Neighbors of UNC’s Bingham Facility will meet with university officials Monday to discuss the latest plans for the animal holding center west of Carrboro.

The facility was in the news last year when UNC planned to add three buildings and expand from 85 dogs to up to 450 dogs and 150 hogs. After repeated leaks of treated wastewater, it shelved the plan and returned a $14.5 million federal grant when it determined it would need another $20 million to make the plan work.

Now UNC is rebuilding the facility’s wastewater treatment system. There are no plans to expand, the university says, but neighbors in the group Preserve Rural Orange are wary. The state last week granted their request for a public hearing on the university’s application to modify its permit, which calls for spreading treated wastewater over a larger area than before.

In an interview, Associate Vice Chancellor Bob Lowman emphasized that UNC is not expanding and that the facility's three buildings are probably all there will ever be, he said. There likely won’t ever be more than 85 dogs or any hogs permanently housed there, he said.

A building that was expected to house specially bred golden retrievers for a muscular dystrophy researcher who is now leaving the university will likely be used for mice, Lowman said.

Look for more on this story coming Sunday in The Chapel Hill News.
 

Wastewater leaks at an animal research storage facility in rural Orange County has some of its neighbors concerned.

The state has cited the university for one of the leaks at the animal holding facility in Bingham Township, and documents now show the university suspected the leak existed nearly two months before installing the sump pump needed to rectify the problem. 

Mark Schultz has the story in today's Chapel Hill News.

UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp announced this morning that the university will not pursue a new airport in Orange County.

This is a big deal for folks living in the rural southwest reaches of the county on land a 2005 report suggested was a good spot for a future airport.

And Thorp said Friday that his decision stemmed at least in part from the distrust created when the General Assembly last year gave the university the power to create an authority to plan, build and run an airport. 

Here's the complete text of a statement Thorp read this morning:

I have decided to ask the UNC Board of Governors not to create an airport authority to identify a replacement site for Horace Williams Airport.

This has not been an easy decision...most of all because I made a pledge to our AHEC doctors. I had said that, short term, I was convinced that a MedAir move to RDU would be workable. But I also said that for the long-term, we owed it to our doctors to explore another alternative. At the time, I thought that an airport authority was the best approach. The county would have the zoning authority, and the siting and development of the airport would be  in the hands of a public body that would operate transparently.

But increasingly, I have felt that the authority would be unable to accomplish what we had hoped. There is a great deal of distrust, not necessarily of the authority, but of the process by which it came to be. That distrust would likely extend to the authority when its members were appointed.
So with all that in mind, I started calling some AHEC doctors. Those I spoke with told me they understood our eventual need to move airport operations to RDU and that it's in the best interest of the university and our community not to form the authority.

I consulted with Speaker of the House Joe Hackney, and he agreed this is the right approach. And I talked with the chair of the county commissioners, the mayor, President Bowles and our trustees, and they all concur.

We will continue to move forward with Carolina North. It is critical to the future of the university and the state of North Carolina. While we will keep Horace Williams Airport open as long as we can, to realize the full potential of Carolina North, we must close the airport.

When that happens, we will still need an airport. It's essential for our AHEC program. But we have an acceptable option - RDU.

Whether Orange County wants and needs an airport should be widely and openly discussed. And the decision should be made by the county and its citizens.