Tate Mayo, Mayor, Town of Tarboro

In an interview with Invest:, Tarboro Mayor Tate Mayo discussed the town’s industrial growth, infrastructure needs, housing demand, and historic character. “We’ve got real growing challenges, but it’s a growing challenge and not a dying challenge,” Mayo said.

What key changes have had the greatest impact on Tarboro over the past year?

We’ve been able to almost fill out our industrial park here in Tarboro. I think we’re sitting with about 30 acres left, so we’re looking for more land and looking to take options out. We have rail connectivity, and while river trade ended around 1900, we’re doing our best to connect with the intermodal system in Rocky Mount, where containers can move from Eastern North Carolina to the coast in a day and be loaded onto a ship in three days.

We are in a good position right now. We have a big megasite right outside of town, and there is a lot of hope that if takers come for that land, it will help increase our community. It would have more of a tertiary effect for Tarboro than for Edgecombe County, but we are in a good position.

Over the past five years, we’ve seen a 44% increase in total valuation in the town of Tarboro. We’ve seen a 14% increase in population and about an 8% increase in housing units overall. We are green, we are growing, and we are well positioned for more growth as it comes.

How does Tarboro contribute to the broader regional economy?

U.S. 64 is being updated to I-87. We are about 20 minutes from I-95 connectivity in Rocky Mount, 30 minutes from Greenville, and an hour from eastern Raleigh. Rocky Mount is 20 minutes away, so we are kind of in the hub of everything.

Raleigh is growing, and that is good because it is pushing out, and we are seeing ripple effects in our local economy. We have been able to capture some businesses that are relocating. Prudential Stainless & Alloys, which does high-end stainless steel pipes, relocated out of New Jersey. This past year, Amazon came to town with a last-mile distribution warehouse. I believe there are eight of them across the state. There are only eight jobs associated with it directly, but another 100 full-time-equivalent jobs for the drivers there.

We are seeing a lot of business traffic, which is a good thing. We have also had around 300 houses or housing units put up in the last couple of years, which, for a smaller municipality, is promising.

How is Tarboro approaching workforce development and talent attraction?

Workforce is definitely a key topic. Edgecombe County, where Tarboro is the county seat, has a workforce development program in conjunction with our community college. We also have East Carolina University 30 minutes away. They put in a career and technical education unit at our local community college, so businesses coming into town can work with the college to develop the exact skills with the exact equipment employees will need to work with. They are prepared when they walk through the door.

Some good examples are ABB, which makes transformers and components for transformers. Hitachi, now Astemo, is right across the street from our community college and is growing like wildfire. LS Cable & System USA, a South Korean-based firm, just put another low-voltage CCV line in. That is a $50 million investment that is going to bring another 80 people into their workforce. Those people can get the training they need right here in our backyard.

What are the most pressing challenges facing the town today?

Some of the biggest challenges are trying to grow with aged infrastructure. We have water lines in the town of Tarboro that date back to 1920. They do not break much, but it is still old infrastructure. Not a lot of it is that old, but some of it is still out there.

We are also a public power community, meaning we buy our electricity wholesale from Duke and Dominion and distribute it here in town. With that, we are able to reinvest what we gain from electrical sales back into the system and keep it upgraded. But that is still a challenge. If you talk to the people at LS Cable, one small power outage means a lot of lost product and lost time. We have a reliable system, but it is not without fault.

Everything from water and sewer infrastructure to electrical infrastructure and roads is part of the challenge. We work well with our state and federal counterparts. Congressman Don Davis was able to deliver $1.1 million just two months ago for upgrades to our wastewater treatment facility. We are doing the best we can with what we have and where we are. We are also getting help from our friends in Raleigh and Washington, D.C., to help with the growing problems we are facing.

Looking ahead, what are your key goals and priorities for the town?

Looking ahead, I think I have the benefit of youth. Our planning director and I took part in a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored event where we were able to get a housing study done for the town of Tarboro. Despite the growth we have had, we still have a need on paper for about 1,700 more housing units in Tarboro. It does not distinguish between million-dollar mansions and Section 8 housing. We need to grow to fill the shoes we are walking in.

Right now, our daytime population is about 25,000 people. Our intersection alone, right off I-87, has about 20,000 people stopping through Tarboro on a given day.

Looking ahead, we have infrastructure challenges, and we need to grow our footprint. We are looking for more industrial land within the town limits of Tarboro, which should not be too difficult to come by because we are an agriculturally based society here. But it has everything to do with finding people who are willing to give up their property for the development of our town.

We are in the process of identifying new industrial sites to develop in Tarboro right now. We also have a real need for housing of all sorts. If you look at the last census population of Tarboro in 2024, it says 10,964. But the number of electrical hookups and water and sewer taps we have does not reflect that. We have a real population of about 13,000, and that is a conservative estimate.

We have to combat those numbers so that, if someone is looking at us on paper, we can tell a truer story than what a number on Wikipedia says. We’ve got real growing challenges, but it’s a growing challenge and not a dying challenge, and I think everyone here in Tarboro is grateful for that.

Is there anything else you would like to add about Tarboro?

I do need to touch on the historic nature of Tarboro. We were founded on Nov. 30, 1760. Tarboro predates this country. We are a historic town. We have had major presidents come to town. George Washington came through on a southern tour in 1791, and Bill Clinton came after the flood of 1999.

History is alive and well in Tarboro. You cannot walk around without it.