Opponents of SANDER Fall Short of Ballot Spot

Opponents of a trash-burning power plant proposed for Kearny Mesa were dealt a setback Monday when San Diego election officials announced that a “clean air initiative” seeking to block construction of the incinerator had failed to qualify for the November ballot.

Jack Fishkin, the city’s elections officer, said backers of the initiative were 5,657 shy of the number of valid signatures they needed to authorize placement of the measure before voters this fall.

“This fell quite a bit short,” Fishkin said. “It’s rather surprising, because they did obtain 102% (of the necessary signatures) on the random sample we had taken earlier.”

Because proponents of the initiative did obtain the valid signatures of 3% of San Diego’s registered voters, state law dictates that the measure must be considered by City Council members, who may choose to place it on the ballot themselves. To make it on the ballot by initiative, the measure needed signatures from 10% of the city’s voters. The council is tentatively set to take up the issue Monday.

Leaders of San Diegans for Clean Air, the group sponsoring the initiative, said they were shocked by the news and immediately challenged the tally. Bob Glaser, a spokesman for the group and chief opponent of the SANDER trash-to-energy plant, said he believes the count was in error and vowed to personally inspect the petitions that election officials say were invalid.

“Something is wrong with the process and I intend to find out what it is,” said Glaser, who also is a candidate in the 6th District City Council race. “It is just not possible that there could be this wide a margin. I believe the signatures are there, but it will take some time to prove it.”

Glaser said he was particularly surprised at Monday’s results because of the initial, random sample conducted by the county registrar’s office, which tallies the signatures under contract with the City of San Diego.

In the random sampling process, officials take 5% of the total signatures and check them for validity. The rate of validity from the 5% is then projected over the entire batch of signatures. If the random sample indicates a total validity rate of 110% or greater, an initiative automatically qualifies for the ballot.

The clean air measure had a 102% validity rate after the random count--8% short of the necessary figure. But Glaser said he was confident because the sampling technique is generally accurate to within plus or minus 1%.

Monday’s results--the product of a signature-by-signature count by 46 employees working overtime through the weekend--indicate that supporters of the initiative were 12% short of the required number.

“I can accept a little fluctuation, but that’s a swing of 14%, and statistically, I just don’t think that’s possible,” Glaser said. “I don’t think there was any intentional effort to harm our initiative, but I definitely believe there was some sort of problem with the registrar’s procedures or the employees.”

Under state law, proponents of a measure that fails to qualify for the ballot are permitted to examine the signatures that election officials disqualify. In this case, 4,799 signatures were said to be duplicates; 13,702 were from residents not registered to vote; 2,500 were illegible; 2,531 were from people living outside San Diego, and 6,377 were from residents at a different address than that listed on the petitions.

Glaser said he is particularly eager to check those said to be illegible and those from people with conflicting addresses.

“Why couldn’t they look up the addresses of the people whose names were illegible, and verify them that way?” Glaser said. “And what if the people with different addresses moved during the life of our initiative process, which was over five months? That could be the 6,000 we need right there.”

SANDER, known formally as the San Diego Energy Recovery Project, is a joint city-county project billed as a way to deal with the region’s looming trash crisis. Officials say the Miramar landfill will be at capacity by 1995, and no other proposals for dealing with the problem are on the table.

SANDER would burn 2,250 tons of trash a day--about 45% of the amount discarded daily at the Miramar landfill--while generating electricity for 60,000 homes.

Opponents of the plant contend that little is known about the health effects of emissions from the plant, which would release a range of known and suspected carcinogens like dioxins, cadmium and arsenic. They advocate an aggressive recycling program as an alternative to the incineration technology.

The clean air initiative would prohibit SANDER and similar facilities from causing an increase in air pollution and from using drinking water for cooling. It also bars construction of such plants within three miles of hospitals, schools, child care centers and nursing homes, and requires companion recycling programs.

A spokesman for Signal Environmental Systems, the firm hoping to build the plant, said the company was pleased that the initiative had failed to garner the required signatures.

Spokesman Bernie Rhinerson said a November election on the matter would have been “inappropriate because the voter would not have had the benefit of all the environmental information coming from the California Energy Commission.” The commission is evaluating the project and will decide whether to issue a permit in April.

“Really, the vote was not entirely necessary because the permit process is so strict here in California that the public interest is very strongly protected and the opportunity for public input in the hearings is certainly there,” Rhinerson said.

Meanwhile, county air quality officials on Monday released a letter criticizing a controversial study released last month by Signal.

The study, prepared by a consultant hired by Signal, concluded that emissions from landfills pose a health risk as much as 50 times that of SANDER and similar incinerators. It said trash-to-energy facilities are a “dramatically preferable alternative” to landfills from a health standpoint.

In a letter to the county Board of Supervisors, the top administrator of the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District called the study “an analytical distortion” that served to “inappropriately inflate the associated health risk” of landfills.

More specifically, air pollution control officer Richard Sommerville said the study failed to take into account both existing and pending devices that limit emissions from landfills and are now required by state law.