In this first paper we present a central relaxing scheme for scalar conservation laws, based on using the local relaxation approximation. Our scheme is obtained without using linear or nonlinear Riemann solvers. A cell entropy inequality is studied for the semidiscrete central relaxing scheme, and a second order MUSCL scheme is shown to be TVD in the zero relaxation limit. The next paper will extend the central relaxing scheme to multi-dimensional systems of conservation laws in curvilinear coordinates, including numerical experiments for 1D and 2D problems.