County Seeks to Stash Trash in City Dumps

Although few North County residents ever question where a garbage truck goes after it bumps and grinds its way through the neighborhood each week, the answer is about to become a hot political issue in nine North County cities.

The problem is that in the near future the local garbage truck may be traveling no farther than around the corner, over the hill or down the street before dumping its load at a transfer station. Few residents want a garbage dump, by any name, within sight or smell of their homes.

As nearby county landfills reach capacity and close, officials charged with finding new dump sites must search farther and farther from cities that generate the waste. This creates the need for urban way stations where the neighborhood trucks can stash their trash until massive 18-wheelers arrive to carry the urban fallout to a distant burial ground.

These local trash collection points, euphemistically called transfer stations, are a reality in many metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles and are soon to be so in North County communities and San Diego. South Bay cities will probably escape the transfer station syndrome because of relatively nearby landfill sites.

San Diego County solid-waste management experts have hired a San Francisco-area consulting firm to survey fast-growing North County for best sites for transfer centers--close to population centers, near freeway off-ramps, out of sight, smell and hearing of residential areas.

The results of that study--including recommended numbers and proposed locations of North County transfer stations--are a closely held secret, hidden in the bowels of the county Public Works Department.

Scuttlebutt around the county corridors is that the consulting firm recommended at least four or five transfer station sites, but political maneuvers narrowed that number to one or two: a coastal site on county land in Carlsbad at the intersection of El Camino Real and Palomar Airport Road and an inland site at the existing county landfill in San Marcos.

North County residents will learn about the recommendations early next year.

County Supervisor John MacDonald, whose district spans much of the North County, is aware of the sensitivity of putting trash dumps near people and has proposed incentives to cities willing to accept their neighbors’ trash.

That proposal will appear on a January or February agenda of the county Board of Supervisors.

Similar incentive programs nationwide have offered some promising perquisites to communities that host a trash station.

Baltimore delivered ball fields for youth and adult leagues. Winnipeg, Canada, paid with a nine-hole golf course and tennis courts. Soccer fields, senior centers, libraries and swimming pools are also among suggested trade-offs. Bridle paths and hiking trails in the buffer around a landfill are other examples of sugarcoating a trash dump. But most communities that accept incentives for unwanted trash facilities echo San Marcos City Manager Rick Gittings’ half-serious quip: “Just give us the money.”

San Marcos will receive nearly $3 million for hosting a trash-to-energy burning plant within its city limits.

Joseph Minner, county program coordinator, compiled the report on incentives. He said the program works when it is applied properly. The incentive program must be flexible, allowing negotiations to determine what the county might offer to persuade a reluctant city council to accept a transfer station, he said.

Urban transfer centers won’t resemble town dumps of yesteryear--open to the elements, sea gulls and varmints, and placed downwind from the nice part of town. The modern version of the town dump will be housed in an “aesthetically pleasing” building with landscaped grounds, built to be as quiet and as odorless as insulation can make it, according to Jon Rollin, county public works department program coordinator.

It will be in a non-residential area, close to major highways. If a transfer station were in a modern industrial park, it would not stand out from neighboring buildings, Minner explained.

Rollin said trucks that collect trash from curbside would drive to the transfer point and dump their loads. Workers would recycle materials such as glass and aluminum, then rake the remaining debris into a bin to be carried away by larger trucks to a distant landfill to be buried or burned.

But the public remains unconvinced that transfer centers would make good neighbors. Residents fear their property values will drop if a trash dump is put nearby, despite half a dozen surveys that show otherwise. Somehow, garbage disposal sites are perceived as a worse threat to the environment and the quality of life than airports, sewage plants or other necessary but undesirable public facilities, Minner said.

Oceanside Councilwoman Melba Bishop saw Minner’s theory become reality last year when a city-proposed transfer station bit the dust in the wake of citizen opposition.

“They gathered signatures on petitions, thousands of signatures,” Bishop said. “They organized whole neighborhoods against the project and had very valid reasons behind them.”

Charisse Krieger, who heads the Neighborhood Alliance of Oceanside, led the successful opposition to the Oceanside transfer station, which she calls “nothing but a mini-dump.”

And Krieger thinks the proposed incentive program is nothing more than “a bribe.”

“There’s no denying that the county would have to offer some kind of a bribe to woo local politicians into accepting something that the people don’t want,” Krieger said.

She campaigns against a throwaway society and for a curbside recycling program to reduce trash, thus in theory eliminating the need for transfer centers.

“What we need is one humongous dump in the middle of North County and a really effective recycling program,” Krieger said. “That’s where the county should be putting its incentive programs.”