Work on Atlantic Avenue project stopped, and now Raleigh is firing the contractor
The company the city hired to rebuild a section of Atlantic Avenue has done little work on the project since last winter, and the City Council voted Tuesday to terminate the $9.6 million contract.
The city chose JSmith Civil LLC of Goldsboro to overhaul a one-mile stretch of Atlantic between Highwoods Boulevard and New Hope Church Road, just north of the Beltline. The project calls for widening the existing lanes, adding more turn lanes and building a grassy median down the center and a 10-foot multi-use path down the west side.
The company and its subcontractors began clearing trees and moving dirt in the spring of 2022 and were supposed to be substantially finished by this Christmas. As of Tuesday, 80% of the contract time had passed, but the company had completed only about 19.5% of the work, according to Sylvester Percival, the city’s manager of roadway design and construction.
The city notified JSmith Civil in June that it was considering declaring the company in default of its contract after months of minimal work. Since then, Percival wrote in a memo to the City Council, the company “has performed no work other than incidental site maintenance requested by the city and has provided the city with no indication of an intention to continue prosecuting the contract work.”
Westfield Insurance, the bonding company that JSmith Civil hired to ensure the project gets finished, has begun reviewing potential contractors to complete the work, according to Richard Kelly, the city’s Engineering Services director. In July, Westfield representatives told the city that the firm “does not envision JSmith Civil moving forward with the project and that Westfield was actively engaged in efforts to make a transition to a replacement contractor,” Kelly wrote in a memo to the City Council.
It’s not clear when work will resume or when the project will be completed, Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said.
“The contractor has not kept their end of the deal,” Baldwin said in an interview. “So we are back at square one. And our staff is looking at how we move forward.”
Baldwin said it’s rare for a city contractor to not complete a job.
“When people work with the city, the contractors want repeat business,” she said. “So 99 times out of 100 they are gonna give it their all and try to get the job done.”
NCDOT road projects left unfinished as well
JSmith Civil has also stopped work on at least three projects with the N.C. Department of Transportation in April. They included the rebuilding of a 1.3-mile stretch of Dickinson Avenue in Greenville, a section of which was left barricaded when work stopped, according to The Daily Reflector newspaper.
JSmith Civil returned to finish that section in mid-May so the road could open to traffic, according to NCDOT spokeswoman Lauren Haviland. No work was done after that, and the department is working with the bonding company to find a replacement contractor to complete the project.
The two other NCDOT projects JSmith Civil left in limbo were on U.S. 117 in Wayne County and U.S. 17 in Brunswick County. Another contractor has taken on the U.S. 17 project, and work started again last month, Haviland said. The U.S. 117 work remains suspended.
Jeremy Smith founded the company that would become JSmith Civil in 2016. It grew to more than 200 employees, according to its website, with offices in Goldsboro and Raleigh.
Efforts to reach Smith or anyone else at the company were unsuccessful.
