City clarifies voluntary incentive program

By: Letters to the Editor | Hickory Daily Record
Published: October 07, 2009

The City of Hickory would like to make some clarifications to Wednesday morning's front-page article entitled, "90 Hickory workers offered early retirement."

This program is called the Voluntary Retirement Incentive Program. Only co-workers who are eligible to retire through the N.C. Retirement System will be able to take advantage of this program.

If an employee is eligible to retire by March 1, 2010, for example, the employee is eligible for this program, but the employee would have to wait to retire until the day he/she is eligible to retire through the N.C. state retirement system.

This is not an early retirement program.

Mandy Pitts
Communications Director
City of Hickory

We must do business with community banks

Recent troubles at Bank of Granite have caused many people in the Unifour to begin thinking about how important a community bank is to the economic health of our local communities. It is little consolation to know that this is a statewide phenomenon.

A quick glance at the financial health of North Carolina's community banks reveals a startling decline in their collective financial condition over the past two years.

The crushing weight of speculative real estate loans combined with historically low interest rates have caused these banks to rack up losses in amounts not seen in our state since the Great Depression.

With one of the nation's highest unemployment rates, the Unifour appears to have the state's worst economy. Catawba, Caldwell, Alexander and Burke counties have been battered by the biggest outmigration of jobs in the Southeast, if not the nation, that has devastated local employers and business owners, including our community banks.

Without locally run banks, like The Bank of Granite, area business will become dependent on decision-makers who do not live in our communities. The deposits in the bank will be shipped off to Raleigh, Charlotte or Greensboro where they will be loaned to local businesses in those cities. Without community banks, the Unifour will be deprived of a much-needed source of capital that will be critical to fuel the recovery and subsequent growth of our local businesses.

Thus, the economic recovery in the Unifour will be slower in coming, take longer and be less robust. If you don't think having a bank headquartered in your area is not important, then we invite you to look at the impact Bank of America and Wachovia have had on Charlotte's growth and infrastructure over the past 25 years.

So what can we do to help? Open an account and deposit money at a community bank, and if you already have an account then keep it open and deposit more money into it.
FDIC insurance keeps your money safe.

Our local economic independence is ours to preserve and ours to lose.

Lisa Tarlton O'Hair and Neal Orgain
Hickory