San Marcos Must Play It Again on Trash Plant

The question of whether an electricity-generating trash incinerator should be built in San Marcos to dispose of North County’s garbage will be put this week to the San Marcos City Council--and the series of public hearings promises to have all the suspense and intrigue of summer reruns.

The council already has once approved the trash-to-energy plant, but it was ordered by a state appellate court to conduct the process again because the city originally failed to consider the environmental impact of the plant on its general plan.

Project opponents say they don’t expect to change any minds this time around and expect the council to once again vote 4-1 to approve the plant.

Voter Approval

The hearings will begin at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and July 6, when a final decision is expected. Earlier this month, the San Marcos Planning Commission unanimously approved the project.

If the council approves the project as expected, a citywide vote will be held Sept. 15 for voter approval of the general plan amendment that would allow the plant’s construction.

The entire approval process has a sense of deja vu : in January, 1985, only Councilwoman Pia Harris voted to oppose the project, and since then there has been only one new member added to the City Council--Mark Loscher, who has not indicated his opposition to it.

Many of the same environmental experts who spoke on the issue 2 1/2 years ago during more than 20 hours of public testimony are expected to make return visits to City Hall this week to present much of the same information; both sides agree that there is little significant new information about the state-of-the-art of selective trash burning that would cause the City Council to change its mind.

While the opponents don’t expect to win this time, either, they say the very manner in which the hearings are conducted may lay the groundwork for yet more lawsuits to block the plant’s construction.

Project Delay

Bruce Hamilton, spokesman for the 4-year-old North County Concerned Citizens, which was formed to fight the plant’s construction, said the city may be guilty of insufficient environmental review and is inviting additional lawsuits that will promise to delay the project still longer. Already, the project is four years behind the original schedule proposed by the developer in 1982 because of legal battles, bureaucratic snafus and financing delays.

“We told them during the first round of City Council hearings (in 1985) that what they were doing was piecemeal environmental review,” Hamilton said, “and the courts ultimately agreed with us. This time we’ve told them the same thing, and once again I predict the courts will agree with us.”

The plant is proposed by North County Resource Recovery Associates (NCRRA), a private venture between the Halliburton Co., a Dallas-based oil services, engineering and construction company, and Thermo-Electron, a Massachusetts company involved in energy systems and environmental monitoring equipment. The companies have constructed other kinds of power plants, but this is their first entry in the waste-to-energy resource recovery field. The San Marcos plant would be its flagship from which to market additional projects, said Richard Chase, NCRRA managing director.

The plant would be built on a 15-acre section of the county’s 219-acre landfill, adjacent to Questhaven Road on the southern edge of San Marcos, between the Elfin Forest residential neighborhood and La Costa. The site is hidden from public view, although the top of a 300-foot-high smokestack would be visible from off the site.

Within a 230,000-square-foot building, trash from throughout North County would be processed, with recyclable and non-burnable material being removed. The rest would be used as fuel to drive steam turbines in order to generate for sale to San Diego Gas & Electric Co. enough electricity to serve 40,000 households.

NCRRA expects to recover 2,800 tons of aluminum, 26,200 tons of metals, 35,600 tons of paper and 6,100 tons of film plastics annually.

Extending Landfill Use

The combined burning and recycling program would reduce by about 75% the waste stream now going into the landfill, thereby extending its life by 20 years or more, city and county officials say. The landfill is expected to be filled within two years, although the county--which has no other North County landfill sites--plans to expand the San Marcos landfill to accommodate the trash plant, which would still throw away non-combustible trash.

Noting that the ash residue from some types of trash incinerators is considered hazardous material, city officials say the ash residue from this plant--though not technically hazardous because hazardous material will not be burned--will nonetheless be packaged and disposed of in a special section of the county’s Sycamore landfill in East County. Should monitoring of the ash show it to be toxic, it would be taken to a hazardous-waste disposal site, officials say.

Chase said NCRRA has so far spent $16 million on the project, which was originated in December, 1982, in contract negotiations with the county over use of the landfill site. The plant’s construction will cost $135 million, and the total cost of the project, including financing charges, is estimated at $217 million. Private investors have been lined up to purchase $185 million in tax-exempt bonds to finance the lion’s share of the project.

Chase and other supporters of the trash-to-energy plant say it is the most economical and environmentally sound way of disposing garbage, and is a safer alternative than continued dependence on landfills.

While the plant would produce pollutants, the use of air bags, chemical scrubbers and other high-tech cleansing devices would keep the pollution within “insignificant” ranges and the plant will not be a health hazard to North County residents, NCRRA has steadfastly maintained.

To that point, a risk assessment study prepared by an NCRRA consultant suggests that the chance of dying of cancer because of the plant is less than one in a million and may be closer to one in 10 million.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the county’s Air Pollution Control District have previously approved the plant’s construction.

Financial Carrot

Not the least of the issues is a financial carrot being dangled in front of the city: NCRRA has promised the city $1 million to

establish a charity to finance senior citizen and youth activities, $1.7 million for road and park improvements and $245,000 a year to fund recycling education and other waste-management education programs in the city. Furthermore, the plant is expected to ultimately generate several hundred thousand dollars a year in redevelopment tax increment income for the city and local school district.

“The whole question of why the city would submit this kind of a health risk to the community boils down to a matter of financial greed,” said Jonathan Wiltshire, another plant critic and spokesman for Citizens for Healthy Air in San Marcos.

He and other opponents cite a long list of objections to the plant, ranging from the presence of a 300-foot-high smokestack to concern for depressed property values to increased traffic to fear of unknown health hazards connected with the emission of dioxins.

Hamilton, who lives outside the San Marcos city limits, said the San Marcos City Council should oppose the plant, allow the county to expand the landfill one time--after paying mitigation fees--and put the county on notice to look elsewhere for a place to dump its trash.

“San Marcos has had its turn with a landfill. It’s done its share. Let the county look somewhere else now to solve the problem,” Hamilton said.