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As someone who spent his formative years in a city neighborhood called Woodmere Park, I still remember the aroma of the air over there on a still, hot summer day.

We were betwixt and between two local institutions that were seldom seen but often sniffed: the North Buffalo Creek Sewage Treatment Plant to the west and the White Street Landfill to the east.

The smell wafting from the two had an odd, spoiled-cheese quality to it that said, "Today is not a good day to cook out."

It was as if our yards were backed up to a giant kitchen garbage can ... in front of an outhouse.

Small wonder my nostrils tingled when City Councilman Mike Barber called the other day and restated his views on the White Street Landfill.

Barber still believes that the landfill was closed prematurely to household waste and that it is costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

In this economy, he argues, the city can't afford that kind of expense.

When this issue has surfaced before, the City Council has quickly quashed it with minimal discussion.

That's understandable. It's human nature to want to move on from an issue that is as difficult and unpleasant as this one.

At the root of it all is some people's belief that reopening the landfill would amount to environmental racism.

I don't know about that. Although the area largely consists of black residents today, the landfill predated most of them.

When my family moved to Woodmere in 1968, it was still a predominantly white neighborhood.

As for the White Street Landfill, it was created in 1940, 15 years before I was born.

When the landfill first opened, few of the homes that now exist in the vicinity, like little Allen III, had even been thought of.

Further, the city chose that site not based on any racial motivations, but because the Army's Overseas Replacement Depot already was using White Street for its waste disposal.

At that time, the area was relatively rural and sparsely developed. Even when more housing arrived, it was predominantly white.

In fact, the area remained majority-white until at least the early 1970s. Trust me. I was there.

That's not to say that established black neighborhoods weren't affected when the landfill was built. Some were. They included East White Oak, Mount Zion and Nealtown.

But as local historians Gayle Fripp and Jim Schlosser have told us before, the city actually may have been doing most black city residents a favor by opening White Street. The previous "city dump" was located in the heart of the black community, at Cottage Grove, Spencer and Perkins streets, in southeast Greensboro. The city incinerator was on East Market Street, again on the black side of town.

So, try as I might, I can't find very many racial conspiracies in all of this.

Then there's the dilemma of Nealtown Farms, a neighborhood that's so close to the landfill you can see the mountainous berms of covered garbage above the treetops.

Nealtown Farms is predominantly black and its residents complained often about the smell and the birds before the landfill was closed to household garbage in 2006.

Here is where the city was dumb, if well-intentioned: Nealtown Farms is a city-subsidized community.

In other words, city money helped build it on the shadow of the landfill, more than 50 years after the landfill was opened.

Now, largely at Mike Barber's urging, the City Council last week directed city staff to consider the costs of reopening the landfill to household trash -- and of buying the homes surrounding the landfill, most of them in Nealtown Farms.

If that happens, city taxpayers would have helped to build the place -- and to tear it down.

If there is a theme in all of this, it's not racism, but preventable waste and horrible long-range planning.

It's why the path of the city's Urban Loop keeps running into development that city leaders and planners allowed to be built.

It's why the FedEx hub, which opens Monday at PTI Airport, encountered such fierce opposition. City and county leaders allowed too much residential development too close to the airport.

Taxpayers probably will wind up paying for some people's homes in that case as well.

Meanwhile, there are legitimate questions about the actual pros and cons of opening the landfill or keeping it closed.

At this point, who knows if Barber is right?

It's worth finding out.

The city -- including those who live nearest the landfill -- would benefit from an informed discussion based on facts, not emotions.