86 DMV jobs go to Bladen County

RALEIGH -- Eighty-six workers will be uprooted next year when the state Division of Motor Vehicles unplugs its Raleigh call center and moves the jobs 80 miles away to Bladen County in North Carolina's rural southeastern corner.

Only a few Raleigh employees are expected to move south with their jobs, but DMV officials say none of the rest will suffer.

George Tatum, the DMV commissioner, said Tuesday that some workers will be ready to retire from their jobs, which pay an average $32,400 a year. DMV will help others find new work in state government, he said, so that nobody would be in jeopardy of losing state employment.

Workers in the center help about 4,000 drivers and insurance companies each day with questions about car registrations, driver's licenses and other issues. Tatum wants to move them out of their quarters to make way for repairs and renovations in the DMV building on New Bern Avenue.

The DMV office has been hurt by high turnover, with between 18 percent and 32 percent of workers leaving the job each year, he said. He predicted lower turnover and other sources of savings in Bladen County. Projected savings are $2.3 million in the first five years.

Workers in the Raleigh office were apprehensive.

"They say they'll help us find other positions, and nobody's going to be out on the street," said Jamila Andrade, 30, of Raleigh, a single mother who has worked there for a year. "But they said they cannot guarantee that we will have a position.

"So which is it going to be?" she said. "We're all going to start looking right now. There's no reason to wait another year."

Debra Mason, who lives in Wendell with her school-age grandchildren, said "it would be a hardship" to uproot her family and move to Bladen County.

The state will pay the Bladen County commissioners about $228,000 a year to lease a 16,000-square-foot office building at an industrial park near Elizabethtown.

The building will be constructed over the next nine months, and DMV expects to have some workers in both locations before it shifts operations entirely to Bladen County late next year.

The 10-year lease was approved Tuesday by the Council of State, a board of the state's top elected officials.

Toni Davis, spokeswoman for the State Employees Association of North Carolina, said the organization would watch closely to make sure DMV workers weren't hurt.

"If what Tatum says is true -- that they can solve their turnover problems without adversely affecting employees -- it's fine," Davis said.

Sen. Tony Rand of Fayetteville spurred state and local officials to make the move. Bladen County, with higher unemployment and lower family incomes than in Wake County, needs the jobs.

Chuck Heustess, Bladen County's economic development director, said underemployed white collar workers in southeastern North Carolina will clamor for the chance to trade retail wages for a government job with good benefits.

"They say it's been hard in Raleigh to keep people at DMV," Heustess said. "But when you get people into these jobs in Bladen County, it's likely that a lot of them will stay in that job until they retire."

(Staff researcher Lamara Hackett-Williams contributed to this report.)