The Orange County Board of Commissioners, Chapel Hill Town Council, Carrboro Board of Aldermen and Hillsborough Town Board agreed to create the task force at an Assembly of Governments meeting Thursday night.

The task force will have two representatives from each municipality, two county commissioners and two members of the Rogers Eubanks Neighborhood Association, which has requested the community center and sewer lines.

It will explore costs and plans for the community center and sewer lines and present its findings to the governing boards at the end of the year.

Last year the county commissioners voted to close the landfill on Eubanks Road in 2013. The landfill opened in 1972.

Records show the county promised to build a park once the landfill closed, said Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton. With current state laws, a park isn't feasible, but a community center is a good alternative, he said.

Several officials also wanted to make sure that the costs of the center and sewer lines were fairly divided between the county and three towns.

County Commissioner Earl McKee said he supports a community center but has reservations about extending sewer lines, especially since the county has a projected shortfall of $3 million in its post-closure expenses for the landfill.

He is also not convinced that the landfill has affected the Rogers Road neighborhood's septic systems, some of which are failing.

"We need to be very careful when we start setting parameters of extending sewer," he said. "We need to start looking very seriously at these costs that could very easily explode on us."

The county and towns agreed that sewer lines would be limited to the historic Rogers Road neighborhood and would not include surrounding neighborhoods like Larkspur. Individual homeowners would still have to pay to connect their homes to the lines once they are built.

County Commissioner Valerie Foushee suggested the task force first focus on plans for a community center, then move on to sewer.

The county agreed to spend $650,000 to extend water lines to homes in the Rogers Road area last year. Commissioners have also allocated $750,000 from the county's solid waste enterprise fund, which comes from the landfill's tipping fees, to create a Rogers Road Remediation Reserve Fund.

The remediation fund will have $1.2 million when it stops generating money when the landfill closes in June 2013.

The county also agreed last October to initiate a "one-time" effort to clean up illegal dump sites in the Rogers Road community. Several dump sites are located on private property, but the county has offered to help clean them up at no cost to the property owner.

The task force is scheduled to report back to the county and all the towns at the Assembly of Governments meeting in December.