CHAPEL HILL - It now appears only one neighborhood has to stay on guard against getting the county's solid-waste transfer station in their backyard.

The Orange County commissioners narrowed the choice of transfer-station sites last week to three, all within a mile of each other along N.C. 54 west of Orange Grove Road. The board will hold a public comment session some time in November, and county consultant Olver Inc. will produce a detailed comparison of the three sites.

The board chose those three because they ranked highest on technical feasibility and community-based criteria such as environmental justice and number of residents impacted.

About 150 people attended Tuesday's meeting, many from Hillsborough, where the Town Board had already opposed any of three potential transfer-station sites there.

"Moving the site away from where the trash is generated isn't environmental justice," said Hillsborough resident Chris Cole, referring to the current location of the county landfill near Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

Most of those who spoke were from Bingham Township, an area in western Orange County along N.C. 54, Orange Grove Road and Dodson's Crossroads, where six out of the 10 potential sites were located. All three finalists are in that area.

Dan Eddleman of Lapin Lane questioned the efficiency of a transfer station far from Orange County's population centers and from water and sewer lines. Eddleman said the infrastructure to collect, transport and treat water used to fight the fires that can occur in transfer stations will be expensive.

"What all this is going to translate into is high cost of operation," Eddleman said. "Hillborough's trash will be coming down Orange Grove Road and will probably be going right back up Orange Grove Road to get to [a landfill in] Virginia," he said.

Former Orange County school board member Ralph Warren said he has lived on Labrador Lane off N.C. 54 since the mid-1970s. He has seen the development of the Cane Creek reservoir and a sludge dumping ground, and threats of another bypass around Carrboro and Chapel Hill, an airport and now a solid-waste transfer station.

"We've had a series of environmental assaults on our little part of the world," Warren said.

One of the sites is 43 acres directly across the highway from Warren's dead-end street. The Orange Water and Sewer Authority currently uses it to dispose of sludge left over from sewage treatment. Two days after the county's decision, the OWASA board decided to try and hold on to its land.

"This is not surplus property, and it already serves an important public purpose," wrote OWASA chairman Randy Kabrick. "However, if the County, in consultation with the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, ultimately determines that the OWASA property is the only location for the transfer station, we will carefully consider the County's request."

OWASA bought the land from the Durham family. Charlie Durham's grandson Edward Dodson, 80, still owns 85.5 acres just west of Morrow Mill Road, and that is the most desirable parcel based on the technical and community-based criteria. Dodson doesn't want to sell and blames political maneuvering for diverting the county from the Hillsborough sites.

"I'm thinking about talking to a lawyer," Dodson said. "This land was my grandfather's land, and it's been a tree farm for close to 100 years. I've had it cut one time. It's a good income. It won't be long before it's ready to cut again."

Warren criticized the way Olver Inc. ranked the sites. He said the rankings were imprecise because Olver gave a set number of points on each criteria based on rankings within the criteria, rather than awarding a raw score.

Using raw scores based on objective factors, Warren said, the five sites along N.C. 54 might have all received the same number of points in any given category. But since Olver gave points based on rankings with each category, the consultant allowed for a wide point-spread among very similar sites.

For example, one site east of Orange Grove Road received 120 points for environmental justice, while a site on the other side of Orange Grove Road received 200 points for environmental justice. Those point values were dictated by the two sites' rankings on environmental justice -- first and fourth. Overall, the total score for the second site was nearly twice that of the first, despite their proximity to each other.

"There's really very little difference in those sites, and yet there's a staggering difference in how those rankings were enumerated," he said.

Commissioners Chairman Barry Jacobs said any ranking system will be imperfect, but the county doesn't have time for perfection. He said the county has at most two years to pick a site, negotiate a purchase, design and build a transfer station before the county landfill on Eubanks Road reaches capacity.

"I'm confident that when the public addresses us, they'll raise issues that will increase the rigor of our thinking, and it will either confirm our process in our mind or it'll cause us to rethink what we're doing, but we can't keep rethinking it forever," said Jacobs.