A $60 million award from the Golden LEAF Foundation will pay for the construction of water and sewer infrastructure for the JetZero factory planned for Piedmont Triad International Airport.
Almost $2 billion in state and local economic incentives are pledged to Long Beach, California-based aviation startup JetZero. It said last week it’s going to invest $4.7 billion and eventually employ 14,564 workers in next-generation jet assembly operations at the Greensboro airport.
That’s the largest job commitment in state history, Gov. Josh Stein said in announcing JetZero’s selection of Greensboro. As it prepares for Boom Supersonic and Marshall USA to commence operations, PTI beat out 25 sites in 17 states – including another finalist, Huntsville, Alabama.
The Golden LEAF award is based upon JetZero fulfilling its pledge of jobs and wages, according to Kasey Ginsberg, vice president and chief of staff for the Rocky Mount-based organization. The release of funds is tied to the company achieving certain milestones, which are yet to be finalized. Part of the agreement will require JetZero to repay a portion of the Golden LEAF funds if the company does not meet job creation and capital investment goals.
In back-to-back meetings last Thursday, the foundation, the state’s Economic Investment Committee, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners and the Greensboro City Council approved incentives for the project. They totaled $1.16 billion from the state and $784.7 million from the county and the city. A large portion of the local incentives will be property taxes JetZero won’t pay.
Formed in 1999 with proceeds from the national settlement with tobacco companies, Golden LEAF has funded 2,338 projects totaling $1.3 billion, mostly in rural, tobacco-dependent, and economically distressed communities. The fund had assets of $1.4 billion as of June 30, 2024, and net investment income of almost $160 million last fiscal year.
As they decided on JetZero incentives, state Commerce Secretary Lee Lilley says, economic recruiters were mindful that two other recipients of economic incentives – Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast and Durham semiconductor supplier Wolfspeed – are struggling to live up to expectations.
VinFast has twice delayed the startup of its Chatham County factory since 2022 when the state secured the project with the potential for 7,500 jobs in 2022. As it mulls Chapter 11 bankruptcy to restructure its debt, Wolfspeed is laying off more than a third of the workers at its new factory, also located in Chatham County.
“It certainly affects the way that we approach any incentive program,” Lilley said in an interview after the JetZero announcement. Performance requirements in programs enacted by state lawmakers “give us a lot of downside risk abatement” in the event that projects backed by incentives don’t “work out exactly like you planned.”
“I still believe in those two companies; I think they’re going to come back around,” Lilley says. “But if they don’t — or if any project doesn’t — we’ve got the performance-based element of the incentives.”
In the case of JetZero, he said, the state, like the foundation, “is investing in public infrastructure at this airport. And that infrastructure is going to serve the public no matter what happens.”
JetZero joins Boom Supersonic at the Greensboro airport as an unproven startup. “They’re in innovation – that’s a different way to put it,” Lilley said. “The state of North Carolina has had good success with partners who are very well established, and we’ve had good, successful partners who are right at the beginning.”
When state recruiters are considering prospects, “whether it’s Toyota or JetZero, we do a lot of due diligence on these projects,” Lilley said. “We look at financials; we talk to other players in the industry.
“We talked to the United States Air Force, which invested $235 million” in JetZero, he said. “We want to know, do you think this is really going to work? Do you think this project is legit? Do you think we’re going to be wise to be a partner here? And in all these cases, I think what we’ve landed on is we think, yes, this is a project that will work.”
