HILLSBOROUGH- After months of debate, Orange County Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to approve spending $728,000 from the solid waste reserve fund to pay for rural curbside recycling pick-up for one year.

While board members agreed it was preferable to raising the property tax rate to cover the cost of the program next year, some, including Mark Dorosin, argued it might be time to reconsider the county’s reliance on fees.

“I’m happy to support [this] option tonight, but I think it’s a very, very, bad, dangerous precedent to start talking about funding services based on who uses them,” said Dorosin. “Once you start talking about everything is a fee for services, you really undermine the idea of a community.”

The county was forced to find a new funding model after a court ruling called into question the county’s ability to levy the fee that supported the program. The board scrapped two alternate funding models in April before opting for Tuesday’s stopgap measure.

Town and county officials are moving towards an interlocal agreement on solid waste, but no agreement has yet been reached on how to equitably fund the recycling program, how the governments should share any future facilities like a waste transfer station, or where such a facility might go.

In an effort to tackle those questions, Commissioners voted 5-2 to create a Solid Waste Advisory Group of residents and elected officials to sort out short and long-term goals for cooperation. Commissioner Penny Rich was one of those who favored a wide scope for the task force.

“This is not a group just to find out what we’re doing with recycling, this group is to really explore what we’re going to do,” said Rich. “I mean, we need a solid waste plan, we need to make that we move into the future and not have this discussion every single year.”

The board will appoint Commissioners on June 17 and solicit representation from Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough and UNC as well as five members of the public. Commissioners hope to receive a report from the newly-formed task force at next fall’s Assembly of Governments. In the meantime, the board will review a draft interlocal agreement on June 17.