by JILLIAN SWORDS
News Reporter

Due to cuts in the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s revenues, all NCDOT construction projects will be delayed, the organization said at an intergovernmental conference in Boone Jan. 28.

The futures of numerous King Street businesses and housing buildings, namely those seized by the state as eminent domain a year ago, similarly hang in the balance as the revenue cuts may affect the widening of West King Street.

“We’re still committed to constructing the project as soon as we can, but we just don’t know what the schedule will be at this point,”

Division Construction Engineer Trent Beaver said about the project.

Meanwhile, the 23 King Street businesses whose property were seized last January still have no idea when their 90-day condemnation notices will begin.

Owner of Boone Florist Leah R. Rudell is one of the affected business owners.

“We haven’t been notified yet [of when they have to move],” Rudell said. “It’s kind of impossible to find a new place [ahead of time] because no one will hold a place open for three months.”

Other businesses, like PC Medics, decided to preemptively move away from King Street.

“We didn’t want to wait on them because they would never give us a legitimate time frame to work from,” owner Tom M. Rooney said. “We went ahead and were proactive and found a place so we wouldn’t be competing with 20 other businesses at the same time.”

Rooney relocated his business off the N.C. Highway 105 extension, largely at his own expense.

The DOT provided partial reimbursement, but it only amounted to the difference in rent from his old location to the new one for a year, Rooney said.

In addition, the move impacted his business “negatively in that our overhead is much higher and our location isn’t as good as what we had. We lose the walk-in business like we had before,” Rooney said.

The King Street project, which affects all businesses on the south side of West King Street from the N.C. Highway 105 intersection to the U.S. Highway 321 intersection, was scheduled to let out for contracts in April, Beaver said.

Despite the delays, the NCDOT’s goal is to complete construction on the east end of the project in time for the opening of the new Watauga County High School in August 2010.

State funds have massively decreased in the past year because of the recessed economy, Beaver said.

Gasoline taxes and car sales, which make up 55 percent and 25 percent of the state’s total transportation funds, are the two biggest shrinking culprits.

“The anticipated revenue is just not coming in,” Beaver said. “We operate on a cash-flow basis.”

The DOT is hopeful that the federal economic stimulus package will inject funding into the lagging projects, although aid from this source will not be salient until mid-March or April, Beaver said.

Daniel T. Striebich, a junior nursing major at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute, lives in one of the houses on East King Street that was seized by the state.

“They told us last year around August but they never told us what time they were going to start the construction,” Striebich said.

Whenever the project moves forward and he does have to move, the DOT has to, by law, find him and his housemates a new place to rent of equal or better price, allaying some of the annoyance of moving.

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