‘We’re still here.’ Last workers in old DMV headquarters in Raleigh prepare to leave
More than three years after the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles moved its headquarters from Raleigh to Rocky Mount, a handful of DMV employees still work in the basement of one of the agency’s otherwise empty buildings on New Bern Avenue.
This spring, they’ll finally be moving out, too.
The seven DMV employees work in the agency’s mailroom, which handles more than 20 million pieces a year, including vehicle stickers, insurance letters and registration and license renewal notices. They’re joined by four contractors from Xerox who print many of those materials before they are mailed out.
The DMV left the workers behind in Raleigh so they could remain near the state Mail Service Center, says spokesman Marty Homan. The mail center handles letters and packages for state and local government agencies across North Carolina, and the DMV is its biggest customer, according to Burketta Slobodzian, acting director of support services for the N.C. Department of Transportation.
The center recently moved from its long-timehome on the west side of Raleigh to a rented warehouse on Chapanoke Road, south of downtown. That’s where the workers from the DMV building will move, likely in April, Homan said.
They’ll be the last of hundreds of workers to leave a DMV complex the city is buying from the state for $20 million. The city plans to demolish the older of the two buildings this year as it begins exploring how to redevelop the nearly 6-acre site along the planned New Bern Avenue bus rapid transit line.
The workers still in the building feel a little forgotten, says Slobodzian, who has worked in the mailroom for 23 years. When news reports describe the DMV site as empty, she wants to yell out, “No, it’s not. We’re still here.”
Still, Slobodzian says everyone is looking forward to moving to the mail center.
“We’re excited,” she said. “It’s clean. Above ground. Pest free. And the building’s not abandoned.”
By pests Slobodzian mostly means rats, though they’ve encountered the occasional bat and black snake as well.
Buildings the state decided couldn’t be saved
The mailroom is in the basement of the older and larger of the two DMV buildings, completed in 1957 and expanded in 1966. The ceilings are low; there’s little natural light, and the heating and air conditioning comes from portable units just outside.
Letters, notices and other documents printed on the Xerox machines here and in Rocky Mount are loaded onto machines that in a blink fold each sheet and slip them into envelopes that are sorted and loaded onto pallets to be sent to the mail center. The steady click of the machines marks the team’s progress toward about 1.8 million pieces of mail a month.
“Good news and bad news, going out,” says Amir Hasheminejad, the mailroom supervisor.
By pre-sorting the mail, the DMV gets a special rate from the U.S. Postal Service, Hasheminejad said, saving 14 cents per standard envelope, or more than $2 million a year.
In addition to better working conditions, moving to the Mail Service Center will be more efficient, eliminating trips across town by truck.
The mailroom and print shop workers are the last DMV employees in a pair of buildings plagued by asbestos and fire safety problems that the state determined were too expensive to fix. In 2018, the General Assembly directed NCDOT to seek leased space for the DMV headquarters in “Wake County and surrounding counties.” The cheapest offer came from the owners of the former Hardee’s headquarters in Rocky Mount in Nash County, which just touches Wake near Zebulon.
City officials would like to see the New Bern Avenue site remade with a mix of affordable and market-rate housing on the new BRT line, along with services such as a day-care center. The city plans to hold a series of public meetings this year to find out what the community would like to see built there.
