The doors of the Rogers Road Community Center are closer to opening after the Orange County Board of Commissioners approved the center’s operations agreement Tuesday.
The agreement is with the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association and outlines the association’s responsibilities for operating the community center.
The Rogers Road neighborhood is a historically black, low-income neighborhood that housed the county’s landfill for over 40 years.
The landfill closed in June.
The neighborhood will be responsible for providing a schedule of the center’s activities, maintaining operating hours and providing staff from Monday through Saturday, keeping the center clean and allowing public use of the space.
The approval means Rogers Road community members are one step closer to achieving a project they’ve been working on for over 40 years.
“To go into how important this is to the community, it would take a couple hours,” said Rev. Robert Campbell, president of the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP. “In the summertime, children have no place to go. Here we have an opportunity to shape and mold them right here in the community.”
Before the approval, former commissioner Pam Hemminger stressed to the board the necessity of making the center a reality.
“What the community is seeing is nothing at this point,” she said. “We’ve been working very hard, but there’s nothing on the ground.”
The board also approved a contract to purchase a 2.6-acre plot of land from the Triangle Land Conservancy. The land is slated to become public recreation areas called the Hollow Rock Access Area and New Hope Preserve.
“Now in North Carolina, 80 percent of the population will likely live most of their lives in a metropolitan area and not have the access to experiencing as much rural space as (people once did),” said Chad Jemison, executive director of the Triangle Land Conservancy.
“We see that as a really important value, connecting people to nature,” he said.
Notable:
Frances Henderson, executive director of the Dispute Settlement Center of Carrboro, thanked the board for its support of the center and provided a brief update on the center’s operations.
The center provides conflict resolution services to help individuals avoid the fees of going through a formal legal process. Henderson said the center is in the process of creating a video that will explain the concept of mediation in order to increase public use of the center’s programs.
“This saves people time and heartache when they have people they can sit down with who can help them get to the root of these interpersonal disputes,” she said.
Quotable:
“Maybe we’ll have you mediate between the folks at the state legislature,” said Commissioner Barry Jacobs to Henderson.
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