San Marcos Council Still Redrawing Lines on Trash Plant

The City Council’s tedious deliberations on the merits of a controversial trash-fired power plant dragged into the seventh night Tuesday, with the prospect of significant revisions in the plans before the council votes.

Councilman Jim Simmons said he was prepared to rewrite many of the 108 conditions laid down by the Planning Commission when it approved the trash plant last month. The council is considering an appeal of that approval.

David Roe, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, said one of the dilemmas the council faces is that there is not enough hard scientific evidence on the environmental questions raised by such projects.

“It is relatively new,” Roe said. “We don’t have lots and lots of them around the country and the world. So when you look at the health effects, you are looking at numbers that are not based on 30 years of experience.

“(Environmental) risk assessment is only as good as the numbers you begin with. All of the discussion tonight depends on those numbers being right, but we don’t have a lot of assurances.

The proposed trash plant would be built next to the county landfill here, and burn 1,000 tons of trash daily to generate electricity and reduce dependence on the landfill.

Meanwhile, North County Resource Recovery Associates, the partnership that wants to build the $120-million trash plant, is seeking support in Sacramento to challenge the validity of a proposed city ordinance that, if approved by voters and upheld in court, would virtually block the project.

Richard Chase, managing director of NCRRA, is scheduled to appear before the state’s Solid Waste Management Board Feb. 8 to discuss the initiative ordinance, which the City Council ordered put to a vote on April 30 after its backers collected enough signatures to force the special election.

The initiative, if approved by a simple majority, would prohibit construction of a trash-to-energy plant in San Marcos unless it is approved by two-thirds of the voters, and only if there is a plant of similar size and technology operating elsewhere in California that can be studied by the City Council. There is no such plant.

Chase said NCRRA attorneys are preparing a lawsuit to challenge the April 30 election on the grounds that, while the initiative process can establish laws and policy, it cannot reverse what would amount to an administrative decision of the City Council, such as allowing construction of the trash plant.

NCRRA also has argued that voters should not have a say in construction of the plant, because the facility is more appropriately governed by state policy.

It is to that point that Chase will ask the Solid Waste Management Board to take a position on the San Marcos voters’ initiative, perhaps by joining in the lawsuit.

“The fact that there are issues of statewide significance involved (in the initiative) is something they (the management board) ought to be aware of,” Chase said. “The ramifications of that initiative go far beyond San Marcos, because it affects the statewide problem of how to get rid of trash.”