Insurance giant Pacific Life is opening a Charlotte office that will bring 301 new jobs. Gov. Stein said Tuesday that the California-based company will locate its office in the Queensbridge Collective development in South End.

In 2014, 61% of Mecklenburg voters rejected a plan to increase the sales tax by a quarter of a penny, from 7.25% to 7.5%. Most of the money would have gone to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

The first phase of Charlotte’s mixed-use medical district just outside uptown, The Pearl, opened in July. It includes a campus of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, a surgical training center, and medical technology companies. But it’s what The Pearl doesn’t include that has some city and county leaders wanting answers.

The City of Salisbury has been awarded $850,000 through the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s Rural Transformation Grant Fund. It will support renovations to a 30,000-square-foot building located on South Main Street, formerly known as the Wells Fargo Building, with improvements to lighting, flooring, fire and HVAC systems. When completed, the facility will house event and office space.

You can probably picture one right now: A vacant, overgrown piece of land, maybe fenced off, where nothing ever seems to get built even though everything around it is booming. These lots dot Charlotte, blank spaces in a sea of construction that become permanent question marks. The Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter this week dug into the question of what plagues some of these more prominent spots.

Ahold Delhaize USA will establish an East Coast distribution center in Alamance County.

Financial services company SoFi said Tuesday that it’s adding 225 jobs in Charlotte. The San Francisco-based company plans to hire loan officers, analysts, sales workers and more, at an average salary of around $109,000 a year. The state of North Carolina is providing a $1.9 million grant to subsidize SoFi’s Charlotte expansion.

Another iconic Charlotte restaurant is closing. WCNC reports that after 66 years on Wilkinson Boulevard, Bar-B-Q King will shut its doors on November 1st. It was once featured on the Food Network show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Owners say the property has been sold.

The result of the state Certificate of Need competition could have big repercussions for Western North Carolina’s health care landscape.

Energy experts gathered in Raleigh this week to discuss how North Carolina’s energy grid — and ratepayers’ wallets — will handle the incoming wave of new data centers.