That's what it's like living near the county's landfill, the Rogers Road resident told Carrboro's Board of Aldermen last month.

She expected it all to end in a few years when the landfill was capped. But now the county is considering building a waste-transfer station on the landfill site, where the county's trash would be collected and shipped off to a landfill elsewhere.

To Stroud, it's the latest in a string of broken promises to the Rogers Road residents, who say they were told when the landfill opened in the early 1970s that it would only be there for 10 years.

"We had a lot of promises that were not upheld," Stroud said. "You should be able to trust what the people in authority are saying. É Even a waste transfer station is still trash. It's still garbage. It's still contamination."

The origins of the promise are unclear. Moses Carey, the chairman of the Orange County Board of Commissioners, said if there was a promise, it wasn't made by the county and it was only related to a landfill, not to a transfer station, which is a very different operation.

"The off-site impacts are not going to be anywhere near the off-site impacts for a landfill," he said.

The commissioners must act soon. According to the county's solid waste management director, Gayle Wilson, it will take up to four years to get a transfer station up and running. Meanwhile, the landfill on Eubanks Road is expected to be full by late 2010.

The commissioners are eyeing the landfill site and two other properties.

The second site under consideration is on U.S. 70 in the county's Eno Economic Development District, near the U.S. 70-Interstate 85 split. But it comes with a $3.8 million asking price.

The owner of a property across the road from that site has created a third possibility, by offering his land for sale at a lower, undisclosed price. Wilson said that while both sites appear suitable, he'd need to do a more detailed study to know for sure.

The county's landfill opened 35 years ago near a predominantly black neighborhood of small, mostly cinderblock and wood-frame houses. It's not an unusual arrangement, said John Cooper, a program director for Chapel-Hill based nonprofit MDC Inc.

Policy-makers look for sites where the land use is compatible and the land is cheap, he said. Those are often the same places where low-income people live.

But while these sites might save money, there are other costs that can't be easily measured in dollars, Cooper said, like the impact on neighbors' quality of life.

"Orange County decision-makers have to be diligent about engaging everyone and making sure the information is transparent and that we take into consideration what has happened in the past," Cooper said. "Is it fair that one group should bear the burden for an entire community's problem?"

The environmental justice movement centers largely on that question.

Philip Berke, a professor of land use and environmental planning at UNC, said environmental justice is the concept that "all people have a basic right of access to a healthy living environment."

When it comes to making decisions about where landfills or toxic waste facilities are located, neighborhoods like Rogers Road don't often have much say, Berke said.

"These voices typically get drowned out or not heard. Or if they're heard, they're not listened to," Berke said. "It's a matter of power."

Carey said the county takes environmental justice seriously, but it also takes seriously its public health obligations to dispose of waste safely. Trash has to go somewhere, he said.

"The people who are on [U.S.] 70 or any of the other sites we might consider will say, "Why us?'" he said. "That question can be asked by the people near any site we consider, and no answer is going to be acceptable to the people who live there."

The county held a special meeting at a Rogers Road church to discuss the transfer station with residents. Several residents have also been invited on a tour this Saturday of Greensboro's newly opened waste-transfer station. The tour was organized by Carrboro Alderman Randee Haven-O'Donnell.

Haven-O'Donnell and two more members of the board of aldermen, along with Chapel Hill Town Councilman Jim Ward, toured the station last week.

"There are all these parts to the questions that affect the decision-making and one of the things that gets lost is what is this facility, really?" she said. "It does handle waste, but when it closes at the end of the day the waste is off the premises."

She said that unlike the landfill, there was no odor coming from the transfer station. The trash is transferred directly from garbage trucks to 18-wheelers inside a large warehouse, not outside. Any trash that blows out of the garbage trucks on the way in is immediately swept up, she said. Haven-O'Donnell said her concerns about fairness to the neighborhood center more around past decisions that were made regarding the landfill, rather than the current decision on the transfer station. She'd like to see some kind of compensation, maybe in the form of added services, made to longtime residents who suffered from the landfill's location.

But a larger question lingers for her as well.

"Why are we still dealing with garbage as something that we need to shift responsibility [for]?" Haven-O'Donnell said. "Because, ultimately, we're saying it's right for us to send our garbage to some other county."