Time Holds Key to San Marcos Power Plant

Now, for the first time in the five-year proposal to build a trash-burning power plant in San Marcos, the question seems to be turning from when the plant will be built to whether it will be built at all.

The project manager himself acknowledged last week that the parent company is considering a retreat date if progress toward the plant’s construction is significantly stymied.

Gerald Toney, who earlier this year took over the local management of North County Resource Recovery Associates (NCRRA), said Friday that construction of the plant will not begin until the second or third quarter of 1989 at the earliest.

But if construction hasn’t begun by the end of next year, he said, “it is probably unlikely we could go forward.” He added, however, that “I don’t see that (long a delay) happening.”

Numerous Roadblocks

Yet, there are any number of roadblocks--some serious--that continue to nag the beleaguered proposal and which might delay the plant’s construction beyond even Toney’s year-off projection.

* Opponents to the controversial, $220-million project who have dogged it since the first days continue to challenge its construction. No fewer than nine separate lawsuits, most of them now consolidated, remain to be resolved. Eight of them are pending at the Superior Court level, meaning that should they be resolved in favor of NCRRA, they still could and likely would be appealed to a higher court, further delaying the project. While opponents in the first days of the project were citizen activist groups, today they include the cities of Encinitas and Carlsbad.

* The federal Environmental Protection Agency, which previously granted construction approval, has now told NCRRA it will have to meet additional environmental safeguards if construction doesn’t begin before January--a deadline that the NCRRA concedes won’t be met. NCRRA says it is confident the new requirements, involving more stringent controls on the emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulates just ten-millionths of an inch in size, can be met.

* The county’s Air Pollution Control District has been told by NCRRA that some of its permit requirements may need amendments--a request that would cause delays in terms of new evaluations and health risk assessments by the county’s staff.

* Perhaps most troubling from NCRRA’s standpoint, it must negotiate either an amended or an altogether new contract with the county for the right to build the plant at the county’s landfill because a San Diego County Superior Court judge ruled last year that the previous contract was null and void. County officials say that, if the courts ultimately rule that an altogether new contract is needed, they may choose--or be required--to put the entire trash-to-energy proposal out to open bid, virtually sending the plan back to Square One.

Until the question of whether NCRRA needs a new contract or must simply amend the previous contract is resolved--and that question is now in appeals court--negotiations between NCRRA and the county will not even begin.

Even San Marcos city officials, who were the plant’s greatest supporters, are now hedging their bets and talking in terms of fall-back positions should the NCRRA proposal fall through.

Municipal Plan Considered

San Marcos Mayor Lee Thibadeau said last week that if contract talks between NCRRA and the county are not resolved by July, he will propose that San Marcos consider dealing with its municipal trash in some other way, at the city’s expense.

“I’m still optimistic--even more so today than I was three or four years ago--that it will be built,” Thibadeau said. “‘Most of the county recognizes how desperate the trash disposal situation is and how viable this trash-to-energy plant proposal is.

“But I’m nervous we’re not seeing some of the activity I’d like to see,” Thibadeau said. “In order to protect San Marcos residents, we’ll probably develop our own plans to make sure the city’s residents are taken care of.”

Such plans, Thibadeau said, could include the city’s purchase of property immediately adjacent to the county landfill for the construction of the city’s own trash-processing facility.

Such a plant could recycle material, as NCRRA’s proposal also includes. But rather than burn the remaining trash, which is the cornerstone of NCRRA’s project, the city would compost the remaining garbage, process it into pellets and ship it to be burned outside the area, he speculated.

Ironically, such a recycling-and-composting facility had been promoted by opponents to the NCRRA trash-burning project as environmentally sounder, and would likely receive far greater support from critics than the NCRRA proposal.

Thibadeau said his city would “likely make the facility available to our neighboring cities for a price. It might be very expensive for them, but it would be a better alternative than what theirs is now, which is none.”

San Marcos has won few friends in North County for its arrangement with NCRRA, with critics arguing that San Marcos was dealing with NCRRA because of the millions of dollars of revenue the city stood to make, at the expense of worsened air quality throughout North County.

No Landfills Available in North County

But project proponents have argued since the outset that burning trash and carefully controlling toxic emissions, and using the power to generate electricity, was environmentally sounder than continued reliance on landfills and concern about toxic seepage into underground water supplies. Furthermore, they have argued, there are no other landfills available to serve the North County metropolitan area once the San Marcos dump is filled to capacity within a few years.

A search for a new landfill is under way in North County, but its selection and preparation is considered at least four to five years off.

NCRRA is a joint partnership between Thermo Electron Corp. and Combustion Engineering Resource Recovery Systems, which joined the project several months ago after an original partner, Brown & Root Inc., decided to withdraw from such projects.

Toney, who came to NCRRA from Combustion Engineering, said the nagging lawsuits against the project “have certainly caused us to take some extra time and extra money, but I think it’s a mistake to think they’ve precluded us from going forward. We’re still doing a lot of the work we need to finance the project and get it under way.”

“But it’s probably tougher to do a project in California than anywhere else in the country,” he said. “There have been lots of failed projects in California which could have gone forward but for municipalities changing their minds. And California is a very litigious state.”

Among the proposed trash-burning power plants scuttled in California was the proposed Sander project in San Diego. The proposed developer backed out last year in the face of mounting public opposition to it highlighted by a referendum petition drive that collected 80,000 signatures.

“Ultimately, this is going to be the way they’re going to dispose their waste--in a (trash-burning) facility like this, with recycling and some degree of landfilling. The longer they take, the harder it will be to resolve their problems and the more they’re going to have to pay” for trash disposal, Toney said.

Nonetheless, he said Combustion Engineering would “likely” cut bait with the project by the end of 1989 if construction hasn’t begun. “We want to develop this project right. We’ve done some serious, diligent homework and we know what we’re doing,” Toney said. “This is the only business we do. We have projects in Hawaii, Detroit and Hartford; we’re concluding negotiations and financing on Long Island, and we’ve been selected for several other projects.

“If we decided not to go forward in San Marcos, we wouldn’t look immediately to going anywhere in California. The industry as a whole will say that, given the history in California, it’s not worth pursuing these projects unless the climate changes,” Toney said. “You’ll likely see a moratorium for some period, and then wait until California realizes how bad its garbage problem is, and then deal with it. Then, it will cost California a lot more money.”

Toney declined to discuss specific issues to be negotiated with the county. In general, they will include how much NCRRA will charge the county to process the trash--charges that the county would pass on to trash haulers--as well as how much royalties NCRRA will share with the county for recycled material, and what risks the county will accept in the project.

“What we will propose is basically the type of deal that’s pretty much an industry standard, involving a sharing of the risks involved, etc.,” he said.

Dwight Worden, an attorney representing the city of Encinitas in three lawsuits it has filed against various aspects of the project, said opponents to the project “will spend whatever it takes” to derail it.

“NCRRA is spending an awful lot of money and they’re worse off now than they were five years ago,” he said. “An objective businessman would say it’s time to quit. If they don’t, they’ll still lose on the merits of the lawsuits.”

Besides the lawsuit by the City of Encinitas--which is receiving financial and legal assistance from the City of Carlsbad--other plaintiffs include Christward Ministry, which operates a 640-acre retreat near the landfill, and Rheingold Inc., a developer which owns land in Olivenhain, just south of the project site.

Among the grounds for the lawsuit are that the environmental and general plan studies leading to the city of San Marcos’ approval of the project were flawed, and that the California Polution Control Financing Authority, which authorized $185 million in tax-free bonds to help finance the project, erred when it extended its deadline for the beginning of construction. The bonds have been sold and its proceeds are in an escrow account, awaiting construction start-up.

Worden said he hoped the trash plant will be rejected by the Board of Supervisors, even before the litigation is resolved, for political or economic reasons.

“Public sentiment toward the Sander project in San Diego was very revealing,” Worden said. “The people said they don’t want trash-to-energy plants that emit toxics, and I feel a majority of people living in North County feel the same.

“It’s such an uphill battle for NCRRA, I just don’t ever see it happening.”