I-77 Tolls
Charlotte residents are expected to pack the City Council chamber Monday night in opposition to the Interstate 77 toll lane expansion from uptown to the South Carolina border. Meanwhile, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles has asked the council’s transportation committee to discuss the controversial project on March 5. West Charlotte residents say the toll lanes will be ugly, increase noise pollution and further divide them from uptown. They say the city and the state are making the same mistakes as decades earlier, when I-77 was first built, bulldozing some homes in their neighborhoods. A majority of City Council members say they support pausing the project, including Joi Mayo, Kimberly Owens, Dimple Ajmera, JD Mazuera Arias, Malcolm Graham and Victoria Watlington. Council member Ed Driggs, who is the council’s point person on transportation, has said it’s too late to stop the project.
Road Repairs
Costs for repairing roads damaged by Tropical Storm Helene now total nearly $5.8 billion, according to state transportation officials' recent estimates. The increase primarily stems from a $900 million hike in estimated costs to repair Interstate 40, which is now expected to cost approximately $2 billion, North Carolina Department of Transportation spokesperson David Uchiyama told the Citizen Times on Feb. 18. It's the most expensive road repair project in the state's history.
Along the Pigeon River Gorge in Haywood County, Helene caused disastrous flooding and landslides, washing away portions of the interstate's eastbound lanes. The road has since reopened along the corridor, but with major adjustments, including a 35-mph speed limit and one lane in each direction. From summer 2025 to January, estimated costs increased by $900 million on the project.
The repair effort has included the construction of a temporary concrete plant and rock crusher directly adjacent to the Pigeon River, which NCDOT says will cut down on material costs and material hauling along the busy highway. Eastbound lanes are still expected to reopen in 2028, Uchiyama said.
Some roads, however, had significant decreases. Repairs on the Toe and Nolichucky rivers along 18 miles of North Carolina Highway 197 from $380 million to $266 million, according to the presentation. Repairs to 30 miles of roadways on North Carolina Highway 197 in Yancey County decreased from $321 million to $256 million.
Other repairs to U.S. 64 and U.S. 74A near Chimney Rock in Rutherford and Henderson counties decreased from $315 million to $303 million. Repairs to U.S. 74A between Gerton and Bat Cave decreased from $141 million to $115 million.
Estimates are still "expected to change," Uchiyama said.
Economic Recruiting
The NC SelectSite Readiness Program will try to expand on its success in recruiting industry to the state by adding five locations, all of them in western North Carolina, the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina announced Thursday. The five new locations, picked from 18 submissions, are concentrated in areas recovering from the effects of Hurricane Helene in September 2024. The sites have utility services and other infrastructure already in place, according to a state report. The five sites made the cut based on factors including worker availability, proximity to highways and utilities and market attractiveness. Each site’s exposure to damage from Hurricane Helene also played a role.
“The NC Selectsite Readiness Program has already proven its value by helping communities across North Carolina compete for and win high-quality, good-paying jobs,” said Christopher Chung, CEO of EDPNC. “Adding these five sites strengthens our inventory of development-ready properties and will help accelerate economic recovery of western North Carolina.”
The North Carolina General Assembly created the NC Selectsite Readiness Program during the 2023-24 legislative budget as a complement to the state’s Megasites Readiness Program, a program focused on readying properties greater than 1,000 acres for industry tenants.
The Selectsite Readiness Program focuses on smaller properties, some of which are under 100 acres, that are still capable of attracting advanced manufacturing companies and new jobs to communities across North Carolina.
Workplace Deaths
The rise of jobs in logistics and advanced manufacturing in North Carolina has also changed workplace safety trends. For the first time in years, there’s a new leading cause of death for people on the job: Being struck by tools, vehicles, equipment and other workplace hazards.
The trend has caught the attention of state Labor Commissioner Luke Farley, who has launched a new initiative to crack down on unsafe warehouses and factories, where workers face too much risk of being hit by forklifts, falling boxes or other hazards.
Farley plans to spend the coming months educating business leaders about safer ways to operate, developing new compliance inspection guidance and consulting on ways to reduce workplace risks. After this year, Farley said, his inspectors will be criss-crossing the state ready to ramp up enforcement and hand out fines to businesses that haven’t done what’s needed to keep their workers safe.
“We're really trying to raise awareness, but after that, it's time for us to step in and bring those numbers down,” Farley told WRAL in an interview. “Citations and penalties that go along with that.”
Farley discussed his initiative this week at a warehouse in Mebane run by electronic component manufacturer company ABB. The company recently put $700,000 toward changing how it stores and retrieves heavy boxes of materials, company representatives said. They say improvements to the warehouse’s layout and new technology have boosted their workers’ efficiency while also cutting down on the chance for accidents, a win-win.
Newly narrowed aisles allow more materials to be stored readily accessible to workstations in the plant, and magnets under the floor help guide forklifts so that the drivers don’t accidentally bump the shelves in those narrow spaces and send them tumbling. Each of the dozens of shelves can hold two tons of pallets and boxes. The forklifts are also equipped with automated sensors that can pump the brakes, plus software that provides real-time safety alerts.
“We were able to double our storing capacity in far less space, and with safety-built-in equipment,” Salvador Sanchez, an ABB manager, said. “This is not just a better layout. This is a safer and smarter way to manage our warehouse.”
In recent years, warehouses and advanced manufacturing facilities have seen a boom across North Carolina. Amazon’s massive shipping hub in Garner handles hundreds of thousands of packages daily. Big-box and grocery stores rely on wide-ranging logistics help, too, and many factories exist in a middle point of the supply chain, taking in and shipping out various components.
And while workplace fatalities have been on the decline in North Carolina in general, Farley said, there has been a recent spike in the number of people killed after being struck by forklifts or falling equipment. Those types of accidents now make up nearly half of the state’s workplace fatalities, he said, as well as a substantial amount of non-fatal injuries.
“Behind these statistics is a family changed forever,” Farley said. “A mother, a father, a son, a daughter, who unexpectedly will not be coming home that day. But these incidents are preventable.”
In the 2023 fiscal year 17 North Carolinians died in such accidents. That figure rose to 20 deaths in 2024 and rose again to 25 deaths in 2025, state data shows — a nearly 50% increase in the past two years
“Seeing that two years in a row, told me and my team that that wasn't merely a blip on the radar, but a dangerous trend that needed to be addressed,” Farley said.
Property Taxes
Property taxes are an entirely local matter in North Carolina. The rates are set by city and county governments, and the money collected is spent on city and county parks, schools, roads and law enforcement. But state lawmakers have taken a keen interest in the topic, and a legislative committee on Wednesday continued to zoom in on how the state assesses, collects or uses property taxes.
Although the state government isn’t involved in setting the rates or deciding how the money gets used, the state legislature is now looking to insert itself into the conversation regardless — raising hopes of tax relief by some property owners, along with fears of meddling by some local government leaders and workers.
But as Republican legislative leaders look at ways they could potentially cut property taxes, they also have to contend with other factors: Republican President Donald Trump has recently slashed federal spending in part by shifting hundreds of billions of dollars that used to be paid by the federal government, for education, health care, cybersecurity and more, onto state and local governments.
"We've seen a lot of federal changes that are going to have impacts on how we govern at the state and local level and how we are able to finance this," Whitney Alfonso, a tax expert with the UNC School of Government, told lawmakers Wednesday. And not all counties are equally equipped to handle those increased costs. Alfonso, whose research focuses on property and income taxes, pointed lawmakers to a map Wednesday showing that the state' large, urban areas tend to have much larger property tax bases than smaller rural areas. But those smaller rural areas, which also tend to be represented by Republicans in state or local politics, are also much more reliant on federal programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, and will therefore be hit even harder by Trump's cuts.
That could add additional political wrinkles to any efforts by GOP lawmakers to cut property taxes. But while smaller, rural counties could bear more of the brunt of new costs associated with Trump's efforts to shift costs for government benefit programs to local governments, Alfonso noted there are also challenges for the bigger counties, where most of North Carolina's growth is happening.
"A lot of our growing areas, on the flip side, are having to invest in new infrastructure," she said. "New wastewater systems, new schools. Those are very capital-intensive, and very costly as well. And so there's no one easy picture to paint of our local governments across the state. But we do expect to see some pretty impactful changes coming from the federal government."
Another recent trend under Trump and his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has also seen the federal government pay significantly less for Hurricane Helene relief than expected, pushing massive amounts of costs onto city and county governments in western North Carolina specifically, Alfonso noted, a factor WRAL has reported is earning the ire of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and others.
The state House kicked off the effort to study possible property tax cuts, launching a new committee to study options late last year. The state Senate has now followed suit, starting its own committee this month. Neither committee has so far suggested any new legislation; the Senate committee hasn’t even met.
The House committee, which has met several times, has been focused on hosting presentations by experts and academics on topics such as the history of property taxes, how other states handle them and what power the state legislature might or might not be able to flex in the realm of local government.