THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 26, 1995 TAG: 9505260512
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, N.C. LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
The Northeast N.C. Economic Development Commission, which has been slow to spend money in the past, reversed the trend Wednesday and approved a $200,000 grant to help promote the Babe Ruth World Series in Dare County next year.
It was the largest funding approved so far for any one of the 16 commission counties in the Albemarle.
Originally, the commission had planned to vote on only a $75,000 grant for the baseball promotion, which involves 900,000 teenagers worldwide. But after Ray Hollowell, a Manteo developer and Dare County member of the commission, described the national attention the games would bring to northeastern North Carolina, the ante was raised to $200,000.
The Babe Ruth World Series will be played over eight days in Manteo beginning in July 1996. Dozens of regional teams will be represented and the ballplayers - limited to a 17- to 18-year age group - will appear on national television.
``The money we got today will pay for that television prime time and there is no better way to market our part of North Carolina,'' said Hollowell.
The promotion plans for the Babe Ruth World Series will annually attract as much attention as the Little League championship games in Williamsport Pa., Hollowell said.
No one was sure what would happen when the vote came. There had been grumbling about allocating so much money to any one county within the commmission - and particularly Dare County, which is considered a fat cat among some of the more rural enclaves away from the coast.
But when the vote was tallied it was a surprising 11-2 in favor of going into the baseball business.
A few minutes before the ballot, Watts Carr, head of the state Partnership for Economic Development, and Commerce Secretary Davis Phillips' representative on the commission, warned that the General Assembly was preparing to cut pump-priming funds.
``There is a feeling in both the house and senate that there will be a 20 percent reduction in the $1,250,000 funding expected for this commission for 1995-1996,'' Carr said.
He estimated next year's General Assembly grant for the commission could be as little as $1,036,921.
In this fiscal year, the pump-primers have only spent $509,000 of the more than $2 million approved by the legislators.
Carr also told the group that former Sen. Terry Sanford, now a practicing lawyer in Durham, will represent an organization that is interested in supplying high-speed ferries to carry tourists between communities on the Albemarle's sounds and rivers.
Bunny Sanders, head of the tourist division of the Economic Commission, has told the group that she hoped to have at least one of the boats as a demonstrator later this summer.
Commission members tangled briefly over whether local governments should approve projects funded by the group. Two separate sets of criteria, one for the tourist division and one for the main economic commission, were finally agreed upon.
Neither set of guidelines required local government approval. by CNB