Optimist Club Turns to Community to Try to Salvage Recycling Center : Trash: Financial losses have mounted. Management changes have failed to stem the Escondido operation’s tailspin into red ink.

Escondido’s Noon Optimist Club Recycling Center is an unsightly community landmark where generations of Brownies, Camp Fire Girls, Webelos and Cub Scouts have exchanged sacks of pop cans and stacks of newspapers for cash to fuel their next project.

Now the salvage center, at 1180 W. Washington Ave., has fallen on hard times, forced to lay off its crew and to discontinue payment for the recyclable trash its customers bring in.

“We’ve paid the community for 18 years, and now we are asking the community to pay us back, at least temporarily,” Hugh Dunning, the site manager, said.

In the past year, financial losses have mounted and management changes have failed to stem the tailspin into red ink that has turned the once-profitable salvage center into a liability. The center, which opened in 1974, has been a steady source of income for the Noon Optimist Club’s many projects and other civic charities. Now it is a costly problem, requiring the hiring of auditors and attorneys to patch together the past and determine where the money went and who, if anyone, is responsible.

The chief victims of the center’s collapse will be the projects it helps support: Huck Finn Day, a safe-driving project, Just Say No To Drugs, Teachers of Distinction, Opportunity School, Escondido Youth Encounter, Escondido Boys and Girls Club medical facility and a dozen others aided under the club’s motto, “Friend of Youth.”

The club, a nonprofit organization, is hoping that the community will pitch in and donate its recyclables until the Optimist leaders can get the salvage center back on a firm footing or find someone who will.

Dunning, who has been at the salvage yard since April, said the donated salvage will be sold and the profits turned over to the Optimist Club, “except for paying the bills, the lights and rent.”

He wouldn’t venture a prediction on whether the nonprofit recycling center could survive now that it is asking its customers to be nonprofit too, but, he figures, “We’ll find out soon enough.”

Arie DeJong, whose business interests include Liberty Salvage, a for-profit recycling venture in San Marcos, concedes that 1989 was no banner year for recyclers but doubts that the price squeeze could have brought a veteran recycling operation to its knees.

“Between us, we have the longest track records in North County,” DeJong said of the Optimist operation. “I have no idea why they are in such trouble.”

The “trouble” that the Escondido recycling center faces is the loss of its capital: a required reserve of $100,000 to $150,000 to pay its customers cash for cans or bottles or paper brought in until it is processed and sent to recycling companies to be turned into new products.

At the start of 1989, the center had $104,000 in the bank. At year’s end, the recyclers had only enough to pay off its employees, most of whom were then laid off.

Optimist Club president Stan Oleksy said Monday that the club had made no charges against anyone about the losses, mainly because there is no way of knowing if there is a “bad guy” involved in the salvage center’s crisis.

The financial history of the center’s operations, Oleksy concedes, is scanty. Most of the payments were made in cash, and many of the written records are incomplete or missing. One batch of records was discovered at the bottom of a trash bin.

“We have said too much already,” Oleksy said. “I’m not saying anything at all to anyone until we get this sorted out and have some sort of solution.”

Until then, Dunning said, the salvage center will remain open for donations of recyclable trash.