Orange County residents continue to protest waste transfer site

Residents of the Rogers Road and Eubanks neighborhoods want to make sure their plea to elected officials doesn't fall on deaf ears.

"Most of us feel we're not being heard," resident Bonnie Norwood said. "We just aren't getting a strong feel that what we're saying is going to make a difference."

Norwood and her neighbors are fighting a proposed waste-transfer site to be built on Eubanks Road.

The Orange County Board of Commissioners approved the site in March after searching for potential locations since 2000. Commissioners say the Eubanks location was "regretfully" the most feasible.

Thursday, more than 40 residents supporting the newly formed Rogers-Eubanks Coalition to End Environmental Racism attended the Assembly of Governments meeting.

The meeting among Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County elected officials usually is not open for public comment. In an unprecedented move, the assembly allowed one representative to speak: Neloa Jones.

"In spite of the fact that Orange County prides itself on being aggressively opposed to social and environmental injustice," she said, "it has refused to honor decades of broken promises made to the Rogers-Eubanks community."

Jones said then-Mayor Howard Lee convinced the community in 1972 to accept a landfill in the neighborhood by promising that the landfill would close after 10 years. The landfill still is open.

The coalition believes the subsequent construction of solid and industrial waste landfills, in addition to the yard and hazardous collection sites and the recycling center, have broken Lee's promise. They want the county to halt all solid-waste activities in the neighborhood by November 2009.

Some believe the neighborhood has been targeted because it is a predominantly black, low-income area.

"No one else wanted it, and we don't have the money to fight it," Norwood said.

Norwood, who moved to the Rogers Road neighborhood in 1986 and serves on the county's Solid Waste Advisory Board and on the Rogers Road Task Force, said the neighborhood has more concerns than the transfer site. She said residents didn't have enough say in the construction of a town garage, animal shelter and school. Norwood said Jones' plea will impact officials.

"The standing ovation she received had as much of an impact if not more than Ms. Jones' individual speech," she said. "I'm sure there's heartfelt compassion."

Stanley Jones, Neloa's husband, said he wants the town to take the neighborhood's concerns to heart.

"The boards always want to do what they want to do," he said. "We're going to make them understand."

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