State wants refund for State Fair T-shirts

Raleigh, N.C. — The state Department of Agriculture has filed a complaint against a vendor who never delivered on an order for promotional T-shirts leading up to the North Carolina State Fair.

The company, Promo Guru, out of New York, was supposed to deliver 9,000 T-shirts by early October, but didn't because of a manufacturing mistake.

The state spent $30,000 to order the shirts from a local vendor – $13,000 more than the order the state placed with Promo Guru.

The agriculture department wants the company to pay the difference.

"If we could have gotten any T-shirt out of that company, we could have been in a good position," spokesman Brian Long said. " We never saw any T-shirts from that company. We didn’t know if the T-shirts were ever going to make it here, because we never saw box No. 1."