City waits as Ingles stays mum on reopening timeline

Step through the dusty, grimy front glass doors of Ingles in Morganton and a visitor is greeted by an interior that appears a long way from being ready for customers.

Birds chip from the metal rafters. Large sections of concrete flooring are missing exposing electrical wires and PVC piping. Freezer doors hang open. Large mounds of dirt sit next to carved up flooring. Cables and light fixtures hang from the ceiling. Sections of plywood cover gaping holes in the concrete floor.

The eastern half of the store, where a Bakery sign still hangs, looks as if it is in a state of demolition, not renovation. The western half of the store’s interior, where local shoppers visited the pharmacy, wine and beer, and dairy products, is more organized with rows of new shelving still in cartons awaiting installation.

Plastic sheeting hangs from the ceiling near shelves in the wine section, which earlier in the week was stocked with hundreds of unopened bottles.

Recent passersby on Carbon City Road have noticed the seven or eight private vehicles parked close to the front doors. Inside the store earlier this week, a dozen Ingles employees, clad in the corporate garb of a white shirt and name tags, were removing hundreds of dirty and unopened bottles of wines and spirits from shelves, wiping them off, organizing them into cartons, and then carting the goods off to a section in the back of the store.

To the visitor, it appeared that the wine inventory had not been touched since the popular grocer closed its store in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

By the looks of things, a visitor could understandably conclude the Morganton Ingles is no closer to reopening than it was early last year.

And every month it is closed costs thousands of dollars in sales tax revenue for Morganton, according to calculations.

The Ingles employees inside spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they did not have approval from Ingles Corporate in Black Mountain to comment publicly.

“We will reopen,” one manager said while his coworkers cleaned and inventoried wine bottles. What’s the delay? He was asked. Ingles’ construction contractor, he said, began demolition and renovation work last year without proper permitting and was fired. That gave Ingles corporate the opportunity to revisit the layout design, extending the reopening date.

And the schedule? “No idea,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. He referred the questions to Corporate.

Executives at Ingles Corporation did not respond to email and telephone requests for additional information.

In December 2024, Ingles applied for a building permit to alter its interior layout beyond storm damage repairs. By Dec. 31, Ingles had submitted all required materials, and the city reviewed and approved the plans on Jan. 6, 2025, three business days later. The only remaining step was payment of the $1,845.27 permit fee.

Ingles and the contractor told the city that Ingles would pay. Because the city wanted to support a local business reopening after Helene, officials allowed work to begin before the fee was received.

“However, after multiple attempts by the city to collect on the payment, the city’s chief building inspector attended the site on Feb. 19, 2025, and met with an Ingles representative,” said Jonelle Sigmon, Morganton’s public information officer. “The Ingles representative told the inspector that Ingles had the check for payment; however, instead of providing the payment to the City, Ingles requested that the City post the property with a stop works order. The contractor offered to pay for the permit, but Ingles refused to allow the contractor to do so.”

The Ingles representative told Morganton’s inspector that the company had the check, but wanted to make additional plan changes that would require a new building permit anyway, Sigmon said.

City officials said routine maintenance and other work that does not require a permit, such as cleanup and refrigeration maintenance, can still continue at the site.

“The City last heard from Ingles approximately in the middle of 2025,” Sigmon said. “At that time, Ingles indicated that Ingles would contact the City when Ingles was ready to resume work on the building.”

“City staff has made it abundantly clear that we are willing to work with Ingles,” Sigmon said. “They are certainly an important business in the community.”

Ingles managers have said that its Morganton sales volume was about $3 million per month. Most grocery food items sold at Ingles in North Carolina are charged a 2% local sales tax (the state doesn’t charge its main sales tax on basic groceries), according to the N.C. Department of Revenue (NCDOR). On $3 million in grocery sales in a month, that works out to about $60,000 in local sales tax collected.

But the City of Morganton doesn’t get all of that $60,000. The money is pooled at the county level and then shared out among local governments, according to the NCDOR’s Sales & Use Distribution Report.

Based on the state’s current distribution formula, Morganton’s share is about 14.8% of that local sales tax.

Tax revenues lost from Ingles’ closure in Morganton totals roughly $8,900 per month from $3 million in taxable grocery sales, or about $107,000 per year.

“On the topic of sales tax, the City has not seen a decline in sales tax, just a reduction in the amount of year-over-year growth,” Sigmon said. “This decline is happening statewide. As a portion of local sales taxes are tied to local sales, the belief is people are shopping at other locations locally for their groceries.”