Past reporting:
- Deep Dive: Did rural counties get left out of the $1.25 billion New Hanover endowment deal? (Port City Daily)
- NHCE’s first grant cycle is complete. Now things get interesting, complicated, and challenging
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Ben Schachtman: All right, Johanna Still, Wilmington editor for The Assembly and my colleague in putting out the weekly Dive newsletter. Thanks for being here.
Johanna Still: Absolutely.
BS: So this week, you had a piece on sort of a changing of the guard at Live Oak Bank. Tell me a little bit about this.
JS: Right, well, Live Oak is one of Wilmington's largest kinda tech-adjacent companies. It's also one of the largest employers in our region. They've got about 700 employees based in Wilmington. And so they had late Friday announced that their president, who's basically the number-two person at the company behind the CEO, was going to be leaving the company and they'd be replacing him with their chief financial officer.
So it seemed a little bit sudden, kind of last minute. And then on Tuesday, the former president, his name is Huntley Garriott, he had filed to sell through the Securities and Exchange Commission, about $7 million worth of stock, which basically represents about half of his holdings in the company.
You know, they didn't have a reason for why he was leaving – Chip Mahan, who is the CEO of a company, did offer some kind words, said that they wished him luck in his next endeavor. And we kind of just broke down where Live Oak has been, They funneled a massive amount of PPP loans during the pandemic. And their biggest backbone is basically in SBA loans, which is Small Business Administration. And so for the past almost six years, once this fiscal year ends, they – six years in a row – they have been the nation's largest SBA lender, which basically means their biggest their bread and butter is small business loans.
BS: And as one of Wilmington’s larger employers and kind of a tent pole of our local, you know, tech and tech-adjacent economy, we're not suggesting anything is going on there, but we want to watch companies like that for instability because it's just part of Wilmington's economic ecosystem.
JS: Absolutely. And Live Oak has absolutely embedded itself, you know, forgive me for a little metaphor here, but their roots have spread very far. They're, they're really connected to the city. And so just keeping up with them is absolutely you know, important. What's also important is checking in on the New Hanover Community Endowment. It was born from the hospital sale of the Hanover Regional Medical Center, they started out with a nest egg of about $1.2 billion. And Ben, this is actually something that I had reported on a couple years ago, but tell me about the angle that you had for this piece.
BS: Yeah. And really, I owe this to your reporting back as the hospital sale was coming to an end and then down was getting put together this idea about how, according to the charter of the New Hanover Community Endowment, the money can only go to nonprofits that primarily work in New Hanover County. And what we started hearing from people was that a lot of the revenue that went into the hospital that allowed it to become a regional hospital came from Pender and Brunswick and Columbus and Onslow – and nonprofits in those communities aren't seeing any money from the endowment. So it's a question we've sort of asked repeatedly, as the endowment has evolved, we've spoken to Attorney General Josh Stein about it, ee've talked to board members, we've talked to William Buster, who is the current CEO and president. And almost everyone we've talked to you seems to acknowledge that there is kind of an inequity here. But there doesn't seem to be any political will or any will at all, to change the bylaws in a way that would that would shift that.
So that's kind of where we're at now. But I would say, every single conversation I have with nonprofits, whether they're in New Hanover or not, this issue comes up. And so I just think it's, you know, you brought it to the forefront with the reporting and I'm doing my best to sort of keep that, you know, keep that in the public's consciousness.
Alright, so real quick before we go, Johanna, what do we have in the works for next week? Give us a teaser.
JS: Oh, you're gonna have me spill our secrets?
BS: A small portion of our secrets – or you can tell people they just have to wait.
JS: I think you should stay tuned. But it's just a little bit of a look at the mind of a man who has been participating heavily in our local dealings and who also happens to be running for Governor.
BS: I liked that. Let's leave it there. Johanna Still from the assembly. Thank you so much.
JS: Thank you, Ben.