The Orange County Board of Commissioners agreed Tuesday to delay any decision on whether to reopen the search for a trash transfer site until after three new commissioners are sworn-in next month.

Bernadette Pelissier, Steve Yuhasz and Pam Hemminger will take their seats on Dec. 1, and the board will make some kind of decision on Dec. 11.

At a work session Tuesday, board members expressed little interest in a new landfill or a trash-burning power-plant as some citizens have suggested. They did, however, discuss lowering the minimum land area for potential transfer station sites from 25 acres to as low as 10 acres and to relax their buffering requirements for sites away from residential neighbors.

Ironically, the board had called for minimum 100-foot vegetative buffers in order to protect neighbors, but that required larger parcels which could only be found in rural areas where there is little development other than homes or farms.

Chairman Barry Jacobs acknowledged that reopening the search to include smaller sites in more industrial areas could prevent the county from building a transfer station before the Eubanks Road landfill reaches capacity in May 2011 because most of those sites fall within or near the town limits of Hillsborough, Chapel Hill or Carrboro and would be subject to the towns' land review processes.

"At best, there will be defensive annexations," Jacobs said. "At worst, we will be stuck in a review process that may not end in approvals."

Other commissioners also hesitated to begin the site-selection process over again. A year ago, the county started looking for new sites after having already chosen to site a transfer station on Eubanks Road near the landfill. The board was responding to complaints of environmental racism from the historically black Rogers Road community which has lived with the landfill as a neighbor since the 1970s.

Gathering citizen input and applying technical and community-based criteria over the past several months, the commissioners had settled on three sites along N.C. 54 near White Cross. But residents there have organized against the transfer station and a potential airport in that area.

"If I were a citizen and I saw us change our position on this, I would question the process," said Commissioner Mike Nelson.

ABOUT THE STATION

What? A transfer station's basic function is to transfer waste from collection vehicles into larger vehicles for more economical transportation to a distant disposal site. No long-term storage of waste occurs in the transfer station. State regulations require all waste be removed from the tipping floor at the end of each day.

Why? A recent assessment by Gershman, Brickner & Bratton Inc. found there is not enough waste generated in Orange County to make an alternative waste processing technology cost-effective. Therefore, when the county's landfill at the Eubanks Road is full, waste will have to be transferred out of county for disposal.

Orange County Solid Waste Management Department