Chapel Hill’s police headquarters at 828 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is built on top of a pit of toxic coal ash, the waste product of decades of energy production at the University of North Carolina’s still-active coal power plant. 

This month, Chapel Hill and the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) released a draft agreement to officially designate the area as a brownfields site, taking a step towards possible future redevelopment of the abandoned property. 

The draft agreement is new, but the issue is not. 

The roughly 46,000 tons of coal ash was dumped into the site in the 1960s. In the 1980s, the town acquired the property and constructed its police headquarters on top of that pit. And the coal ash was largely forgotten until 2013, when the slope leading down to the Bolin Creek greenway eroded enough to release coal ash into the soil and groundwater. 

The town did some basic removal and fencing, but the question of what to do with a pit of toxic waste remained largely unanswered. Last year, the police department announced plans to relocate to another building, citing a crumbling facility. 

The 66-page document does not set out an exact plan for the police headquarters. It does, however, limit the town to “no uses other than for a municipal service center, office, retail, recreational, associated parking, and transit uses, and with prior written approval from DEQ, other commercial uses.”

The draft is also specific in the list of uses for which the town may not develop the site without the prior written approval of DEQ, including: childcare centers, adult care centers, schools, residential use, ground-contact sports (including, but not limited to, golf, football, soccer, and baseball), kennels, dog parks, private animal pens or horse-riding, agriculture, or grazing. 

Town officials had briefly looked to build affordable housing on the site, but those plans were derailed following community backlash, and the agreement would mark a clear end to those plans.

The agreement lays out a process through which the town must “design a remedy” in the form of a structural cap before redeveloping the site. Some residents have previously argued that removing the coal ash is the only way to ensure it does not escape in the future.

Like asbestos and lead paint, coal ash is a highly toxic material that was widely used in construction for decades and now is the source of headaches for municipalities across the country as they struggle to deal with the potentially lethal legacy.

NC Newsline previously reported that “at least 8.85 million tons of coal ash have been legally used as fill at a minimum of 72 locations in North Carolina, state records show. However, because the state did not require documentation of structural fill sites until 1994, the number is likely far higher.” 

In the 1990s and 2000s, people became more and more aware of the danger of that waste. And just last year, the EPA announced that coal ash may be even more toxic than previously known.

The brownfields program, started in the 1990s, allows developers—like the Town of Chapel Hill, in this case—to build on sites where “the threat of environmental contamination has hindered its redevelopment,” per the DEQ website.

“At the heart of the program is the brownfields agreement — in effect, a covenant not-to-sue offered to a prospective developer of a brownfields property,” the website states. “Under a brownfields agreement, a prospective developer agrees to perform those actions deemed by the department to be essential to make the property suitable for the proposed reuse. In return, the department agrees to limit the liability of the prospective developer to those actions described in the agreement.”

The draft is open for public comment until July 30, and the town plans to announce a date for a public hearing. 

We have uploaded a copy here. 

Chapel-Hill-DEQ-828-MLK-BLV-Draft-Agreement

You can also access the draft agreement (and other relevant documents) online via the NCDEQ site. Enter the project number 23022-19-068 into the search bar. 

Hard copies are available at the Chapel Hill Public Library (100 Library Drive) service desk on the main level.

The NCDEQ asks that the public provide comments in writing by July 30 to:

Bruce Nicholson, Chief

Brownfields Redevelopment Section

Division of Waste Management

NC Department of Environmental Quality

1646 Mail Service Center

Raleigh, NC 27699-1646

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].

Chase Pellegrini de Paur is a reporter for INDY, covering politics, education, and the delightful characters who make the Triangle special. He joined the staff in 2023 and previously wrote for The Ninth Street Journal.