After years of planning, searching for property and securing funding, the Cape Fear Public Transportation Authority (Wave Transit) broke ground for construction of the transit system's new Operations and Maintenance facility on Thursday, May 23, just north of Wilmington. A contract in the amount of $8.9 million for construction of the Operations Center was awarded to Clancy & Theys Construction Co. on April 25. The groundbreaking took place at the future site of the operations center at 1480 Castle Hayne Road.“Although the process of constructing this important public transportation infrastructure has taken longer than we anticipated, we are confident that the end result will be an environmentally-friendly facility that will take advantage of the current construction market and provide our employees a safe environment for maintaining the investment we have in our fleet of buses and vans,” said Cape Fear Public Transportation Authority Chairman David Scheu. “This project will also create hundreds of jobs in the local community and remove an industrial bus garage from the residential Bottom neighborhood off of Castle Street.”
The facility is primarily funded by the Federal Transit Administration through their State of Good Repair initiative. Additional funding is being secured from NCDOT and local financial support is being provided by utilizing the value of the property as matching funds. In addition to creating a safer and more responsible maintenance and operations center, the facility will include a compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling station and the Authority plans to begin introducing CNG buses shortly after the facility is complete.
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