Chapel Hill extends extraterritorial jurisdiction to include Rogers Road

The Chapel Hill Town Council unanimously voted to extend the town’s extraterritorial jurisdiction to include a portion of the Rogers Road neighborhood during their meeting last week.

Extending the ETJ allows the town to spend community development funds — for services like water and sewer — in the Rogers Road area.

The historically-black and low-income Rogers Road neighborhood housed the Orange County landfill from 1972 to 2013. In exchange, Orange County and the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro said they would provide water and sewer services or a community center for the area after housing the landfill for 10 years. More than 40 years later, local officials are still working on keeping those promises.

A public hearing on the ETJ finished Wednesday after being pushed back by the council several times in the past 12 months.

The hearing began in October 2013. The hearing was pushed back three times.

“This public hearing actually opened about a year ago,” Principal Planner Judy Johnson said.

“And we have continued until tonight because we haven’t had the information to make a sound decision on what to do about the extraterritorial jurisdiction.”

The council also passed a resolution Wednesday that will allow Town Manager Roger Stancil and staff to create a long-term plan for providing services to the community.

Providing sewer services to the area would cost about $5.8 million, according to the meeting’s agenda. The town would be responsible for about $2.5 million, or 43 percent, of this cost.

Robin Campbell, a resident of the Rogers Road community for 23 years, spoke about the community’s history of environmental and social activism.

“I’ve been here my whole life,” she said. “And just being a really young child, I remember going to meetings with my father that focused on environmental and social injustice, not only in our society but also in my community.”

Mark Dorosin, an Orange County commissioner who was at the meeting but not in his official capacity, also expressed support of extending the ETJ, which he said is an important step in getting the Rogers Road community the services it was promised.

“We have made, in this community, environmentalism and our conservation and our protection of the environment a high priority,” said Dorosin, who is an attorney for the UNC Center for Civil Rights, which has represented the Rogers Road community for years.

“What’s often missing from that discussion about environmentalism is environmental justice, is the human environment, the environment that the people here in this room have had to live in for the past 40 years.”

Council member Matt Czajkowski said the Rogers Road landfill has been an issue for years.

“Getting to where we are today has been an effort obviously that involved dozens, if not, hundreds of people,” he said. “We worked away through it in countless council meetings and other meetings.”

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