Board Leaves Trash Plant Up to San Marcos

The state board that regulates garbage disposal listened with a sympathetic ear to a private firm that wants to build a trash-burning, electricity-generating plant in San Marcos.

But members of the California Waste Management Board refused to become directly involved in a legal effort to halt a vote on an initiative forced by opponents of the $120-million facility.

They did agreed to say in a letter to both sides in the dispute that state policy encourages waste-to-energy plants like the proposed San Marcos facility.

However, members refused a request by the project’s lawyer that the board file a brief in an expected lawsuit asking the court to stop the April 30 special election ordered by the San Marcos City Council after they were presented with a citizen petition.

The board’s letter also will say, board members decided, that state officials do not want to interfere in local land-use matters.

An attorney representing North County Resource Recovery Associates, the firm planning to build the plant, said after the meeting that he will file a lawsuit challenging the vote next week.

Wes Peltzer of San Marcos said the state board would have been a more powerful ally had it filed a brief, but the letter still may help him in court.

“This is good, but there is a better” way to help, Peltzer said after the board decision.

San Diego attorney Michael Hogan, representing the plant’s opponents, said that the board’s stance was not bad, but could have been better.

“There is no doubt that the board has a legitimate interest . . . but they clearly said that local land-use issues are best left to the local people,” Hogan said.

Board members expressed scorn toward the group Hogan represents--Citizens for Healthy Air in San Marcos --and other opponents of the plant, accusing them of abusing the initiative process.

The initiative process, as it is being employed in San Marcos, noted board member Les Brown, “allows a proponent to spend $3 million and then get hit with an initiative.”

That, said Brown, is wrong.

Peltzer tried to convince the state board, and will contend in a lawsuit he will file early next week, that the initiative process being used is illegal because it seeks to reverse a series of administrative decisions. Initiatives, he said, are intended to deal with legislative matters.

If the opponents succeed with what he characterized as a dishonest ploy, Peltzer warned board members, “you are not going to see a resource recovery plant in the County of San Diego and you are not going to see them elsewhere in the state either.”

The proposed initiative, if approved at the polls, would prohibit construction of the plant until the financing, health, safety and environmental impacts of another plant of similar size and technology elsewhere in the state has been studied in depth.

It also would require that the existing San Marcos landfill be converted to a park when it is filled, around 1993.

North County Resource Recovery Associates attorneys say the proposed San Marcos plant, which would process 1,600 tons of waste a day, is unique.

The only waste-to-energy plant operating in California--at Lassen College in Susanville--is one-sixteenth the size of the proposed San Marcos plant, state officials said. And the only one of about 50 other California plants in various stages of planning that is anywhere near construction--in the City of Commerce--is about one-fifth the size of the proposed San Marcos plant.

Board members agreed with Peltzer that the initiative is worded to keep the San Marcos plant from ever being built.

“I totally lack in sympathy for the group you represent and I feel strongly that your position in indefensible,” board member Richard Stevens told Hogan.

Peltzer and project manager Pamela Thornton, who spoke on Resource Recovery Associates’ behalf, said the plant’s opponents represent only a small group of residents and that polls show the majority of San Marcos citizens favor the proposed plant.

But elsewhere in the state, trash plants have not fared well at the polls.

Proposals calling for trash-to-energy plants were defeated overwhelmingly in Brisbane and Berkeley in 1982, and in Glendale in 1983.

Hogan challenged the claims that a majority of San Marcos citizens favor the plant.

“If that is so,” he asked, “what is all this concern about this initiative?”