UNC will respect local zoning rules and use eminent domain as a last resort in siting a new airport, Chancellor Holden Thorp wrote last week in a letter to the Orange County commissioners.

"The University and Health Care System cannot unilaterally force the development of a new airport," Thorp wrote in the Dec. 9 letter to Valerie Foushee, the new chairwoman of the Orange County Board of Commissioners.

"If the Board of Commissioners passes the appropriate ordinances, it will have the power to determine whether an airport can be sited through zoning and the issuance of special use permits," he wrote.

Thorp's letter comes in response to the previous county board chairman, Barry Jacobs, who has sharply criticized the university for pushing an airport bill through the legislature without sufficient local input.

The state legislature last summer authorized a 15-member airport authority to locate, build and operate a general aviation airport in Orange County.

The panel will have four members each picked by the university's board of trustees and the UNC Health Care system, two by the legislature, three by the county, one by Chapel Hill and one by Carrboro and Hillsborough on a rotating basis.

Jacobs told Thorp the county could not pick its members until the university answered some questions, including where the authority would be looking and whether the university would commit to "transparency" and "robust public participation."

A 2005 consultant's report ranked a site in White Cross in southwestern Orange County as the top location, after Raleigh-Durham International Airport, for housing UNC-CH's medical fleet once Horace Williams Airport closes for construction of the Carolina North satellite campus.

The report and recent legislation has mobilized Orange County's rural residents. Hundreds have packed meetings to organize against the university's plans.

In his letter, Thorp emphasizes again that no site has been selected and that the airport authority will have to commission new site studies to take in more current traffic and roadway data, among other criteria. He holds out the possibility that the Medair fleet could remain at RDU if a new airport does not become available and says the use of eminent domain to take land "should always be a last resort."

mark.schultz@nando.com or 932-2003

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