UNC-CH drops plans for airport

CHAPEL HILL -- UNC-Chapel Hill has scrapped its plan to look for a new airport site in Orange County.

The decision Friday was a welcome surprise to residents of the rural southwest corner of the county, who have been on edge since a bill the state legislature passed last summer allowed for the creation of an authority to find, build and run an airport. County commissioners, who were not involved in that legislation, had opposed the plan.

"We ended up surprising people with the legislation far more than we should have," UNC-CH Chancellor Holden Thorp said Friday. "It had origins in the university and origins in politics. I'm sorry that this surprised everybody."

The way the authority was created caused too much "distrust" in the community, making the panel unworkable, Thorp said.

As a result of Friday's announcement, the air component of the university's Area Health Education Centers program, which flies doctors and other health professionals to clinics across the state, will have a final home at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The university had already planned to use RDU as a temporary home for the AHEC program, and it is constructing a $3.5 million hangar there.

The AHEC program is currently housed at the Horace Williams Airport in Chapel Hill, but Thorp reiterated Friday the university's plan eventually to close it. A new law school is still planned for that prime, flat piece of real estate, a linchpin project for UNC-CH's long-planned Carolina North development.

Thorp said the most difficult part of his decision to stop pursuing a new airport was breaking the news to the AHEC doctors who enjoy the convenience of Horace Williams to get quickly across the state to treat sick children and others. The AHEC program accounts for about one-quarter of all the flights in and out of that airport.

Tom Bacon, AHEC's program director, said he supports Thorp's decision but conceded that some UNC-CH doctors may not be pleased with the long-term plan housing AHEC's air operations at RDU.

"There may be some faculty who are reluctant to travel, and we will have to work hard to make it easier on them," he said. "Faculty are feeling a lot of pressure these days. They're working harder. They're under pressure to find grants and be more productive with their clinical time. So I think it's a general concern that it's one more thing to cut into their time."

Bacon said his office is considering a van service and other ways to make travel to and from RDU easier.

Cliff Leath, whose 32-acre horse farm might have been seized if UNC-CH had built an airport in southwestern Orange County, was among four members of the group Preserve Rural Orange to meet with Thorp, UNC system President Erskine Bowles and House Speaker Joe Hackney in December. He was invited back Friday for Thorp's press conference and said afterward the decision will provide relief to him and his neighbors.

"If we wanted to, we couldn't sell our land," Leath said, "because the airport was hanging over us."