First Posted: 3/13/2015

LUMBERTON — Sanderson Farms could not have picked the industrial site near St. Pauls to invest more than $100 million for a complex where 1,100 people will work without a remnant of a golden age in Robeson County — tobacco.

The Golden LEAF Foundation, which was created with the use of money from the tobacco buyout, provided $500,000 to extend utilities to the industrial park.

Bo Biggs, who was appointed to Golden LEAF’s board of directors in 2014, said extending sewer lines to the site was a “crucial piece of infrastructure” needed to attract industries to the property.

“The due diligence by the Golden LEAF staff to choose this parcel of the many sites submitted for consideration for Golden LEAF’s limited funds is to be commended, as this once piece of row-crop farmland is now to become one of the largest job creation machines in the county,” Biggs said. “My hats off to all of the elected officials, economic execs, and to Sanderson Farms for turning this spec site into an economic engine.”

Sanderson Farms Inc. announced Thursday it would be building the chicken processing plant. The development will be part of a $139 million investment by the company that includes the new St. Pauls plant as well as upgrades to its feed mill in Kinston. Officials expect construction of the plant to begin this summer and be completed by September 2016.

J.R. Steigerwald, the town administrator for St. Pauls, said it would have been “impossible” for the town to get the site up to snuff without the Golden LEAF grant.

“The town didn’t have the wherewithal to run the sewer out there without a customer,” Steigerwald said.

The sewer grant was the second largest investment made by Golden LEAF in Robeson County, according to the foundation’s website, and was part of a Community Assistance Initiative designed to help revive communities, like Robeson, hit hard by a shrinking tobacco industry.

Tobacco was once Robeson County’s leading private industry, generating as much as $80 million a year in the early 1990s, and also creating jobs for support industries. But tobacco began a nosedive under the Clinton administration, and now is only about a $25 million a year industry in the county, with far fewer acres devoted to the crop.

Established under the Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act of 2004, the federal Tobacco Transition Payment Program, known as the tobacco buyout, ended the regulation of tobacco prices. The program was intended to help farmers transition to an economy without price supports or quotas, and since 2004 is estimated to have paid out about $10 billion.

Until the last of those checks were sent out in late 2014, Robeson County consistently received about $18 million from the buyout each year, according to the North Carolina Cooperative Extension in Robeson County.

The Golden LEAF Foundation was formed in 1999 and tasked with distributing half of North Carolina’s share of the buyout.

With the help of the $504,993 grant from Golden LEAF, sewer lines were extended to the St. Pauls Industrial Park, which is located about four miles west of the town, in 2010.

Golden LEAF has funded 1,280 grants, totaling more than $563 million, statewide. Its largest investment in Robeson County was a $1,158,000 grant to build a pre-treatment wastewater plant in the town of Pembroke that serves Trinity Foods.

Golden LEAF also contributed about $500,000 each towards Fairmont’s Heritage Center, a mobile medical clinic for Southeastern Regional Medical Center, and facilities for manufacturing training at Robeson Community College.