Help for Waynor Road

March 5, 2008 

One of the small, mostly African American communities in Moore County, North Carolina seeking help is Waynor Road.  And it looks like help is on the way. Last week, an official announcement was released stating that the Town of Southern Pines was awarded a $750,000 Community Development Block Grant.  The long-awaited funds will go towards digging municipal water and sewer lines for Waynor Road residents.

 

I first visited the Waynor Road community in summer 2005.  Thomas Jones showed me his property.  Jones said he was proud of what he had built but worried his property value would evaporate if there weren’t municipal services to support the infrastructure.  The problem, Jones said was he and about 75 other residents lived in no-mans land:

 “…seem like our problem is everybody around us have water and sewage, even behind us…we’re just in one little circle in between.  Out there Highway 22, water…on the other side of 22, water…right here behind this house, water…by the ball field, football field, water.  We don’t have any.” Thomas Jones

Lawyers with the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights have long said a pattern of “municipal exclusion” has prevented basic services to be extended to pockets of Moore County like Jackson Hamlet, Monroe Town, Midway and Waynor Road.  As more and more homes in the expanding golf communities have been built, rural has become urban.

About a year and a half ago, the Ray family of Waynor Road became especially active in the pursuit of municipal services.  Jerry and Dorothy Ray live in a small wooden house with a tin roof. Their adult daughters – Doris Ray and Joyce Ray – live in separate residences on the same plot of land. Doris is president of Waynor Road in Action. 

When I visited Dorothy Ray last summer, she was hopeful but still uncertain if her community would ever get municipal water and sewer:

 “I hope to see it when it comes here, that’s my prayers. I hopeto be here and still see it.  I have grand children and great grand children. If it doesn’t get here for me, it’ll get here.” Dorothy Ray

Dorothy will have to live with deteriorating private wells and failing septic tanks for just a little while longer.  Now that the total $1.1 million has been raised, the project should be complete in two years.