A full year to the day after Apple announced its second campus in Austin – a project North Carolina was widely reported to be close to landing – Gov. Roy Cooper’s administration says efforts to recruit the company are still “active.”
State officials used that designation to repeatedly refuse to disclose details on millions in potential incentives to lure the company to the Tar Heel State.
State law requires agencies to release at least some records of recruitment attempts when companies decide to go elsewhere. But administration officials maintain that the new Apple campus in Austin is separate and apart from the jobs they’re pursuing for North Carolina – an effort codenamed “Project Bear.”
It’s Apple, the state’s commerce chief says, that will determine how much longer the project will remain open, keeping the public in the dark… [Commerce Secretary Tony] Copeland said that the project will be closed “when Apple tells us it’s closed.”
“When Apple tells us it’s no longer an active project, and we jointly decide that there’s no prospect of this project moving forward, then we’ll release the records,” Copeland said before refusing to answer additional questions about the project.
MacDailyNews Take: More to come for Apple in North Carolina? Apple reportedly controls about 280 acres of Wake County land in Research Triangle Park.
Apple is likely to stay uncommitted to North Carolina for as long as the Legislature remains uncommitted to banning discrimination on the basis of LGBT status.
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