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Midnight on Millhouse Road

Posted on December 3, 2009December 3, 2009 by Staff

Next Monday, the board of county commissioners are due to make a decision on the location of a solid-waste transfer station, a place where the bulk of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough and Orange County’s garbage will be collected and reloaded onto semi-trucks for shipment to parts as yet unknown.

To those on the inside of the decision, the choice is pretty clear — either a spot off N.C. 54 near Orange Grove Road or one just a half-mile from the current landfill and just a stone’s throw from an old construction landfill.

With the towns’ tight budgets and concerns about the distance and suitability of the N.C. 54 site in mind, several members of the board of commissioners appear inclined toward the Millhouse site.

We believe that not only is the decision itself a false choice, but that to choose the Millhouse Road site would make a mockery of public process in Orange County.

The two sites on the table were chosen through vastly different processes. The N.C. 54 site was picked after an extensive and expensive review using a wide range of criteria, including a minimum acreage of 25 acres, proximity to major roads, environmental concerns and the impact on the surrounding community. Millhouse came in over the transom.

Promised as part of a park, it sits just down the road from an area of the county landfill originally earmarked for the transfer station. That plan was rejected over environmental-justice concerns. Why the new site, the access to which would use the same roads, should be any different doesn’t make sense.

To those on the outside watching this decision, choosing Millhouse will look very different. At the 11th hour, the county changed the criteria and picked a site in the same lower-income historic black neighborhood it wanted in the first place, but that was eliminated from consideration by the criteria the board had approved. The same neighborhood that for years has been charted out of basic services despite repeated committees and task forces recommending some accommodation, some nod, that we owe something for three decades of noise and trucks and dust and stench and buzzards.

The hypocrisy of the state’s proud liberal bastion making such a move won’t be lost on people.

While the decision is in the county’s hands, the towns bear a responsibility for what happens.

Carrboro, to its credit, passed a resolution against the Millhouse site at its meeting Tuesday night. But save a lone council resolution opposing a Millhouse Road site, Chapel Hill has been strangely silent over the controversy unfolding right on its border. Contrast that with the Town of Hillsborough, which last year threatened to quickly annex the old weigh station on I-85 when it became a prospect.

This newspaper has published tens of thousands of words on the subject, and to us and, we suspect, to at least some of those on the board of commissioners, the reason to reject the Millhouse site is straightforward: Because it’s not right.
Should the county proceed along that course, it will invite resentment from within and ridicule and scorn from without.

3 thoughts on “Midnight on Millhouse Road”

  1. Mark Marcoplos says:
    December 4, 2009 at 4:43 am

    The county should decide to site its own landfill in an Economic Development District as the anchor of an Eco-Industrial Park that uses the resources of the waste stream. That being said, the Paydarfar site is not in the Rogers Road neighborhood. A transfre station is not a landfill & trucks could be routed in & out without affecting the Rogers Road neighborhood.

  2. Pingback: Midnight on Millhouse Road « Rogers-Eubanks Coalition
  3. Terri Buckner says:
    December 6, 2009 at 6:34 am

    To those of us who have lived in this community since the 1970s, the selection of the 54 site is also an issue of environmental injustice, an injustice grossly overlooked by local media. Many multi-generational farmers in that area lost their family farms to OWASA when the Cane Creek Reservoir was built. Now, in addition to the loss of their property, they are dealing with the severe health problems resulting from the land application of sewage sludge, a practice increasingly found to pollute ground water and, at least temporarily, the surrounding air.

    As a county, we have made a commitment to protecting our local farms, the production of healthy food, and reducing greenhouse gas generation. Selecting the 54 site will not only constitute an environmental injustice for the families in the Cane Creek region, but will totally counter those other environmental goals.

    The site selection was flawed. None of these considerations was recorded on the tally sheet used by the consultant, a point that has been made repeatedly at public meetings. Let’s stop focusing only on the rights of the Rogers Road community and look at this process in totality. Solving one problem to create several more is not sustainable governance.

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