The DMV’s New Bern Avenue license plate office is moving later this year
When the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles headquarters leaves New Bern Avenue for Rocky Mount later this year, the local license plate office will also be moving, though not as far.
The state plans to lease space for the license plate agency in a shopping center off New Bern at New Hope Road, east of the Beltline. The office is one of six in Wake County where car and truck owners go to get a new license plate or to have their vehicle titled and registered.
The new office, in part of a former Kmart in the Wilders Grove Shopping Center, will eventually share space with a new driver’s license office.
The license plate office will open first, though no date has been set, said DMV spokesman Steve Abbott. There’s also no scheduled opening date for the new driver’s license office, which will become the seventh in Wake County after ones in North Raleigh, West Raleigh, Cary, Fuquay-Varina, Garner and Wendell.
The DMV offices will go in the Kmart’s old garden center, on the east end of the building at 4121 New Bern Ave. A Hamrick’s clothing store moved into part of the Kmart about seven years ago, but the east end has been empty since the Kmart closed about 17 years ago.
The state has agreed to lease about 20,000 square feet in the building and another 5,200 square feet of outside storage for 10 years, with two options to renew for five years each. The state will spend an average of $381,840 a year during the first decade of the lease.
The DMV is preparing to vacate its long-time home at the corner of New Bern Avenue and South Tarboro Street. The buildings there, which date back to the 1950s, have asbestos and fire safety problems that the state Department of Insurance and the State Construction Office agreed were too expensive to fix.
Lawmakers directed the agency to lease headquarters offices in Wake or a surrounding county. The lowest offer came from the owners of a complex on the north side of Rocky Mount that once served as home to the Hardees restaurant chain and later Centura Bank.
The agency is leasing about 139,000 square feet of office and warehouse space on the Rocky Mount campus for an average of $2,053,635 a year over the first 15 years, with options to renew the lease for an additional 10 years at higher rates.
DMV had planned to begin moving this summer to meet a deadline of Oct. 1 set by the General Assembly in 2018. Because of the disarray caused by the coronavirus outbreak, Secretary of Transportation Eric Boyette asked lawmakers to give DMV more time.
The coronavirus relief bill passed unanimously by the General Assembly and signed by Gov. Roy Cooper allows DMV to begin the headquarters move on Oct. 1 rather than complete it by that date.
The license plate agency on New Bern Avenue is the only one operated by the DMV and has been closed during the coronavirus outbreak. The other plate offices are operated by private contractors or local governments, and most have remained open.
This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 9:46 AM with the headline "The DMV’s New Bern Avenue license plate office is moving later this year."
