DELAYED FLIGHT.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Global TransPark - Statistical Data Included

After a decade, the Global TransPark is ready to get off the ground. But critics still say the project will never fly.

Billowy clouds shroud the horizon in every direction, making the sky over Ormond's Mart, on the western edge of Wayne County, look larger than life. Farmers fill up their trucks at battered old pumps as tufts of cotton blow like tiny tumbleweeds across U.S. 70. Kinston, says a sign just down the highway, 33 miles. Welcome, says another, you are now entering the Global TransPark Development Zone.

"You're looking at an area that's as rural and poor as it gets," Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue says, referring to Eastern North Carolina. The New Bern Democrat adds: "We're the poorest of the poor down here."

Ten years have flown by since the state launched the Global TransPark to change that. Prosperity was going to descend from the sky in the form of a $285 million air cargo industrial complex. A widely distributed illustration showed 13 jumbo jets clustered around a futuristic terminal at the Kinston airport. Pharmaceuticals, aerospace equipment, electronics. Value-added, just-in-time manufacturing. Fat paychecks. The microchip that lands in the morning flies out that night in an assembled computer.

Now, the clock that began ticking a decade ago is starting to wind down. Despite an investment of $78.2 million -- $52.5 million from the state and $25.7 million from the feds -- grass grows in the airport parking lot. The TransPark, with incentives that have included free rent and tax breaks, has attracted just two tenants, bringing barely 200 jobs -- not the thousands proponents once promised. It has drawn national attention -- but not the kind supporters want: NBC Nightly News featured the project as part of its "Fleecing of America" series, describing it as "blue-sky wishful thinking." Syndicated newspaper columnist Neal Peirce dubbed it "a nutty idea." Homegrown critics, who have called it everything from the Global Trailer Park to Global TransPork, are growing louder and bolder.

Even some of the people it was intended to help have lost faith. On a roadside adjoining the airport stands a sign: Industrial Land -- Utilities Accessible. Reginald Sutton, whose family has owned the land since 1919, planted it not long after the TransPark selected its site in May 1992. He recently painted over the first two digits of the price listed --$32,000 an acre -- leaving a dollar sign and three zeroes. Sutton, who lives in Raleigh, says he'd settle for half of what he once wanted. "The only interest in the TransPark has been from the government," he says. "It's been all paper and talk. To tell you the truth, it's a dismal damned failure."

And that interest seems to be waning. In a recent survey of the General Assembly's 170 members, more than half of the 78 who responded favor killing it -- fewer than a third are steadfast in their support. "We should have known it was in trouble when a Democratic governor began giving a Republican governor credit for it," says Rep. Drew Saunders, a Mecklenburg County Democrat who chairs the House Transportation Committee. His panel is among those that must make some key decisions about the TransPark's future -- it needs $3 million to operate this year, plus $3.5 million to match federal commitments.

With the national economy slowing and the state facing a nearly $800 million budget shortfall, politicians all across North Carolina are squirming. "Obviously, right now it's not working out like we hoped," says House minority leader Leo Daughtry, a Johnston County Republican who supports the project. "We've spent millions of dollars in public and private money on it, but there's going to come a time when we have to decide whether to go forward." That time may be approaching. "We've got citizens and lots of our legislators asking when we're going to quit throwing money down a sinkhole," says Rep. Nelson Cole, the Rockingham County Democrat who chairs the Transportation Appropriations Committee. "It's time somebody put up or shut up."

It's not so much what's been put up as what's been put down, the TransPark's defenders say. That includes the 80,000 dump-truck loads of dirt moved to extend the stubby World War II runway from 7,600 to 11,500 feet, long enough to land cargo jets. The millions of dollars spent on master plans, environmental studies and creation of a Foreign Trade Zone to cut through red tape for international shipping. "We've done all the studies, we've made the investments, and now we're near the end of the rainbow," says Paul Busick, the retired Coast Guard admiral hired in 1998 as the $140,000-a-year president and executive director of the Global TransPark Authority. His mantra: The factories will come soon. Something big is just over the horizon. We're talking to a Fortune 100 company.

The skeptics say they've heard that for years, and all the TransPark has to show for its efforts are two companies recruited from elsewhere in the state and a $6.5 million training center, completed last year. US Airways Express discontinued its four daily flights 18 months ago. Last year, the airport averaged 84 operations -- a takeoff or a landing -- a day. Some were military and civilian pilots practicing "touch-and-go" landings, each of which counted as two.

What went wrong? Environmental studies dragged on from July 1994 to September 1998, though the original feasibility study in 1991 and the 1994 master plan raised questions about the TransPark's impact -- the latter, specifically, on 2,600 acres north of the Neuse River and 871 acres of wetlands next to the...