The Orange County Commissioners last week declined to take Eubanks Road off the list of potential sites for a solid waste transfer station, but they hinted that they may do so when they take the matter up again next month.

When they do, we hope they'll do more than hint.

The residents of the Rogers Road neighborhood near the landfill on Eubanks Road have been saddled with the landfill's noxious smells, rumbling trucks and other unpleasant consequences for more than three decades.

Last year the commissioners voted to put the next generation of solid waste facility -- a transfer station, where waste will be loaded onto trucks to be hauled somewhere else for disposal -- on Eubanks Road, near the existing landfill.

Residents and their supporters raised an outcry, and the commissioners eventually backed away from that decision and re-opened the search for a site.

Ten sites, including Eubanks Road, are now on the table. A consulting firm is in the process of evaluating those sites. The consultants have ranked them according to purely technical criteria and will next apply "community-specific criteria" to their evaluation. Those criteria include "environmental justice considerations."

Environmental justice, in our view, would mean that the residents who have lived with the garbage the rest of us produce for more than 30 years should finally be released from that burden.