Ohio leaders fuming over NCR move to Ga.

DAYTON, OHIO — A large international airport, lots of young, educated people and at least $60 million.

In its barest contours, those were the essentials of the offer Georgia used to draw NCR’s corporate headquarters to Duluth from Dayton, the city NCR has called home for 125 years.

Persuading NCR to move wasn’t a “poaching exercise,” a spokesman for Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue told the Dayton Daily News Tuesday. Instead, it was a matter of treating NCR like a “customer,” said Bert Brantley, the spokesman.

He said the exercise was months in the making, with Perdue and NCR’s CEO staying in touch after NCR announced an expansion of its customer service unit in Peachtree City.

“Months and months and months, when you’re talking about identifying what the company was looking for and what it needed,” Brantley said.

Ohio leaders were left fuming, saying they never had a chance to retain or expand NCR in the Buckeye State.

“NCR makes ATMs,” Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher said Tuesday. “And to me this is equivalent to going to your ATM and finding out that your bank that you and your family have banked with for 125 years has, without even talking to you, transferred all your funds to another company.”

Fisher said the state had little time to make an offer to NCR.

“We had to simply guess what the company needed and wanted,” he said.

Fisher said it was clear that NCR had shared more information with Georgia.

Dayton City Manager Rashad Young said he learned of NCR’s plans to move its corporate headquarters from Dayton to Georgia late Monday.

“I was stunned and a bit speechless,” Young said. “Even with rumors around for almost a week… there is still disbelief and, when I heard it, frustration.”

Young said that while many NCR employees live in Dayton and are involved members of the community, that hasn’t been the case with the company in recent years.

“There has been a corporate disconnect between NCR and the city for some time,” Young said. “This announcement was the first information that flowed down to us. They didn’t return our telephone calls, our emails, our overtures, nothing.”