waste transfer station
Have y'all seen the web site that the County's consultant set up about the new site search process? At the Orange County Transfer Station Siting Website, visitors can find background, details on the siting criteria, and upcoming meetings.. This is a good start and represents an improvement on the amount of information previously available.
My wishes are that:
- They would provide a syndicated feed so that we can follow updates to the site without having to visit each page every day to see whether there's something new.
- The COUNTY ought to provide this kind of information on it's own website, since this is the people's information, and should do this for more projects. Of course, the Towns should do this as well.
The County Commissioners are starting the new search process to site a proposed waste transfer station, just as they received official notice of an environmental justice complaint filed with the EPA in 2007 by the landfill neighbors.
Before getting to the search the board met in closed session to discuss a newly received notification from the Environmental Protection Agency Office of Civil Rights that a formal complaint had been filed.
The complaint alleges racial discrimination on the part of the county, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, the Orange Water and Sewer Authority and the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
County Attorney Geoff Gledhill said officials will not publicly discuss Eubanks Road until they decide on the board's response.
To avoid similar protests this time, the board will serve as the search committee but will work with Olver Inc., a Charlotte-based consulting firm that specializes in environmental issues and waste facilities.
At their meeting tonight, the Board of Orange County Commissioners (BOCC) will getting an update on the process of siting as waste transfer station to ship our garbage out of the county. It looks like they might be deciding on the Eubanks site, or they could decide to look at other sites, or maybe even re-open the search.
The Manager recommends that the Board receive the attached information and provide staff with additional comments or direction regarding a final decision on a transfer station location. Should the Board wish to further consider one of the two Highway 70 candidate sites, staff will prepare a detailed assessment of the site, including the scheduling of a community meeting and other opportunities for community input into the search process, and arrange a transfer station tour for interested residents of the Highway 70/Eno DD area.
- Action agenda item abstract (PDF).
This is an issue I've been wanting to write about for a while, but it's been hard to start. I have been a supporter of the Rogers Road neighbors for 10-15 years. It may have been as far back as my college days, when I wrote my senior thesis on environmental racism, that I first met Rev. Robert Campbell and learned about the repeated violations of the local governments' promise to the residents of this historic African-American neighborhood.
As was thoroughly documented in a recent Chapel Hill News editorial by Aarne Veslind, our current landfill on Eubanks Road was built in 1972 with assurances to the neighbors that it would only operate for a fixed period of time and that no additional waste management facilities would be located in the neighborhood. Guess what happened?
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