A new request for redevelopment proposals for city-owned property on Castle Street could be coming to the Wilmington City Council by March. The council voted unanimously Tuesday night to allow the city's staff to come up with the new RFP for 1110 Castle St. after the only proposal submitted for the 2019 request was withdrawn in December. At issue is a former Wave ...

Live Nation is requesting 10 additional shows for the 2022 concert season at Live Oak Bank Pavilion.  The inaugural season ended last month with 19 shows (Lake Street Dive, the last Live Nation event of the season, canceled the day of, citing plans to reschedule that have yet to be announced). Under the city of Wilmington’s 10-year management contract wi ...

A local development team hoping to transform a defunct property on Castle Street into a mixed-use project has dropped its plans, but officials at another Wilmington company hope to fill the void.  Clark Hipp, a Wilmington-based architect, and his partners “couldn’t meet the city’s requirements” to make their proposal feasible for the former ...

Repairs to a major leak on a transmission main that delivers raw water to hundreds of thousands of customers in the Cape Fear region are nearly complete.   The roughly $2.3 million emergency fix is replacing about 200 feet of a ‘90s-era 48-inch ductile iron pipe owned by the Lower Cape Fear Water and Sewer Authority (LCFWASA), the region’s raw wate ...

The city of Wilmington hired Joe Conway as its first chief equity and inclusion officer, according to an announcement Tuesday.  His first day is Jan. 18 Conway comes to the city from Novant Health/New Hanover Regional Medical Center, where he has worked since 2007 and was named director of health equity and human experience in 2017, a city news re ...

After just one year at Tier 2, New Hanover and Brunswick counties return to Tier 3 status, the least economically distressed ranking designated by the N.C. Department of Commerce.   New Hanover and Brunswick were long categorized as Tier 3 until being downgraded to Tier 2 in 2021, prompted by pandemic-induced metric shifts. Tier 2 indicates moderate economic distres ...

Design of the nCino Sports Complex is complete, with the bidding process to construct the multi-million dollar facility beginning in the coming weeks.  Donated in 2019 to the city of Wilmington by the Wilmington Hammerheads FC, the hometown youth soccer club, the 64-acre site for the complex was once a landfill. The donation put in place a partnership that will lik ...

An unnamed company is considering bringing 1,000 new jobs to land owned by Pender County. Monday, Pender County Commissioners accepted a $500,000 grant from the North Carolina-based Golden Leaf Foundation – the largest amount the nonprofit has ever awarded through its Open Grants Program. The funds will be used to remediate Pender County’s old BASF vita ...

Design plans to get utilities in the ground at New Hanover County’s 120-acre Blue Clay Business Park are anticipated soon, setting the framework for a project that is expected to be complete by summer 2022.  Plans will be turned over “within the next several weeks” according to the county’s chief strategy officer, Jennifer Rigby. “We a ...

Nearly eight years have passed since New Hanover County last ordered a comprehensive analysis of its economic development landscape. A revisited, yet briefer version of the 2014 Garner Economics report has been quietly underway this year, with delivery set for February 2022.   Robin Spinks of Greenfield Development Company is leading the task al ...