Artist rendering of $136.7 million science building being built on the N.C. State University campus.
N.C. State University picked multinational contractor Skanska to build the $136.7 million Integrative Sciences Building, marking one of the biggest UNC system projects of the year.
The 164,947-square foot building will be used to promote STEM teaching and research as part of the university’s efforts to expand science education. It will include classrooms, teaching and research labs, faculty spaces and a cafe.
Departments using the building will include chemistry, biochemistry and biotechnology research.
The buildingwill “revitalize the marquee Brickyard, one of the nine hallowed places on the north campus,” said Mark Balling, Skanska’s executive vice president for North Carolina and Virginia building operations, in a release. Richmond, Virginia-based Moseley Architects is the building designer.
The project is expected to be completed in September 2026.
Skanska, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden, has previously built several N.C. State structures, including Fitts-Woolard Hall; the Golden LEAF Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center; the James B. Hunt Jr. Library; and Engineering Building III at N.C. State.
An out-of-state bank has set its sights on the Carolinas, and its regional leader says there’s a lot for Huntington National Bank to like about its plans to open about 55 branches in North and South Carolina over the next five years.
First, both states rank in the top 10 for population and economic growth. That makes the region attractive to any financial services company, says Heath Campbell, Huntington’s Charlotte-based executive managing director of the Carolinas.
Then, he adds, “There’s a lot of disruption happening in North and South Carolina” in financial services. The former Truist executive declined to go into specifics about his former employs, but says the Columbus, Ohio-based company sees an opening here.
“We saw it as an opportunity to bring a culture-rich, people-first organization to the Carolinas and this was the right time to do it,” says Campbell, who until October had been president of the North Carolina West Region for Charlotte-based Truist, the nation’s sixth-largest bank with about $520 billion in assets.
While Campbell sidestepped questions about Truist, industry analysts and executives of rival lenders have cited its leadership departures and other changes as creating business opportunities. Truist this year closed about 80 of its approximately 2,000 branches and has significantly changed its senior management as part of a $750 million cost-cutting effort.
Huntington, the nation’s 24th largest bank, operates about 970 branches in 11 states. Charlotte-based Bank of America, the nation’s second-largest bank, has more than $3.2 trillion in assets. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, which has a large presence in Charlotte, and ranks third nationally, has more than $1.7 trillion in assets.
Huntington National’s addition of bank branches will represent a $240 million investment, and adding 350 workers to the 200-plus employees in the two states, he says. Five branches will come by 2025, with the first coming in either December or January at a former First Third Bank branch in Charlotte’s SouthPark neighborhood. Other branches will be in Raleigh and Winston-Salem, and Charleston and Spartanburg areas of South Carolina.
Heath Campbell
The divide between how many jobs and branches will go to either state hasn’t been nailed down, says Campbell, adding that it will roughly be determined by the population size and economic development occurring in the two states. North Carolina has about 10.7 million residents, about twice as many as South Carolina.
Huntington ranks second in North Carolina for Small Business Administration loans, says Campbell. Having people see brick-and-mortar bank branches will raise its profile in the two states, he says. Last year, Huntington opened a regional headquarters in Charlotte had more than 40 employees in the center city.
“What I’ve found being a part of Huntington is a lot of similarities and familiarities with Midwest values being a real nice complement to Southern hospitality,” he says.
“If we earn the trust of our constituents each and every day I like our chances of being successful in the long run,” he adds.
Campbell also believes Huntington National has another advantage of locating in North Carolina, especially banking-heavy Charlotte when it comes to filling jobs. “I believe there’s available talent that we can welcome into the Huntington culture from North and South Carolina,” he says.
Part of the region’s growth, is people wanting to move to the Carolinas, adds Ian Wyatt, a director of economics for Huntington, who previously worked for BofA in Charlotte.
Opening branches in the two states will mean Huntington providing its full services to the area, which includes insurance, wealth management and commercial and business banking. Huntington’s nearest retail branches are in West Virginia, with most of its offices spread from Ohio to Minnesota.
The types of branches Huntington will open will be determined by AI-driven data on traffic patterns, demographic trends, economic activity, says Campbell.
“We have a lot more data to make more informed decisions than we would have if we were building these branches 20 years ago,” he says.
Raleigh software firm ShareFile has been acquired again. Progress Software Corp., a provider of application development and infrastructure software, is buying the homegrown business unit of Cloud Software Group Inc. The $875 million deal, coming in a combination of cash and Progress Software’s existing revolving credit facility, is expected to close by the end of November.
After two weeks of delays, the ambitious Polaris Dawn space mission, led by billionaire Jared Isaacman and in collaboration with SpaceX, launched Tuesday morning. The four-person civilian crew launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. One crew member is Duke University graduate Anna Menon, who earned her Master’s in biomedical engineering in 2010.
The highest courts in two states ruled differently on efforts by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be removed from their presidential ballots, with a divided North Carolina Supreme Court affirming he should be omitted and the Michigan Supreme Court reversing a lower court decision and keeping him on. North Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled 4-3 affirming omission.
Construction has finished on the largest industrial building in the city of High Point. The Ecolab Customer Care Center, which spans 1,058,957 square feet of space at 1101 Gallimore Dairy Road, began operations in late July. It distributes cleaning and sanitizing products that are made at Ecolab’s nearby Kay Chemical Co. division in Greensboro to customers.
Bank of America is pledging to pay its bank tellers and other hourly workers at least $24 per hour starting in October. The Charlotte-based bank says that this pay raise, from $23 per hour currently, will affect “thousands” of its 212,000 employees. The wage increase will particularly affect tellers and other customer-facing employees, such as call-center workers.
Kyowa Kirin, Inc., an affiliate of Kyowa Kirin Co., Ltd., a global specialty pharmaceutical company based in Japan, broke ground on a state-of-the-art pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Sanford. It represents an investment of up to $530 million to build the 171,700-square-foot, two-reactor facility that will accelerate the company’s production of therapies for patients with rare diseases.
The Great Smoky Cannabis Company — selling marijuana, gummies, cannabis-infused drinks and more — opens its doors on Saturday. The retail outlet will be North Carolina’s first and only place for adults to legally purchase weed. It promises to be a significant revenue stream for the Eastern Band of Cherokee, which has had financial success with its casinos.
Cedar Fair, which owns Carowinds, will merge with Six Flags. The combined company will be headquartered in Charlotte.
North Carolina hasn’t started marketing it yet, but our state is arguably the theme park capital of the world, after this summer’s merger of the Six Flags and Cedar Fair companies prompted a headquarters move to Charlotte.
Take that, Mickey Mouse! Just kidding. Disney Parks is much bigger, but the new Tar Heel public company has more sites.
Six Flags Entertainment is now the “largest and the most diverse amusement park operator” with 27 amusement parks, 15 water parks and nine resort properties in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, the company says. The sole Tar Heel entry is Carowinds and Carolina Harbor in Charlotte, which had been a Cedar Fair operation.
The company reported some interesting information in a recent SEC filing of a presentation for investors. Highlights include:
250 million people live within 100 miles of Six Flags’ parks.
Attendance at the 42 parks totaled 49 million in the 2023 fiscal year, with revenue of $4.3 billion and operating profit of $1.2 billion.
It has sold 7.6 million season passes; holders make up more than half of the parks’ attendees.
Passholders pay an average of $115 at Cedar Fair versus $79 at Six Flags, reflecting the widely held view among park aficionados that Cedar Fair has better parks and superior leadership. “Analysts and fans consider Cedar Fair a stronger manager of day-to-day park operations than Six Flags,” CNN reported in July.
Cedar Fair’s passholders average nearly five visits a year and renew at a 28% clip, compared with three visits and an 18% renewal rate at Six Flags.
At the merger, Cedar Fair holders controlled 51% of the new company, and its CEO, Richard Zimmerman, moved to Charlotte to lead the business. The merged company chose the Six Flags name, though its shares had declined about 40% over the past five years. The market cap is about $4 billion. Cedar Fair had been based in Sandusky Ohio, while Six Flags’ corporate office was in Arlington, Texas.
That trend has continued since the July 1: Shares closed at $39.90 Tuesday, down from about $53 on the merger date. Along with Disney and other park operators, Six Flags reported relatively weak results this summer. Executives blamed financial pressures facing lower-income consumers.
But Zimmerman’s team plans to turn things around, pledging the merger will create $200 million in savings over the next three years. They expect a “recovery of 10 million-plus visits at legacy Six Flags parks” through various improvements, according to the investor presentation.
Indeed, Six Flags executives know changes are needed. In 2022, former Six Flags CEO Selim Bassoulsaid that its parks had turned into “cheap day care centers” for teenagers. He also said the company hoped to “migrate…a little bit from what I call the Kmart, Walmart to maybe the Target customer.” He raised Six Flags’ prices, which hurt attendance. Bassoul is now the company’s executive chairman.
Among the first changes Zimmerman announced this summer were a “chaperone policy at selected Six Flags parks to ensure we maintain a family friendly environment while increasing the deal with parents who are the decision-makers and who have the deeper share of wallet,” he told investors. The company also removed an unpopular surcharge on in-park purchases at the Six Flags parks.
“The merger’s most attractive and important growth opportunity, however, is returning legacy Six Flags parks to their historical levels of attendance,” Zimmerman said.
Winston-Salem’s Front Street Capital and Atlanta-based developer Carter plan to break ground in December on an $150 million project that will put retail, residential and office space near Wake Forest University’s football stadium and baseball park.
Spanning 100 acres, The Grounds will draw upon the more than 750,000 people who attend sports, concerts and other events in the Deacon Boulevard area annually, Front Street and Carter said in a release. The project will be near the Allegacy Federal Credit Union Stadium, David F. Couch Ballpark, the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Wake Forest Tennis Center and Winston-Salem Fairgrounds & Arena.
Front Street and Carter are partnering with the city of Winston-Salem and the university on the project. The Grounds site is about three miles north of downtown Winston-Salem and a miles south of the main Wake Forest campus.
The combination “shows that Winston-Salem is ready for a project of this scale,’’ said Coleman Team, Front Street’s president and managing partner. His family business, led by Robin Team, has become a leading developer in the city.
The Grounds’ first phase will include a pedestrian-friendly 40,000-square-foot retail village, featuring a central lawn adjacent to a new Deacon Walk serving as a gateway to the football stadium.
Loft-style residential units will be located above restaurants, boutiques and other retail space, adding activity when events aren’t underway. A 240-unit residential community is also planned, with pedestrian access to the central plaza area.
The university plans to lease a 100,000-square-foot office planned for the site, the statement said.
“By creating a dynamic place that blends residential, commercial, athletic stadiums, and welcoming public gathering spaces, we are reimagining the University’s role as a community partner,” Wake Forest University President Susan Wente said in the release.
A state grant totaling $35 million will pay for infrastructure improvements, including roadwork, the restoration of Silas Creek and construction of a paved walking trail connecting to venues in The Grounds.
Wake Forest University enrolls about 9,100 students, including nearly 5,500 undergraduates at the Winston-Salem campus. It’s among the city’s major employers with nearly 7,500 faculty and staff.
The university is also expanding in Charlotte, where it is partnering with Atrium Health on a new medical school campus to complement the Winston-Salem school. It also offers a variety of graduate-level programs in the Queen City.
