Public works provide structure for builders.

• Position: Construction

For the second straight year, government projects carried North Carolina's construction industry while the shaky economy kept higher-margin commercial ventures on the shelf. Most of the public projects came courtesy of the school bonds voters approved in 2000--$3.1 billion for the state university system and $1.2 billion for elementary and secondary schools.

Construction by the University of North Carolina system should continue to support the industry in the near term, says Dave Simpson, North Carolina building director for the Charlotte-based Carolinas Associated General Contractors. Over the next four years, UNC plans to seek bids totaling about $4.5 billion for construction and renovation. That figure includes money not provided by the bonds approved in 2000. Among other big public projects that will stoke the industry are the $350 million FedEx hub at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, a $250 million pro-basketball arena in downtown Charlotte and Unity Place, an $87 million project being developed by the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. It will include theaters, offices, town houses and a new headquarters for Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.

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The commercial sector probably won't rebound until late this year. Contractors just hope it happens that soon. Public-works projects helped Goldsborobased T.A. Loving through a difficult 2003 but didn't make up for a drought of commercial projects. CEO Sam Hunter says revenue fell 30% during the latest fiscal year. Loving has laid off about 75 since the beginning of 2002, leaving it with about 280 workers. The company has concentrated on utility and UNC-related projects. Otherwise, the pickings are slim in the eastern part of the state. "There have been projects to bid, but there have been so many competitors," he says.

The competition came from companies that moved into Eastern North Carolina during the late 1990s and early 2000 when commercial business was better. Now that things have slowed, some of those contractors are competing for T.A. Loving's core utility business and pushing down bids.

Things have been better in the Triangle. Chuck Wilson, president of Durham-based C.T. Wilson Construction, says his company expected revenue of nearly $23 million by the end of 2003, up from about $12 million in 1998, during the building boom. "We have been very fortunate. That's not true of everybody in the industry." He attributes some of his 51-year-old...