ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 5, 1997 TAG: 9702050086
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEDFORD
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
GRAYSON ELECTRONICS' workers can't get to their new workplace until a railroad warning system is installed.
Grayson Electronics Co. and its sister company, Allen Telecom Systems, could move as planned later this month into their new building in Forest, but their 175 employees wouldn't be able to get to jobs there.
The problem is a barrier - or actually the lack of one.
Vista Centre Drive, a $348,000 four-lane industrial access road built mostly with state funds, leads from U.S. 221 to the building Grayson will occupy at Lake Vista Corporate Centre. The road crosses railroad tracks owned by Norfolk Southern Corp.; but because there's no crossing signal at the tracks yet, motorists can't legally cross.
The Virginia Department of Transportation has given Grayson permission to bring its moving trucks to the building via a connecting private road that also crosses the tracks. But for safety reasons, it won't allow Grayson's employees to drive on either road without a permanent signal at the tracks. NS says it won't be able to put a signal gate at the Vista Centre Drive crossing before late March.
"Here's the big problem - if [VDOT] allows me to move my stuff in there, that's fine for the move; but Monday morning, I've got to have 175 employees move their vehicles in. How do they do that?" asked Dave Cushman, Grayson's senior vice president.
"I can move in, but I can't have my employees go to work, so what's the use?"
"If I can't have my employees go to work Monday morning, then I'm not going to move," he said.
"We've got a real problem," said Bedford County Administrator Bill Rolfe. "We've got a business that wants to go to work, and it's being prevented from going to work [because] I don't have a road for them to get to work."
Grayson, a subsidiary of the Allen Telecom Group in Cleveland, manufactures, designs, and sells signal-extending equipment and components for cellular phone carriers. It bought the 60,000-square-foot shell building from a group of local nonprofit economic development corporations. The $740,000 deal last spring included surrounding property that was part of Grayson's planned 30-job expansion. Because of moving delays and lack of space at its current facilities in Greenstone Industrial Park in Forest, it now has some employees working in temporary warehouse space.
Grayson won't lose orders or money because of the delays, Cushman said, but it's "a tremendous inconvenience."
The state first approved building the road in June 1995. When Grayson purchased the building, VDOT expected to have the access completed by the end of 1996, so the company could move into the building in December. Wet weather delayed the road's construction. Recently, Grayson, VDOT engineers, and county officials met and determined that the road project could be completed this month if NS got the railroad crossing in place.
Rolfe and Sue Gilbert, county economic development director, said they told NS that Grayson hoped to begin moving into the building in February, and while the railroad gave them no specific date for the crossing's completion, they believed that NS would meet the deadline.
This week, however, NS said it would begin construction on the crossing signal gate March 17, and it would be complete about March31.
Some of the parties involved see the delay as the railroad's fault, but NS spokeswoman Susan Terpay said the crossing is actually ahead of schedule. "We're certainly not trying to slow this company from moving in or opening for business," she said. For one thing, just ordering the swinging crossing signal arm can take up to four months because it must be manufactured.
NS installed more than 350 railroad crossings last year, Terpay said, and the average wait for those projects was about a year. In comparison, the Vista Centre Drive crossing, requested last August, will have taken just seven months if it is completed in March.
LENGTH: Medium: 74 linesby CNB