wash clothes. If we wash clothes, you can't take a bath. Most people get a bath every day. We can't...You get [a bath] every two days or three days, you're lucky."
Christina Seward, mother of three small children, says her boys love to drink water. "But I don't have to tell them not to drink this water," she says. "The taste, the dirt--you wouldn't want to drink it. You put water in a glass, and you can see the dirt settle to the bottom. We don't know what's in it--we just know it's not safe."
Indeed, the Sewards' well was tested by the Arkansas Department of Health in 1996 and found to be contaminated with particles of fecal matter "too numerous to count." The Sewards use well water only to wash clothes, but not light-colored articles. The water turns "white things yellow," says Seward.
In order to drink, cook, bathe and wash, residents haul bottled water from nearby towns or load up on barrels from natural springs in the hills above Evansville. Since their campaign for water began, residents have appealed repeatedly to the state to provide a share of the $1.5 million project. "We've done everything they wanted us to do," says Kaye Trentham, who operates K.T.'s Cafe. "But we still don't have water."
The Evansvilles of America are growing in number as the job wars intensify. Since the 1980s, states have added one economic-incentive program after another to retain existing corporations and lure new ones. Even states that once refused to compete are reversing course. North Carolina, which had long shunned big-ticket deals, abruptly shifted gears last summer and enacted the Economic Opportunity Act of 1998. The first two beneficiaries:
--Federal Express, the global delivery service with headquarters in Memphis, Tenn., that had 1997 revenues of $11.5 billion, will receive $115 million in state tax concessions and other economic benefits to build a hub at Greensboro, N.C.
--Nucor, a company based in Charlotte, N.C., that operates steel mills in half a dozen states and had 1997 revenues of $4.2 billion, will receive $155 million in state economic assistance to build a mini-steel mill in Hertford County in the northeastern corner of the state.
Why has North Carolina joined in the great scramble to give away incentives? The same reason all the other combatants are in it: jobs. Or at least job announcements. As John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation (a Raleigh, N.C., public policy institute that advocates individual liberty, a free-market economy and limited government), put it, "Creating jobs is not the goal of these [economic-incentive] programs. The goal of these programs is to create job announcements."
And create them they do.