Rogers Road

Sorry for not posting this sooner. The day job is kicking my tushy this week. The Historic Rogers Road Community Enhancement Plan Development and Monitoring Task Force (whew!) will be meeting tonight at 7:00 PM at the Homestead Community Center, 600 Homestead Road. This is the county's committee that I think is focused on how to remediate the current (and probably future) impacts of our landfill on the African-American neighborhood that has been denied relief for 30 years.

I was hoping to go, but I don't think I will be able to. I'd love if someone could go and report back!

This is an issue I've been wanting to write about for a while, but it's been hard to start. I have been a supporter of the Rogers Road neighbors for 10-15 years. It may have been as far back as my college days, when I wrote my senior thesis on environmental racism, that I first met Rev. Robert Campbell and learned about the repeated violations of the local governments' promise to the residents of this historic African-American neighborhood.

As was thoroughly documented in a recent Chapel Hill News editorial by Aarne Veslind, our current landfill on Eubanks Road was built in 1972 with assurances to the neighbors that it would only operate for a fixed period of time and that no additional waste management facilities would be located in the neighborhood. Guess what happened?