Wake School Board Buys Land in Cary for Transportation Facility
Cary, NC – The Wake County Public School System has amended plans from opening a transportation center in Apex, now buying $13 million worth of land in Cary for a facility to store buses and repair damaged buses off of Piney Plains Road.
The newly purchased land is around 29 acres at 1660 Piney Plains Road, a former Crossroads Ford repair and maintenance center.
There are no specific plans for the new Cary site yet but the Apex plan included a 60,000 square foot maintenance building, a 19,000 square foot operations building and 262 parking spaces for Wake County school buses. The Apex site is 23 acres, located off Optimist Farm Road, near Middle Creek High School.
Plans are not yet finalized, as the Cary site is only under contract and WCPSS could still go back to the Apex center, according to Betty Parker, WCPSS senior director of real estate services.
“We’ve only put it under contract, so we have to complete the due diligence process and then weigh costs and benefits of continuing with Middle Creek versus pursuing an option that could provide us a facility a year sooner and less expensively,” Parker said.
If WCPSS continues with the Apex plan, their projected start time to lay down the parking lot would be 2022. Since the Cary property was already a repair and maintenance center, opening there may take less time.
“It’s a large eight parking lot area that has the potential to accommodate the bus storage we were seeking at Middle Creek and a large repair facility that’s larger than we planned to build at Middle Creek,” Parker said. “So it’s an opportunity to consider an option that may deliver a more cost-effective solution.”
The cost for the Apex transportation hub was estimated to be around $29 million.
Story by staff reports. Photos courtesy of the Wake County Public School System.
