After 40 years of complaints by residents stuck in congestion, the N.C. Department of Transportation has awarded a $249 million contract to widen N.C. 150 at Lake Norman.
“Our community has long awaited these enhancements, and we are committed to work with NCDOT as they oversee the construction,” state Sen. Vickie Sawyer, R-Iredell, said in a statement Thursday.
Sawyer and Mooresville town commissioner Lisa Qualls announced the awarding of the contract to Charlotte-based Blythe Development. The NCDOT Board in Raleigh approved the contract at its meeting Thursday morning.
Sawyer called the widening of the two-lane former farm-to-market route critical to alleviating chronic backups and improving safety “along one of the region’s most heavily traveled corridors.”
N.C. 150 was backed up at Interstate 77 Mooresville exit 36 as long ago as the late 1980s, but a member of the State Transportation Board from rural Cherryville in Gaston County got work started there first, a Charlotte Observer investigation in the early 1990s revealed.