People line up at one of Durham’s music venues, Motorco, in downtown Durham, N.C. DURHAM, N.C. — Taco Tuesday was oddly slow, but Elizabeth Turnbull wasn’t worried. If roasted pork on homemade tortillas failed to lure diners on this pollen-dusted spring evening, the 42-year-old restaurant owner could count on private parties. Three companies had booked her space for next week.
The law’s defenders blamed Democrats for whipping up a national controversy that spooked investment. Backlash to HB2 cost the state almost $4 billion, Gov. Roy Cooper said at the time, citingby the Associated Press that measured the impact’s 12-year tail. The PayPal deal alone would have contributed more than $200 million annually to North Carolina’s economy, the state’s Commerce Department estimated.
Turnbull disagreed. Scanning the candlelit bar of COPA, the restaurant she started with her husband in 2018, she mulled what they stood to lose. Like, perhaps, the guy sipping red wine at her quartz counter and typing on a MacBook, who she’d never seen before.again get canceled if transgender people could get arrested for their restroom choice? Or maybe he was one of Google’s fresh hires, who probably had the budget to splurge on three tacos for $15.
Yet the city still lost at least $10 million from called-off conferences and conventions, said Shelly Green, former head of Discover Durham, who led the tourism board through the blowback. “And that accounts only for events we had on the books,” she said, “not the calls we didn’t receive.”