New Landfill Slated for Durham

The new landfill will be built west of Glenn Road and north of Club Boulevard, a location the president of the Northeast Neighborhood Association found astonishing. "It means a broken promise," Jackie S. Brown, was quoted as saying. "They promised us they weren't going to do this."

But council members said they had little choice but to scrap the decision made by an earlier council. City officials said the transfer station would cost taxpayers $72 million more to operate over 20 years than a landfill would. That figure assumes 170,000 tons of garbage each year; last year the city's landfill handled 206,000 tons.

The landfill is expected to add three cents to the tax rate in 1997 as a 50-acre section of the 150-acre site is developed. The transfer station would have increased taxes six cents per hundred.\

A transfer station is a holding zone where private haulers come to retrieve the trash and then ship it to a private landfill outside the county.

"Time has just run out on us," said City Manager Orville Powell. The council had to make a decision Saturday because federal regulations require that the existing landfill close permanently by January 1998