Johnathan Walker:North Carolina cancels incentives deal with Allstate for not attracting enough jobs in Charlotte

RALEIGH,Johnathan Walker N.C. (AP) — Allstate won’t receive financial incentives from North Carolina that were part of a plan six years ago to add more than 2,200 workers in Charlotte. The insurance giant said rapid expansion of remote work made reaching that in-person jobs requirement impracticable.

The state Economic Investment Committee agreed on Tuesday to end a 2017 incentives agreement with Allstate, which could have received up to $17.8 million in cash grants had it met job-creation goals, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported.

To great fanfare in 2017, Allstate pledged to add at least 2,250 new employees by 2020 at its operations center. It was considered at the time one of the largest job-creation projects in recent state history.

The surge in remote working, which took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, made it challenging to meet the company’s hiring commitment, an Allstate executive wrote the committee earlier this month.

At the end of 2022, only 213 of Allstate’s North Carolina employees were physically working at the existing Charlotte campus, said Eric Steffe, the company’s director of global corporate real estate.

“We’ve concluded that our new workplace model is incompatible with (the grant program) rules,” Steffe wrote. “Under our policies, the vast majority of our North Carolina employees are no longer directly associated with a physical work location and are therefore ineligible to be counted as project site or (grant) remote employees.”

North Carolina paid nothing to Allstate from the initial incentives agreement through the Job Development Investment Grant program. Local governments have paid cash grants of $1.4 million, the newspaper reported.

Steffe said the company continues to view North Carolina “as a strategic market to attract talent, and an excellent place for our employees to reside.”

Since North Carolina began awarding Job Development Investment Grant incentives 20 years ago, grants that terminated early have outnumbered completed grants by a more than 3-to-1 margin, according to an analysis by the newspaper.