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CHAPEL HILL -- The Orange County Board of County Commissioners decided Tuesday to keep the Bradshaw Quarry Convenience Center open at reduced hours through the end of the fiscal year.
BQCC will stay open two days during the week and on Saturday. The Solid Waste Work Group will continue to look at Orange County's broader solid waste plan.
"Bradshaw Quarry staying open is a small part of a much larger picture of providing service that will promote waste reduction and recycling and will serve citizens in the best way possible," said County Commissioner Barry Jacobs.
Jacobs said that in addition to responding to multiple letters and citizen requests to keep BQCC open, the work group also thought through the logistics of spending -- BQCC would take $10,000 to close, Jacobs said.
"It's silly to spend money to do things that we might immediately reconsider," he said. "It's a compromise to keep it going, to keep it viable, to be responsive, but not to spend too much money while we figure out the next big step."
And the next big step for the solid waste plan involves factoring in the county's new relationship with Durham and the possibility of shipping trash there instead of building an Orange County transfer station.
"Changing from the transfer station to shipping to Durham changes a lot of what we have to consider," Jacobs said.
New angles include talking with the county's new partners about a commitment to the 61 percent waste reduction goal and how to deal with recycling, factors that contribute to a joint future.
"It's a chance to really experiment with what we can do with a whole host of options in cutting the county's trash," said Bonnie Hauser of Orange County Voice. "We have to find a better way in the long-term to deal with trash."
The work group hopes to get authorization from county commissioners to share the conceptual framework of the solid waste plan with other governments, Jacobs said.
"Even the best case scenario now has the landfill open for another two years," he said. "We need to make some investment decisions and some partnership decisions. It depends on what the commissioners think of the plan, what the public thinks of the plan, what our partners think of our situation."
And Hauser said she hopes the community continues to have an impact on the formation of the future of solid waste collection.
"There may be a better option," she said. "But at least now we're paying attention, and hopefully the community will have a say in what that is."
