Currently we have four of these Business and Technology centers. Last year they developed 200 jobs in these highly distressed areas. The Legislature has a bill being considered this session to award us up to $2 million to create four more business and technology centers -- we call them "technology lighthouses." And they're in the most distressed areas on the borders of our state. If you look around our state and other states some of the most distressed counties are on the borders. They are further from the center of power, of government. And second, half of their economic catchment area, their economic model, is gone. And many times they have two sets of laws that affect their operations and their economy. They have two sets of taxes, usually two sets of education laws that affect the students in their region, two sets of university regulations, two sets of community college regulations.
Polk County, N.C., is on the border with South Carolina. It's a small county, and because North Carolina increased the community college fees for out-of-state students, they lost a lot of their South Carolina students, and as a result, they don't have enough capacity in their number of citizens in their county, now, to get technology specific for-credit courses.
Half the citizens in that county are in a LATA [Local Access and Transport Area -- a region covered by one or more local telephone carriers] in another state -- in South Carolina. So when you are here, you are required to pay long distance across the LATA to get to citizens in your own state. You are being routed out of the state and then back in to get to here. So we've gotten some foundation money to work on what we are going to call "Technology Enterprise Zones." And draw the zone across two states -- half in this state and half in that -- and see if we can't get the legislatures to allow a six-to-10 year harmonization of the regulatory laws, regulations in that area, and allow them to work together to go after grants at the federal level. With two states you'll pick up extra congressmen, you'll pick up extra senators, and you'll help that area.
It's really pretty sad to see these distressed areas affected by cross-border concerns and now even those areas are more distressed with the loss of textile and furniture jobs. And we can show you these areas on our South Carolina border, on our Tennessee border, and our Virginia border as well as the Georgia border. We're bordered by four states, because Georgia comes in there at the corner also. The people in that area are 350 miles from Raleigh. They get more information from Georgia and Tennessee than they get from North Carolina. And there is a technology center there called the Tri-County Technology Center. And it's incredible what they've done. These business and tech centers in the most distressed counties last year created 200 jobs, and these jobs are predominantly related to technology. We try to "tech-up" the whole region around the technology center, the lighthouse, the one in the mountains in Allegheny, it manages the technology for the schools, for the county government, for the city governments, for the regional hospital, for the regional libraries. It then aggregates all those tech needs, creates positions, and goes out and hires back kids -- who've graduated and had to move somewhere else -- to come back into the community and have a job.
It has energized them so much, that they've learned they can create new things. In a 42,000 square foot shut-down cotton mill, with a community college in one end teaching the technical training courses to students -- the community college comes over from Wilkes County, because Allegheny doesn't have a community college of its own. In the other end of the Business and Technology Center is a job-link facility, and in the center is the 25,000 square-foot facility that deals with the technology resources for the whole community. And they work across the Virginia border. They had a CPA firm over in Virginia whose information systems crashed -- it's an online auditing firm -- and they couldn't get anybody out from Richmond or anywhere else, and they were down two days, and it was costing them a fortune. Somebody said "why don't you call the Business and Tech Center over in Allegheny?" So they called, and the Tech Center staff went over and had them up in two hours, and [the CPA firm] gave them a $17,000 contract to keep them up and running for the next year.
When we were up there last month for the site visit, we went over to Virginia to eat dinner and the bed and breakfast there told us they had a wine merchant from Sparta, N.C., they wanted to come over and do a wine tasting. They're eight miles away, and the guy couldn't come, because he'd have to pay $1,000 to Virginia in taxes to come over and do that. Well, he's not going to be able to make $1,000. So they are the next area that wants to work on this cross-border effort. We're going to test this out, and we've got a legislator in North Carolina who said he'd chair it -- a co-chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee -- So we're really excited about doing this. We just got the money from a foundation, and we're going to invite in the folks from Virginia, like Deputy Secretary of Technology Eugene Huang from Virginia, and a couple of legislators from Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina, so they can sit with us and if this pilot works with South Carolina, we want to re-create it in three other places. Then we'd have Virginia and Tennessee and Georgia with us. If you get four states, you can really do some things with members of your congressional delegation to help work with these distressed border areas with some federal programs.
