Firm Scraps Bid for Controversial SANDER Plant

In a stunning turn of events that leaves San Diego without a long-term method for dealing with a looming trash disposal crisis, a New Hampshire company on Wednesday abruptly aborted its costly, five-year quest to build a controversial waste-to-energy plant in Kearny Mesa.

During a press conference, the president of Signal Environmental Systems Inc. said the company is pulling out after a $5-million investment because the San Diego City Council has failed to aggressively support the proposed San Diego Energy Recovery Project facility, known as SANDER.

“We entered into this project in 1983 as a partnership between a private company and the government of San Diego,” Signal President John J. Sullivan said. “It’s our opinion that, over the last several months, that partnership has been basically unilateral, that our partner, the City Council and the mayor, has chosen to duck the major policy issue here.”

Without political leadership, Sullivan said, “SANDER is doomed.”

Referendum a Factor

Sullivan charged that instead of backing SANDER, city leaders in recent months have allowed opponents of the plant--whom he described as “vigilante health authorities”--to shape debate over the project and unduly influence decisions on its fate. As evidence of the city’s deteriorating relationship with Signal officials, Sullivan cited his inability to obtain a meeting with the mayor--despite six months of effort.

“There comes a point where it is not in the best interest of our stockholders to continue with this kind of an investment,” said Sullivan, noting that Signal has been spending $400,000 a month in legal and technical fees.

Signal’s announcement comes just two weeks after the City Council placed the so-called Clean Air Initiative--which would have blocked construction of the trash plant--on the November ballot. Sullivan said the referendum--and the council’s comments during debate over the measure--stimulated the company’s “rethinking” of the project but was not the sole factor triggering the pullout.

City officials expressed a range of reactions Wednesday to news of Signal’s decision. Councilwoman Judy McCarty, whose district encompasses neighborhoods that would have been affected by emissions from SANDER, agreed with Sullivan that her colleagues had betrayed Signal by not siding with the company in recent council actions.

“These people came to us eight years ago in response to a request for proposals, and they have worked in good faith and we have . . . stabbed them in the back,” McCarty said. She added that the loss of Signal leaves San Diego with a growing garbage dilemma as landfill space continues to dwindle: “Yesterday, it was a problem. Today, it’s a crisis,” McCarty said.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor was out of town and unavailable for comment. But her press secretary, Paul Downey, expressed surprise at Signal’s decision given the pending ballot initiative and the ongoing evaluation of the project by the California Energy Commission, which issues permits for resource recovery plants.

“What the mayor and the rest of the council has done is they haven’t taken a position either in favor or against the project,” Downey said. “They are waiting for the (Energy Commission report on its environmental effects) to say one thing or another.”

Opponents Jubilant

Opponents of SANDER were elated upon learning that Signal is throwing in the towel.

Bob Glaser, a City Council candidate who has led the campaign for the Clean Air Initiative, called the pullout “a great victory but a partial victory because we still need the initiative to protect us from burn facilities that may be proposed here in the future.”

Janet Brown, a Tierrasanta resident who formed a citizens’ group to fight SANDER, also expressed elation at the news.

“I guess Signal realized that the citizens of San Diego would not accept this degradation of their air and the threat to their environment,” said Brown, whose campaign against the plant dates to 1984.

Sierra Club spokeswoman Ruth Duemler said the news would make a “clean air party” she had planned for Friday an even jollier event. “Now we really have something to celebrate,” she said. “Incinerators are unhealthy, and the air in San Diego is too bad already to have that large a source of air pollution.”

SANDER was billed as a way to help San Diego avert a local trash crisis caused by the loss of landfill space, which is expected to be used up within six years. The $400-million plant would have burned 2,250 tons of trash a day--about 45% of the refuse dumped daily at the Miramar landfill--while generating electrical power for about 60,000 homes.

The plant would have been one of the largest polluters in San Diego County, emitting nearly four tons of pollutants per day, including a range of suspected and known carcinogens. Although Signal officials say their incinerator poses “no significant health risk,” questions surrounding its public health effects have dogged the proposed plant, which was to be built on 43 acres north of the Interstate 805 interchange with California 163.

The company’s pullout, which will become official as soon as Signal withdraws its application for a permit from the state energy commission, leaves San Diego bereft of a plan for dealing with its garbage woes.

Lockwood Disappointed

City Manager John Lockwood, who said he was “disappointed” Signal had abandoned the project, noted that, other than the mass-burn method, there are few proven technologies currently available for handling the 1.5 million tons of refuse generated annually by San Diego.

Lockwood said a joint city-county study is under way to find new landfill space by 1988, but locating dump sites is a difficult process because residents typically oppose having such facilities in their backyards. The city also has solicited proposals for other alternative trash-disposal systems, but the approval and construction of such technology could take years.

Officials said that if voters defeat the Clean Air Initiative in November, the city might once again attempt to build a mass-burn plant.

SANDER critics, meanwhile, said the departure of Signal means it’s a perfect time for the city to develop a full-scale recycling program to help San Diego deal with the mushrooming trash problem.

“What we have to do now is to pursue alternatives to cut down what we’re producing and develop safe, sane methods of ridding ourselves of our solid waste,” Brown said. “We have to reduce, reuse and recycle. That’s the name of the game.”

Signal officials say they had planned to include recycling as part of their program but warned that it can only be one element of a municipality’s trash management plan.

Sullivan said city officials had “made a big error” in failing to avidly support its trash-burning technology and ensure that SANDER is built. He said that council members were swayed by the political climate, and content to “sit in the back row” and let the voters decide the issue, rather than take a definitive stand on the waste disposal conundrum.

“I think it’s essentially a philosophy that if you don’t take a position on an issue, it will take care of itself,” said Sullivan, who plans to place advertisements in local newspapers explaining the company’s decision. “I happen to think that’s ducking a major policy issue, that it’s wrong.”

To illustrate his argument that the city had failed to take a supportive position on SANDER, Sullivan cited the recent refusal of the council to rezone the proposed plant site--a move necessary for construction of the facility. He also charged that it was “premature” of the council to schedule the Clean Air Initiative for November--months before an environmental analysis of the plant’s effects would be available.

“I think we deserved better treatment. We’re not just some guy off of a turnip truck,” Sullivan said.

Signal has six trash-burning plants in operation in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Maryland and Florida. Another 10 are either under construction or in the permit process. The company is the leading vendor of the incineration technology; to date, its plants have burned 10 million tons of trash.

With Signal’s pullout, the proponent of any future trash-burning plant would be required to start the long, arduous planning and permitting process from square one, according to a spokeswoman for the California Energy Commission, which has been evaluating SANDER since February and planned to issue a verdict in April.

The company’s departure also makes the city ineligible for a contract that would have included relatively low “tip” fees for each load of garbage deposited at the plant. Under terms of the contract, the city would have paid the company $12.80 for every ton of refuse burned at the plant. Typically, the disposal fee is $26 per ton.