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Senate budget orders DHHS headquarters out of Raleigh to Granville County

The proposed move and $250 million to pay for it surprised the department and the Governor's Office.

Posted Updated

By
Travis Fain
, WRAL statehouse reporter, & Laura Leslie, WRAL Capitol Bureau chief
RALEIGH, N.C. — The state Department of Health and Human Services headquarters would move from the Dorothea Dix campus in Raleigh to Granville County under a plan floated in the Senate budget proposal released Tuesday.

The budget includes $250 million for the move, which caught the department and Gov. Roy Cooper's administration by surprise.

Granville County offered to donate land for the project in a letter that went to Cooper, DHHS Secretary Dr. Mandy Cohen and a number of legislators within hours of the budget's release. County Manager Michael Felts pitched a business and industrial park called Triangle North Granville, which is near Interstate 85 and Oxford.

County commissioners plan an emergency meeting on the project Wednesday at 5 p.m. Felts said Wednesday morning that the good news took him by surprise Tuesday and that county officials scrambled to put together a response.

Sen. Brent Jackson, R-Sampson, one of the Senate's lead budget writers, said the initial plan was to move DHHS to Butner, where the state owns land around Central Regional Hospital. He said he learned last week that the county might donate land in the business park, and the language was broadened to Granville County, allowing for both possibilities.

"I just want to get it out of Raleigh," Jackson said. "I just really think folks need to start looking outside the larger municipalities and trying to put some of these jobs that they can in these rural counties that could use the growth. I think that's very key. I sort of say it's sort of like spreading all the good things around."

He said he didn't discuss the provision with DHHS before putting it in the budget.

DHHS spokeswoman Kelly Haight Connor said the budget provision caught the agency off guard.

"We are only aware of relocation options in Raleigh that have been discussed with the General Assembly," Haight Connor said in an email to WRAL News. "There are several proposed provisions in the Senate budget that impact the department’s ability to fulfill its mission to protect the health and safety of all North Carolinians and provide essential human services."

Felts said in his letter Tuesday that the DHHS headquarters would be the park's first tenant and that the state would have wide latitude in selecting a location within the park's 527 acres.

The Dix campus was sold to the city of Raleigh in 2015 and is to become a park, necessitating a move by 2025, but DHHS leaders had hoped to move to land the state already owns on Blue Ridge Road in Raleigh. Jackson said that's expensive real estate that "can be better used."

"I personally do not think all the state agencies need to be located here in downtown," he said. "My opinion has always been, let's move some of this job growth into these rural counties that really need the help, and to me, I'm all about trying to do what I can for rural."

The Senate budget orders the move to Granville County with just a few sentences hundreds of pages into the spending proposal, saying the state "shall select land located in Granville County suitable for the relocation of the Department of Health and Human Services facilities at the Dix Campus in Raleigh." Another part of the budget authorizes $250 million to build a new facility.

The move would cover at least 1,800 employees working on the Dix campus and could include thousands more who work in Raleigh at satellite locations.

Seventy-five percent of DHHS employees live in Wake County, and Rep. Cynthia Ball, D-Wake, said moving the office an hour from Raleigh would be a huge loss locally.

"We're not quite sure exactly how many – 4,000 to 5,000 people are employed at Wake County at both the Dix property as well as some of the auxiliary places – so if all of those move out of Wake, that's maybe as many as 5,000 jobs [lost] in Wake County."

The Governor's Office said Tuesday that it was not consulted about the proposal, which Jackson confirmed Wednesday. The budget language was first reported by The News & Observer.

This language doesn't appear in the House's budget proposal, and it is not final. The Senate plans to vote its budget through this week, then negotiate differences with the House before sending a spending plan to the governor, who could sign or veto it.

The State Employees Association of North Carolina was not happy with the proposed move, which came to light on the same day the group's executive director stood with Senate leaders at a press conference to praise salary increases included in the budget proposal.

SEANC government relations director Ardis Watkins said in a statement that the new commute would cause the state to lose "many well-trained career employees" and increase congestion on already busy roads.

"We cannot imagine that citizens traveling those roads on a daily basis now would appreciate this," Watkins said in the statement.

In his letter, Felts told state leaders that Vance-Granville Community College is 5 miles away from the park, offering courses in health sciences and human services that could help produce potential employees. Felts also said that J.F. Webb High School in Oxford offers college-level courses in biomedical engineering and medical sciences.

DHHS oversees a range of health services in North Carolina, including Medicaid, mental health, substance abuse treatment, disease prevention, social services, pre-kindergarten and other early education programs and services for the blind, deaf, hard of hearing and elderly.

If the language is approved in a final budget, DHHS would become the second state agency to move out of Raleigh. The state Division of Motor Vehicles plans a move to Rocky Mount, a change supported by both the governor and the legislature.

This year's House and Senate budget proposals both include funding for the DMV move, which SEANC has also opposed on behalf of agency employees.

"This continues the precedent that we don't want to continue of moving state offices remotely from the capital city, which is where the government is," Ball said.

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