County native is new Visitor Center director

Bettina Cox

Bettina M. Cox, a Guideway area native who has called Greenville home since leaving for college in 1995, will become Tabor City’s N.C. Visitor Center director in mid-December.

She will succeed Steve Lynch, initially as Tabor City’s industry recruiter who has been on the job in Tabor City for more than seven years.

Cox will be leaving a position as sales and service manager for the Greenville Convention Center. She has worked as a visitor operations assistant for the Washington Tourism Development Authority in Washington, N.C.

A 2000 graduate of East Carolina University, Cox holds a BA in psychology with a minor in recreation and leisure studies.
She is pursuing a certificate in non-profit management from Duke University.

Lynch has delayed his planned Dec. 31 retirement to work with Cox into February. Town Manager Al Leonard says Cox will do well, and town government will work to give her the tools to do her job well.

Coming home

The daughter of Valeta Cox and the late Elbert Cox, Tabor City’s new Visitor Center director grew up in the Guideway area but got most of her early education in Brunswick County, where her mother was a schoolteacher.

“For high school I came back to Columbus County,” Cox says.

She was a member of South Columbus High School’s first sophomore class after spending her freshman year at Nakina High School just before consolidation.

East Carolina and Greenville in 1995, and today, retains enough of a small-town feel to keep Cox there, even after graduation from ECU.

“I have wonderful friends here,” Cox says. “We spend a lot of time together. ECU football is big on the list of things we do.

“It’s big enough that there are things to do, but small enough that there’s a sense of small town, a sense of community. It’s not a huge town yet.”

That sense of small town was a factor in bringing Cox back to Tabor City.

“The people are just such warm, friendly people,” Cox says of Tabor City. “The area has such potential. I want to see us grow together and have a community spirit that shows.”

Times are changing in Tabor City, and Cox says she recognizes that life today is not the same as it was when her father farmed in Guideway.

“It’s not the agrarian community that it used to be,” she says. “We have to find alternative ways for our natives to make some money, to have a career, to have employment, without going somewhere else.”

Will she miss the bigger town?

“I went to Starbucks, and thought this is the last time that I’ll be able to go to Starbucks in the morning,” Cox said. “It’s little things I’ll miss.”

But Cox says she’s sold on Tabor City and her new place in town government.

“I consider this coming home and I don’t have any intention of leaving,” Cox says. “I’m really excited about it. I’m looking forward to it.”

Moving on

Managing the state Visitor Center will be Cox’s primary duty, but she says she’ll follow the example Lynch has set working on economic development projects, either in conventional or unconventional ways.

She has some experience in working in unusual situations at her current job. The Greenville Convention Center was built by a private developer, who operated the facility in an unusual partnership with city government. Most similar facilities are either privately or government owned and operated, not both.

“It is very unique in the convention center market,” Cox says. “But that’s what they had to do to get that into Greenville.”

What does Cox envision for Tabor City?

First, learning from Lynch and Leonard. She has good things to say about the town manager.

“Mr. Leonard has been real helpful through this whole process,” Cox says. “I think he really cares about Tabor City and where it is going.”

Cox says she sees opportunity in her new job, and for Tabor City.

“We have to bring economic growth into the community. We have to have something for our influx of residents, something for them to do, places for them to live.”

Enhancing tourism is important, Cox says.

“With us being on the way to the beach, we need for folks to want to veer off of 701 and to come into the community instead of just passing us by.”

(By Deuce Niven, Tabor-Loris Tribune)