AP Exclusive: 'Bathroom bill' to cost North Carolina $3.76B

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Despite Republican assurances that North Carolina's "bathroom bill" isn't hurting the economy, the law limiting LGBT protections will cost the state more than $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years, according to an Associated Press analysis.

Over the past year, North Carolina has suffered financial hits ranging from scuttled plans for a PayPal facility that would have added an estimated $2.66 billion to the state's economy to a canceled Ringo Starr concert that deprived a town's amphitheater of about $33,000 in revenue.

The blows have landed in the state's biggest cities as well as towns surrounding its flagship university, and from the mountains to the coast.

The law excludes gender identity and sexual orientation from statewide antidiscrimination protections, and requires transgender people to use restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates in many public buildings.

What corporate headquarters consideration for a foreign company — there's a lot of them out there — just took you off the list because they just didn't want to be bothered with the controversy?

The vast majority of large companies with existing operations in the state — such as American Airlines, with its second-largest hub in Charlotte — made no public moves to financially penalize North Carolina.

The organization said the figure came from a study by consulting and accounting firm Deloitte, but the Federation Equestre Internationale declined to release the report.

Other companies that backed out include Adidas, which is building its first U.S. sports shoe factory employing 160 near Atlanta rather than a High Point site, and Voxpro, which opted to hire hundreds of customer support workers in Athens, Georgia, rather than the Raleigh area.

An analysis by the state Commerce Department shortly before HB2 was enacted shows state officials expected the PayPal expansion to contribute more than $200 million annually to North Carolina's gross domestic product — an overall measure of the economy.

State officials said they didn't run the same financial analysis for CoStar, Voxpro and Adidas, so losses attributed to them were calculated using payroll numbers and other figures from the companies or state documents.

Elsewhere, tourism setbacks range from an estimated $100 million lost when the 2017 NBA All-Star Game moved out of Charlotte to $36,000 in spending taken elsewhere when the Lutheran Financial Managers Convention backed out of Fayetteville.

Trillium Asset Management, which manages more than $2 billion for wealthy families and foundations, had dozens of clients request that their holdings exclude bonds issued by North Carolina state or municipal governments, Chief Executive Officer Matt Patsky said in an interview.

According to separate documents obtained through public records requests, the majority were in the PayPal and CoStar projects.

CoStar, a real-estate research firm, was entering final negotiations to bring 732 jobs to Charlotte in September when its board backed out because of negative publicity over HB2, according to an email between a chamber executive and a city official.