Possible airport worries rural Orange County residents

WHITE CROSS -- Cliff Leath stands in the tack room of his and wife Lynn's barn.

A chestnut brown horse pokes its head out of its stall. A black and white barn cat leaps down from a beam, nuzzling its head into Leath's hands.

The Leaths bought 32 acres off Orange Chapel Hill Clover Garden Road in 1993. They handpicked every tree they took down for their house and barn to keep the land thick with hardwoods. Four deer graze along the long, gravel driveway.

They didn't think about losing their property until Leath ran into White Cross neighbor Warren Ray at the recycling center. Ray raises beef cattle on land his wife's family has lived on since the Civil War.

"I said, Warren, how are you?" Leath recalled.

"He said, 'I'm just devastated.

"The university's going to take my land, and they're going to take your land too."

The Leaths, Rays and other families live on Site H west of Carrboro in southwest Orange County's White Cross community. A 2005 report by university consultants Talbert & Bright ranked it a top location for a new Orange County airport.

Not much happened after that report, which university officials say exists only in a Powerpoint presentation. Neighbors say they went on with their lives.

Then state lawmakers passed a bill last summer authorizing the UNC system to establish an airport authority.

The 15-member panel will have the power to site, build and operate a general aviation airport in Orange County. It will have the power of eminent domain, the ability to take private property for the public good.

Now, the community is organizing --"No Airport" signs have sprouted like campaign placards -- even though UNC leaders say the airport authority will have to begin its search anew.

The university needs a new airport to replace Horace Williams Airport in Chapel Hill, which officials say they must close in order to build the planned Carolina North campus. The airport is home to the university's Area Health Education Centers fleet, which flies health care workers to underserved areas around the state.

But medical flights account for only a quarter of flights at Horace Williams, and neighbors say they think other interests are driving the issue.

Compounding their frustration is the fact that the county commissioners -- this unincorporated area's only elected representatives -- say they, too, have been left out of the loop. Barry Jacobs, chairman of the Orange County Board of Commissioners, has said the county would not be discussing an airport had the university not pushed the bill through the legislature.

"This got slipped under the wire," said Leath. "No public debate. No nothing."

Mike Teer, Gold Mine Loop Road

A corner of the proposed runway at Site H cuts across Mike Teer's cornfield off Gold Mine Loop Road.

Teer's family milks about 100 Holsteins and grows enough corn on 120 acres to fill three silos. He recently finished shelling the corn, a process that removes the kernels from the cob, and began planting wheat. They also grow soybeans and sorghum.

Teer's great grandfather and two of his sons started the dairy in 1927. They fed the milk to pigs and sold the cream to an ice cream plant in Durham. Teer remembers they used to sit the metal milk cans in a stream until it was time to take them to the plant.

This isn't the first time the Teers could lose their land.

Teer says they bought their current land with money they got in a settlement when they lost about 70 acres to Cane Creek Reservoir, the main source of drinking water for Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

Ironic, Teer says flatly.