Rogers Road
This month the Town of Chapel Hill followed up on their promise to help create a community center for the Rogers Road neighborhood by... shutting down the center that neighbors set up for themselves for code violations! What?
Did anyone at Town Hall think twice before doing this? Did anyone think 'given our huge debt to this community and our stated goal of supporting a community center there, how can we help improve this center and bring it up to code?'
No, as if they were computers instead of humans, they kicked the Rogers-Eubank Neighborhood Association out of their home. What were they thinking?
Last night, the Orange County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to set June 30, 2013, as the closing date of the county’s municipal waste landfill, and to pursue a costly interlocal agreement to ship our trash to Durham’s waste transfer station.
I'm at the Orange County Board of County Commissioners meeting tonight to hear the latest on the landfill and Rogers Road mitigation. I'm spending a night outside the school district and talking about issues that won't help me get elected, so it must be important. The attachment (link below) has a county manager proposal that closes the landfill in 2013, and also addresses some of the mitigation items requested by the community. Looking forward to BoCC reaction -- are we going to finally do something for this community or push it further along the road?
The news this week that the Orange County Board of County Commissioners has voted to charge a new tipping fee at the landfill to raise money for remediation in the Rogers Road neighborhood
- a move that seemed somewhat ham-fisted to municipal governments (see
below about that) - reminded me of a very interesting conversation I had
last month. I attended oral history performances by a UNC class that conducted interviews with civil rights activists.
Two students had worked closely with David Caldwell and Gertrude Nunn
and learned about their neighborhood's 3-decade challenge of trying to
get justice for living with the landfill that serves all of Orange
County.
One grad student who is very familiar with local politics
turned to me afterward and asked the same question that was in my mind:
our County Commissioners have to be one of the most liberal boards in
the state. How is it that the Rogers Road neighborhood has been stymied
by them repeatedly, instead of being championed by the environmental and
social justice advocates on the Board?
As someone who has worked with the Rogers Road neighborhood for many years, it really upsets me when I hear some of the criticism lobbed at our local elected officials over the issue of justice for the Rogers Road neighborhood. It’s true that some of our elected leaders have sought to sweep the issue of landfill compensation under the rug. But some elected officials in both Chapel Hill and Carrboro have worked hard on these issues for a long time. So let's not paint everyone with the same brush.
The Landfill Compensation Working Group
In 1996 and 1997, a group of elected officials (including me, then a Chapel Hill Council-member) and residents of the Rogers Road community recommended a list of 14 compensation items that our local governments owed to the neighbors of the landfill. This list was a result of inclusive facilitated meetings of the Landfill Compensation Working Group (as the committee of neighbors and officials was known).
Showdown at the Assembly of Governments Corral
The Assembly of Governments met on October 30, 1997 to discuss the LCWG's recommendations.
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