HILLSBOROUGH - A frustrated Orange County Commissioner Mike Nelson suggested Hillsborough take its garbage to Durham to buy time at the Orange County landfill, as the search for a trash transfer station site drags on.

"We're going to need it," Nelson told his fellow board members Tuesday night, saying three years until the landfill's scheduled closing is not much time to site a new waste facility. "I don't know when this board is going to be ready to make a decision."

"That feels like we've given up," said Commissioner Alice Gordon.

"I will acknowledge -- I frankly have given up," Nelson said.

The board Tuesday gave itself until Dec. 7 to make a final decision.

It's been eight years since the commissioners agreed the county needs a transfer station, and they've spent the past three years searching for a site.

Two years ago, they chose the current landfill site on Eubanks Road in Chapel Hill, but neighbors argued that would be environmental racism, and the county reopened a meticulous, $450,000 search that ended with a site on N.C. 54 in southwestern Orange County, more than a dozen miles from Chapel Hill and Carrboro which generate most of the trash.

"Sometimes a good process takes you to a bad result," said Commissioner Steve Yuhasz. "It brought us to a place where the only option that we had turned out not to be a very good option."

So now the majority of the board -- with Nelson, Gordon and Chairwoman Valerie Foushee dissenting -- appear poised to choose one of two sites on Millhouse Road. The sites are more than a mile from Rogers Road but within what neighbors call the historic Rogers Road community.

Commissioner Pam Hemminger said $750,000 in "reparations" for the historically black Rogers Road neighborhood could blunt the impact of another garbage facility nearby.

"A waste transfer station is not what anybody wants in their backyard," she said. Southwestern Orange residents organized quickly and forcefully against the N.C. 54 site over the past year.

The morass had commissioners questioning why they agreed to take over garbage responsibilities from the towns in the first place.

"We're obviously masochists," said Commissioner Barry Jacobs.

He helped persuade the board to wait until December to choose, saying that might be enough time to find a "regional solution" in partnership with Durham or Chatham County or at least to hear back from the Town of Chapel Hill on 8 acres it owns at the Town Operations Center. The Town Council plans to discuss the matter Sept. 28, and the commissioners are asking them to make a decision by Thanksgiving. But Jacobs said 10 acres the county already owns across the street from the Town Operations Center holds "definite promise" because a transfer station on that site could be hidden more easily from abutting neighbors.

Citizens Tuesday complained that the Millhouse sites arose outside the formal search process. Chapel Hill Town Council candidate Will Raymond said the county-owned site near the future Blackwood farm soccer fields "came right out of right field."

Commissioner Bernadette Pelissier defended the board against claims that rejecting the N.C. 54 site in favor of Millhouse Road undermines a process the public could follow and understand.

"There will always be somebody that disagrees with the outcome," Pelissier said. "The most important thing is to put out options and give the public a chance to tell us what they think."

At Tuesday's meeting, the public offered no concrete solutions - only a short-term sharing of Durham County's transfer station to buy time for a new comprehensive search.

"There is time to do it right," said Nancy Tunneson of the Orange County Organizing Committee.