The Chapel Hill Town Council voted last week to enter a brownfields agreement with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for the redevelopment of 828 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the former police station that sits atop a mound of toxic coal ash.
Brownfields agreements are usually meant to limit the liability of a developer that’s building on a contaminated site. The 64-page agreement approved by the council requires the town to monitor the coal ash and to “design a remedy” in the form of a structural cap before building on the site. It also prohibits the town from uses other than “a municipal service center, office, retail, recreational, associated parking, and transit uses, and with prior written approval from DEQ, other commercial uses.”
It does not, however, require the town to remove the coal ash before building on top of it.
The eight council members who voted for the agreement framed it as just a first step in a longer process to decide what to do with the property that will include community engagement through the spring. Removal of the coal ash (which was dumped into the site in the 1960s as a waste product from the University of North Carolina’s still active coal power plant) is still an option.
“DEQ is setting the minimum standard, but not directing how we move forward,” mayor pro tem Karen Stegman said.
Council member Adam Searing was absent from the meeting, but tells INDY he would’ve voted against the agreement because it doesn’t require full removal.
The site is above Bolin Creek and the accompanying greenway. Julie McClintock, who is a founder of local groups Friends of Bolin Creek and Chapel Hill for a Livable Town (CHALT), told the council that she was worried about potential flooding and erosion. The organizations have previously pointed to flooding in 2018’s Hurricane Florence, when water lapped at the base of the hill.
The town took “intermediate remedial efforts” in 2020 and 2024, including removing 1,000 tons of contaminated material and installing silt fencing (as well as actual fencing to keep people away from it).
John Richardson, the town’s community sustainability manager, said that coal ash may have, at certain points, reached water.
“We did not see evidence of it entering the creek at the time we took those samples [since 2013],” Richardson said. “That’s not to say it couldn’t have happened in the past. That’s not to say it didn’t happen during a hurricane event. I don’t want to say that those things haven’t happened, because, in all likelihood, they have. But when we took the samples, we did not see evidence of that happening on a regular basis.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center’s Nick Torrey, representing Friends of Bolin Creek, urged the council to reject the brownfields agreement.
“We would like to see the town move forward with a real cleanup plan. That does not mean digging up every inch of this site. We would be happy to talk to you and work with you and your consultants about which areas of coal ash are problematic and need to be removed,” said Torrey.
Stegman later noted that the brownfields agreement wouldn’t preclude the town from accepting Torrey’s offer.
Under the brownfields agreement, the town will not be allowed to build housing (other prohibited uses include: childcare centers, adult care centers, schools, ground-contact sports, kennels, dog parks, private animal pens or horse-riding, agriculture, or grazing). That’s at least something of a victory for Searing and his allies—in 2022, they were staunchly opposed to the previous council’s ideas of building affordable housing on the site without removing the ash, citing health risks.
Several council members worried about what, exactly, removal would entail.
“I also am not comfortable in sending our harmful materials to another community that may not be able to protect themselves as well [as Chapel Hill]” said council member Camille Berry. Council member Paris Miller-Foushee pointed out that solid waste facilities, where the ash may end up, are disproportionately located in communities of color and low wealth.
Records show that the ash removed in 2020 was sent to Uhwarrie Landfill in Mount Gilead (population 1,141) between Charlotte and Fayetteville.
“If Duke Energy can safely and responsibly move millions of tons of coal ash to lined, capped landfills specifically designed to take and store this type of waste, we can do it too,” says Searing, referencing other remediation processes. “In fact, I think we have a responsibility to move the ash away from a creek that runs into protected game lands, Jordan Lake, and multiple apartments and other housing.”
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Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].
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