Chapel Hill council ignores county request

The county manager asked the Chapel Hill Town Council for cooperation. She didn't get it.

No council member would even make a motion Monday night when asked to speed up the review process for a proposed solid-waste transfer station on Eubanks Road, at the current site of the county landfill.

County officials expect the Orange County landfill to fill up by the end of 2010. The county plans to send local garbage to another landfill, probably in southern Virginia.

"I am strongly against the concept of transferring our garbage to somebody else's back yard," said council member Jim Ward.

The county's request for "expedited review" was buried in the council's consent agenda, normally a list of noncontroversial items that need only a rubber stamp from the council.

Ward asked to pull the item from the consent agenda for a full discussion, but there was no debate. When Mayor Kevin Foy asked for a motion to approve the request, in accord with a recommendation from the town's planning staff, the council members were silent.

"Well, that sure isn't a consent agenda item, is it?" said council member Mark Kleinschmidt.

"There's no motion?" Foy pressed. "Well, all right, then I guess we'll move on."

County Manager Laura Blackmon had argued for the quick review on the grounds that the project was already delayed while the county responded to neighborhood concerns.

Without any more "substantive delays," she wrote, the transfer station could be ready by early 2010, leaving some landfill capacity for special circumstances such as disposal of dead animals or costly hauling and dumping fees for the off-site landfill.

But that's exactly why Ward opposes the idea of a remote landfill.

"I think we'll one day be held hostage by the haulers or the regional landfill," he said.

Town planners endorsed Blackmon's request because the project serves a public goal and because it would include energy-efficiency elements favored by the council.

In any case, they wrote in a memo to the council, a normal review would take 11 to 17 months, and there are so many projects in the pipeline that an expedited review would not be much shorter.