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Georgia offered $60M, airport, key demographics

Learn more about Duluth, where NCR is moving its headquarters to in Georgia.

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By Thomas Gnau, Staff Writer Updated 2:05 AM Wednesday, June 3, 2009

ATLANTA - A large international airport, lots of young, educated people and at least $60 million.

In its barest contours, those were the essentials of the offer Georgia government presented to NCR Corp., the offer the drew NCR’s corporate headquarters to Duluth, Ga. from Dayton, the city NCR has called home for 125 years.

Persuading NCR Corp. to shift its headquarters to Georgia wasn’t a “poaching exercise,” a spokesman for Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue said Tuesday June 2.

Instead it was a matter of treating NCR like a “customer,” said Bert Brantley, communications director for Perdue.

And the exercise itself was months in the making, he acknowledged.

“Months and months and months, when you’re talking about identifying what the company was looking for and what it needed,” Brantley said.

Ohio officials have said NCR leaders never gave them the opportunity to retain or expand NCR’s presence in the Buckeye State.

In a phone interview Tuesday before Perdue formally announced NCR’s headquarters move to Duluth Ga., Brantley painted a picture of a state government working carefully with a Fortune 500 company in another state.

Perdue and Bill Nuti, NCR’s chief executive, stayed in close contact after NCR announced in October 2008 the move of its Worldwide Customer Services unit to Peachtree City, Ga., Brantley said.

That move involved at the time pulling just 50 jobs from Dayton and the creation of 900 jobs total. At the time, an NCR spokeswoman said Dayton would remain NCR’s home.

But Perdue and Georgia’s economic development leaders didn’t want to stop with the 2008 expansion.

“We believe in service after the sale,” Brantley said.

He said NCR is exactly the kind of company states wish to attract.

“We would be working with them very likely for months after the October announcement,” he said.

Georgia offered a “megatax” credit worth more than $56 million based on the creation of 2,166 jobs total. In addition, this year, the state “tweaked” a total payroll credit to help persuade companies to move higher paying jobs to Georgia, Brantley said.

“What we are trying to do is incentivize a certain type of project,” he said.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland spoke with Nuti Monday evening and after that conversation produced an incentives package worth up to $31.1 million.

“It’s always just an unfortunate side of these things,” Brantley said of the Dayton area’s loss. NCR has about 1,300 employees in Dayton.

Brantley said he didn’t know if Strickland and Perdue had spoken over the phone about NCR’s plans. He said such a conversation would be “unusual.”

Brantley also said he didn’t know whether NCR first approached Georgia government or vice versa.

Finally, he noted that at least three of NCR’s key customers are in the Atlanta area — Delta Air Line, Home Depot and Sun Trust, an NCR ATM customer.

Asked about the chronology of NCR’s dealings with Georgia, an NCR spokesman wanted questions in writing.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2390 or tgnau@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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