Trash Plant Foes Win a New Count

Opponents of a trash-burning power plant received a reprieve of sorts Monday when the San Diego City Council agreed to pay $30,000 for a more thorough review of signatures on an initiative that city officials had ruled ineligible for the November ballot.

The council’s 7-1 decision to pay for the thorough check came after heated debate and despite an opinion by County Registrar Conny B. McCormack that the review would be futile because it would net far fewer than the 5,657 signatures the initiative fell short of to qualify for the ballot.

But council members decided to pay the money to put to rest questions that had arisen about how the signatures on the controversial clean-air petition were checked.

The initiative, sponsored by San Diegans for Clean Air, is aimed at blocking a city-county trash-burning plant, which government officials say is needed because of the area’s shrinking landfill capacity. The plant would burn 2,250 tons of trash a day and generate enough electricity annually for 60,000 homes.

Health Questions

However, the group wants to stop the government project, called the San Diego Energy Recovery Project or SANDER, because of questions about its health effects. Emissions from SANDER would include suspected or known carcinogens like dioxin, cadmium and arsenic.

The group collected more than 79,000 signatures on its initiative, and it appeared that it had more valid signatures than the 54,000 needed to qualify for the November ballot.

But it received a shock earlier in the month when the city clerk’s office said a review of the signatures showed the measure was short of the goal. Despite that, council members on Monday still had the option of putting the measure on the ballot, along with a raft of other proposals slated for voter determination in the fall.

Members of San Diegans for Clean Air told council members Monday that the county registrar’s office, which reviewed the signatures under contract with the city, did not complete the third and final phase of inspecting the names. Instead of conducting the costly, labor-intensive step, the registrar’s office figured it would be useless and recommended to the city clerk’s office to stop the verification procedure, said Bob Glaser, a spokesman for the group.

Yet Glaser, a council candidate in the 6th District, said even his name had been disallowed under the incomplete verification procedures because he had changed addresses between the time he signed the petition and when it underwent the verification process. The more thorough check would add his name to the petitions, he said.

Glaser said the determination represented a “bottom line, . . . gut-level guess that the signatures are not there.”

McCormack estimated that, with the meticulous verification, clean-air advocates might gain 1,300 signatures--far short of the 5,657 still needed to qualify.

Cost of Verification

The initial verification cost the city $39,000, and the extra work will cost an additional $30,000, she said.

“We have concluded that this petition is going to fail,” she said.

At first, council members seemed to be inclined to skip the expense of the thorough check and instead put the measure on the ballot anyway, following the arguments of Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer and Mayor Maureen O’Connor that it deserved a citywide vote despite falling short in collecting valid signatures.

O’Connor said she was “impressed” that nearly 50,000 signatures had been validated anyway. “If means the community wants to discuss the issue and they want that right,” she said.

But council members Ed Struiksma and Judy McCarty fought the move aggressively, and Struiksma was visibly upset at the direction of the discussion.

“We are turning our backs on the laws that govern the city,” Struiksma countered. “Yes, we may have come close, but that’s not good enough. There are a lot of people who come close and don’t make it, and that’s tough.”

Uneasy Compromise

Eventually, the council settled on an uneasy compromise--pay the $30,000 and see if the more thorough check would net the necessary number of signatures for the ballot.

Only McCarty voted against the motion. She argued that it was a waste of city money.

McCormack said her staff will look at the signatures and report back to the council by next week, just in time for the measure to be voted onto the November ballot if enough valid names are found.

While that initiative failed to make the ballot on Monday, the council voted to put several other measures before voters in the fall, including:

- A bond issue to fund improvements at Balboa and Mission Bay parks. The voters will be able to choose between a $93.5-million and a $73.9-million bond issue for shoring up buildings and conducting other improvements at the popular city landmarks.

The measure requires approval of two-thirds of the voters. The last time a bond issue was passed by San Diegans was in 1966, when they approved a $23.5-million issue for the two parks.

- Whether to allow development of the controversial La Jolla Valley project, which calls for an industrial park, a Christian university and residential development on 5,100 acres in the city’s northern tier. Voters will be asked whether the city should take the 5,100 acres out of the “urban reserve,” which is theoretically off limits to development until 1995, and allow construction now. It was council approval of the La Jolla Valley project in 1985 that inspired the slow-growth Proposition A, which requires citywide approval of removing land from the reserve.

- A measure asking San Diegans to lift a limit on how much money the city can spend. The limit was imposed by the Gann Initiative, which was approved by Californians in 1979.

San Diego is the first major city in the state to find itself in conflict of the limit, which froze government spending at the 1979 level with adjustments for population growth and cost of living.

City Manager John Lockwood and his staff say that, if the limit is not lifted, the city will have to return to taxpayers $8 million to $10 million that will be automatically collected in 1988--money they say is better spent on police protection and other city services. The amount will increase each year, and the city’s budget will suffer proportionately, he added.

- A proposal to change the name of Martin Luther King Jr. Way back to Market Street. This measure automatically qualifies for the November ballot because it garnered enough qualified signatures.