The North Carolina Department of Commerce’s Economic Investment Committee (NCEIC) ended yet another Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG) on Tuesday after a Durham firm said it couldn’t create the 878 jobs promised under the agreement.

BioAgilytix Labs, LLC, a life science testing company that was founded in Durham in 2008 and is headquartered there, was due to receive up to $18,885,000, spread over 12 years if they held up their end of the agreement that was announced in October 2020.

The company didn’t receive any money through the grant program. 

The expansion was proposed to help the company meet increased demand from its customer base.

Reports say it is now having trouble hiring new employees due to a downturn in biotech funding over the last two years.

BioAgilytix Labs, LLC also has laboratory locations in the Cambridge area of Massachusetts and Hamburg, Germany. It specializes in large molecule bioanalysis and supports the development and release testing of biologics across several industries and disease states. 

As part of the JDIG agreement, the company planned to invest $61.5 million in Durham.

Over the 12-year term of the grant, the project was estimated to grow the state’s economy by $2.8 billion, with state tax revenues to exceed $58.8 million.

The average salary of $96,477 would have brought a payroll impact of $84.7 million to the region each year. The average wage in Durham County in 2020 was $71,756.

BioAgilytix’s JDIG agreement could have moved as much as $6,295,000 into the state’s Industrial Development Fund – Utility Account for use by rural communities elsewhere in the state. The Utility Account helps finance necessary infrastructure upgrades in more economically challenged areas of the state to attract future business. 

The latest announcement comes after state officials terminated three more incentive packages worth millions of dollars and 1,000 potential new jobs last month.

NCEIC officials cancelled packages for Clorox Services Company, Syneos Health, and Service Offsite Solutions because they couldn’t produce the jobs required to qualify for the Job Development Investment Grants (JDIG) that they were to receive.

The cancellations are the latest in a series of terminations by the state for the JDIG program, which doesn’t have a good track record when it comes to “promised job creation and investment targets.”

In January, Bandwidth, a Raleigh-based communications software company, had its JDIG agreement terminated by NCEIC for not following through on its required hiring goals as part of the agreement. 

Bandwidth notified the department in early January. The company said the withdrawal would give it greater flexibility for workplace planning.

A growing number of recent agreement terminations have prompted calls to terminate the JDIG program.

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