Orange County commissioners aren’t the only folks ticked off over UNC Chapel Hill’s handling of the siting of a new regional airport in Orange County, which will replace the Horace Williams facility near the campus. A group called Preserve Rural Orange already has a petition drive going to fend off the taking of rural land via eminent domain power, which the airport authority has the right to use.

Even more interesting is information from the blog written by Mark Schultz of the Chapel Hill News. The paper has gotten its hands on public records related to the airport project in order to assess behind-the-scenes planning and maneuvering, which is a sore spot with commissioners who feel the county has been left out. According to this Schultz blog:

In the meantime, e-mails released upon our public records request indicate that at one point UNC was talking to Duke about the airport it wants to build and that Duke had concerns about the airport authority having the power to acquire private land.

“We are adamantly opposed to the changes that Duke wants, which is to strip the right of eminent domain from the provision,” then Chancellor James Moeser wrote in a June 20 e-mail to bill sponsor Richard Stevens. “Without that, we have nothing.”

There does not appear to be a follow-up e-mail from Moeser, but whatever concerns Duke had appear to have been allayed by the time UNC system President Erskine Bowles wrote Moeser June 24. In the e-mail Bowles said he spoke with Duke President Richard Broadhead earlier that day and Duke “would be happy to cooperate on a new Orange County airport.”

Bowles goes on to note that one of the sites being considered — odd because UNC says the authority will have to start the site selection process again — might impinge on a part of Duke Forest and that if it did the two universities would have to talk further.

Kudos to the Chapel Hill News for digging into this story.