‘Not in My Backyard,’ Foes of Dump Sites Yell

Burl Gist has a homestead many would envy. The 66-year-old retiree lives with his wife and family in a three-bedroom, wood-frame house on a rural, 60-acre spread north of this inland city. A canopy of century-old oak trees screens Gist’s home from the hot summer sun. Out back, a grassy valley unfolds far into the distance.

It’s no wonder, then, that Gist was alarmed to learn that a huge parcel near his home near the unincorporated Twin Oaks area has been spotlighted as one of a handful of sites deemed suitable for a new trash dump in North County.

“We’re very sad about it,” Gist said. “My father bought this land back in the ‘30s. He’d turn over in his grave if he knew they were talking about putting a landfill in here.”

A 376-acre tract bordering Gist’s home north of Deer Springs Road was among three parcels selected Tuesday night by a special task force mobilized to find a site for a landfill in rapidly growing North County.

The 17-member panel, composed of representatives from each of North County’s cities and special service districts, also tagged a 1,100-acre site across Interstate 15 from Lawrence Welk’s Country Club Village and a 600-acre tract on Vista’s southern edge as potential dump sites.

At a hearing filled with all the tumult and emotion of a New England-style town meeting, the task force also recommended that San Diego County officials expand the hunt for a landfill site to include a wider swath of North County.

Originally, only sites in the area north of Palomar Airport Road were eligible. Nearly half the task force members, however, made it clear Tuesday that they were unhappy with even the most promising parcels in that area and refused to vote. As a result, the entire group agreed to include the recommendation that county officials continue the search for sites, this time focusing on the area immediately south of the thoroughfare.

The committee has been grappling since January with the difficult job of recommending suitable sites for a trash dump in the North County, a region where the population is booming while landfill space is dwindling.

Numerous parcels were located that proved to be physically suitable, encompassing the right combination of open land and soil conditions to prevent ground water contamination and other problems.

But the job of finding a spot that would be accepted by its neighbors has been much more difficult. Indeed, many local and county officials--as well as residents--readily concede that no one wants to live next to a garbage dump.

Elected officials in Oceanside, Vista and San Marcos have gone on record opposing any dumps in their municipalities, and residents near each of the proposed sites have expressed serious qualms.

“They say that everyone belongs to NIMBY--Not In My Backyard,” said Bob Weaver, president of the Lawrence Welk Mobile Home Owners Assn., where about 1,000 residents live across Interstate 15 from one of the proposed dump sites. “It’s a difficult choice. Everyone realizes the need for this, but no one wants it near their home.”

Sharon Reid, manager of the county’s solid waste program, agreed.

“Most landfills have a difficult time being sited,” she said. “People are concerned about the image of having a landfill in their backyard. They’re concerned about the impacts.”

Alana Knaster, a consultant working with the task force, said many residents are unaware that a landfill can, if properly managed, be a good neighbor. Dumps can also be converted to park space and other “wonderful uses” after the landfill is filled to capacity, Knaster said.

Residents, however, often cast a wary eye at such claims, Knaster said. As she sees it, there exists a “credibility gap between citizens and government,” a situation prompted by news accounts of air and water contamination problems caused by dumps around the nation.

Such concerns notwithstanding, county officials are eager to find a site for the new landfill as time continues to run out on North County’s two operating dumps.

An 80-acre dump in Ramona should be filled to capacity by 1988, although county officials hope to purchase an adjacent 80 acres to extend the landfill’s lifetime.

North County’s largest trash dump, a 203-acre facility in San Marcos, is expected to shut down in 1991. Authorities say the life of that dump, which gets garbage from coastal areas between Del Mar and Oceanside and as far inland as Escondido, could be extended until 1995 if a planned trash-to-energy plant in San Marcos is built. But the plant, which would reduce to a quarter the amount of garbage now dumped in the landfill, has been caught in a legal web spun by residents and other opponents.

Even after a dump site is approved by the Board of Supervisors, an action that county waste management officials say will probably not come until late this year, it is expected to take between four and five years to push the project through the complex regulatory process, purchase the land and prepare the site.

And if no dump is opened, trash haulers would be forced to transport refuse far inland or to the southern part of San Diego County, officials say. That will cost both time and money.

“If the trash being produced by people on the coast has to be hauled to a remote site, that translates into an increase in the trash bills people pay,” Reid said.

From 18 original sites, the task force in recent weeks narrowed its selections to six choices based on aesthetic and geological considerations, as well as the effect on traffic.

Each site had its opponents. About 50 residents from various communities packed Tuesday’s meeting at Vista Senior Center to register their opposition, sometimes shouting at committee members to get a point across.

In addition, officials from various cities spoke out against sites proposed in their municipalities.

San Marcos officials criticized selection of both the Deer Springs Road site and the parcel near Lawrence Welk Village, noting that traffic from Oceanside, Carlsbad and other coastal areas would likely divert through their city to reach a dump on either tract, which are adjacent to one another on the west side of Interstate 15.

“We object very, very strongly,” Councilwoman Pia Harris said, noting that San Marcos already has an operating landfill. “We’ve done our part. Now it’s time for someone else to do their part.”

After the meeting, Harris said the county should consider other options, such as recycling and using biodegradable garbage for compost, before settling on another landfill.

“It’s like they’ve got tunnel vision as far as what they want to do with the trash,” Harris said. “Let’s look at other alternatives.”

And Vista officials complained about the dump site proposed on the city’s southern edge, just north of Palomar Airport Road. A 1,250-acre business park planned for the area has been in the works since 1981.

“I’m ready to go to war on this,” Councilwoman Gloria McClellan declared. “They want to come along and dump on our backyard.”

Oceanside officials argued against siting a dump on 395 acres east of Vandegrift Boulevard near the Camp Pendleton Marine base, saying truck traffic would ruin roads and disturb the thousands of residents in homes that ring the area.

Finally, residents of the rural region straddling California 79 complained about two sites selected in that area, a 795-acre parcel west of the highway near the county line and a 316-acre stretch in Cleveland National Forest.

In the end, the two sites along Interstate 15 north of San Marcos drew the most attention from the committee Tuesday. The parcels were selected as the top choices by task force members who voted.

For residents such as Roberta Hirschhorn, that was bad news.

Hirschhorn and her husband, Pete, moved their family to the Twin Oaks area in December to escape the truck traffic caused by the San Marcos landfill which went into operation several years ago near their old home.

Now, with talk of a landfill adjacent to their new residence, the couple feel like they’re suffering trash-dump deja vu.

Hirschhorn worries that even if authorities select the site across Interstate 15 from Lawrence Welk Village, the more northern of the two tracts, it would only be a matter of time before the dump would be expanded south to the Deer Springs Road parcel next to her home.

“I think it’s an absolute travesty,” Hirschhorn said. “It’s unbelievable what they’re trying to pull. We go horseback riding right where they want to put this dump in. It’s criminal.”

Gist agreed. He fears that if the Deer Springs Road tract is selected, half his 60 acres would be taken for the project, literally putting his home on the edge of the landfill.

“When they’ve picked the area right by us here as No. 1 or No. 2, it looks pretty bad,” he concluded. “It’s such a shame. We have these beautiful oak trees, hundreds of years old. If we have to move, you can rebuild your house. But you can’t take these oak trees with you.”