
{"id":8262,"date":"2009-12-03T10:50:36","date_gmt":"2009-12-03T18:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=8262"},"modified":"2009-12-03T10:51:36","modified_gmt":"2009-12-03T18:51:36","slug":"midnight-on-millhouse-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2009\/12\/03\/midnight-on-millhouse-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Midnight on Millhouse Road"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s garbage will be collected and reloaded onto semi-trucks for shipment to parts as yet unknown.<\/p>\n<p>To those on the inside of the decision, the choice is pretty clear \u00e2\u20ac\u201d 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s throw from an old construction landfill.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>With the towns\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make sense.  <\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The hypocrisy of the state\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s proud liberal bastion making such a move won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be lost on people.<\/p>\n<p>While the decision is in the county\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hands, the towns bear a responsibility for what happens.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not right.<br \/>\nShould the county proceed along that course, it will invite resentment from within and ridicule and scorn from without.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s garbage will be collected and reloaded onto semi-trucks for shipment to parts as yet unknown. To those on the inside of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8262"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8264,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8262\/revisions\/8264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}