Highway plan is a bully in his china shop.

• Position: Planned road construction in Goldsboro, North Carolina, requires demolition of facilities of Replacements Ltd.owned by Bob Page

Bob Page, owner of Replacements Ltd., is busy these days trying to keep a bull out of his Greensboro china shop. The state, you see, has plans for his 2-year-old headquarters -- building a four-lane highway right through it.

Page is beyond trying to figure out how the N.C. Department of Transportation could have spent $1.2 million on an impact study without noticing that his building -- the size of two football fields -- lay directly in the path of the road's proposed intersection with Interstate 85.

"This makes no sense to me," says Page, who quit his job as an auditor for the state Department of Human Resources in March 1981 to start Replacements Ltd. Mainly a mail-order house, Replacements sold $16.5 million of discontinued crystal, china and silver last year. Page spent $7 million in 1990 to buy 80 acres and build his new warehouse, which he says draws $60,000 a month in walk-in traffic.

The state's defense is that construction on Page's building began about the same time engineers started looking at possible routes for the 39-mile Gate City beltway. Neither knew of the other's doings until it was too late, says J.T. Peacock Jr., chief engineer of the highway department's pre-construction division.

"I only learned that his...