UNC-Chapel Hill:
At Carolina North, UNC-Chapel Hill will find room to grow in new directions while preserving the special qualities of main campus. Carolina North will be an unsurpassed setting for teaching and learning, and a place where our faculty and students can engage with business and government to address some of society's most pressing needs. We will create a place where Carolina scientists can nurture their inventions, moving them out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. And we will create a setting for service, for reaching out to our communities and beyond. For example, one of the initial projects envisioned for Carolina North is First School, an innovative laboratory for early childhood education. First School, a partnership between our Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro public schools, will be a working school that serves the community.
The excellence of our research programs attracts intellectual talent and new funding, yielding valuable innovations and attracting jobs and economic activity. But these thriving enterprises need room to grow, and they need a place where they can work side-by-side with partners in state and federal government, and in the private sector. We already have programs ready and waiting for first phase of Carolina North. For example, new facilities for the School of Pharmacy would foster biomedical and pharmaceutical advances, cultivate basic science and intellectual property, and help us recruit and retain outstanding scientists. All of this will add up to innovations that improve health care for people everywhere.
Because we will soon run out of room on main campus, some of our best academic programs are forced into makeshift facilities, and we pay a high price for leasing facilities off campus. The School of Public Health, for example, now leases approximately 50,000 square feet at a cost of $900,000 a year. The leasing costs alone would, over time, easily pay for new facilities for the School at Carolina North. In our academic research centers and institutes, many of which are scattered among inadequate facilities on- and off-campus, the cost in human productivity is even greater, because scientists work best in close collaboration. At Carolina North, scholars and scientists with common interests will mingle, accelerating the exchange of knowledge and ideas.
Carolina North will allow us to blend, in one setting, all of the ingredients of creative innovation. It's a place where a diverse community of people can live, learn, and work together in a mixed-use development designed to inspire and support their creative endeavors. Carolina North will provide housing for university employees, including support staff, and it will situate that housing near parks and green space in compact, high-density neighborhoods that avoid suburban sprawl.
As employment in North Carolina's traditional industries has declined, the State has turned to us for help building a new, knowledge-based economy. Carolina North will help us engage businesses, institutions, and citizens in new ventures that will lead to economic growth and improvements in quality of life. When it is fully built, Carolina North will create over 7,500 permanent jobs, equivalent to $433 million in annual salary and other personal income and $600 million in annual business revenue. In addition, Carolina North is expected to generate approximately $48 million in recurring tax revenue for the local government and the State. But the greatest economic impact of Carolina North will be its research-based innovations, and the value of those is beyond estimation.
