Shortly before Charlotte’s city council voted to extend its long-standing nondiscrimination ordinance to cover the LGBTQ community last month, Mayor Jennifer Roberts warned that companies like Apple would only come to cities that enforced such measures.

“We’ve had employers tell us that they feel it’s important for their employees to have these protections to be treated equally,” she said of the ordinance, which was also backed by the Charlotte-based Bank of America. “We want to be competitive. We want to be among those cities that are welcoming to all the talent in the workforce that we can find.”

Roberts’s sole motivation wasn’t to make Charlotte more business-friendly; after all, she came to power by upsetting a centrist dynasty. Her aim was also to convince the North Carolina General Assembly — dominated by ultra-conservative Republicans so zealous that they once wrested control of redistricting from a county legislature when the party lost its seats on the body — that there was an economic incentive to pass the ordinance.