WHAT IS NORTH COUNTY’S TOP ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM?

Jerry Harmon, 46, spent most of his 18 years on the Escondido City Council as the sole slow-growth advocate until two like-minded candidates were elected in 1988.

I think we have two, and it’s both water and air. Water from the standpoint that since we live in the desert, this entire region is dependent on imported water. As the population increases, we become even more dependent. And as a result, I think we are reaching a point where we need to seriously consider the recycling and reclaiming of water.

Escondido is on the verge of getting into that in a very meaningful way, in that probably in the next few weeks we will be making decisions regarding the expansion of our waste water treatment plant, and we are planning to not only expand it, but also to go to full tertiary treatment to meet state standards, which is not being done any place in the county at the moment. And by doing so, we will be in a position to use all of the water that is currently now dumped into the ocean at San Elijo. We will be able to sell that for irrigation and agricultural purposes, thus relieving the demand on potable water that is imported, and at the same time, creating a new income stream from the reclaimed water that we will be selling.

Every day that goes by, we throw away 16 million gallons. We could be selling that at two-thirds the cost of what we paid for to bring it into the region in the first place.

It does take time because obviously there are health considerations involved, there are engineering considerations in terms of how do you distribute the water. Because it’s one thing to reclaim it. And that’s a important point when you talk to other people who may say that trash is an environmental problem.

It’s one thing to say that, well, we are quote, recycling our trash, and that that’s a way to deal with trash. But if you think about it, recycling is a bit of a misnomer unless you have complete loop. It’s one thing to collect and separate trash, but that’s only part of the process of recycling. Unless you have a market to reuse that trash that has been collected and separated, you really haven’t completed the loop as far as recycling is concerned.

And what I’m saying is also true with water. Unless you can market the water, and you have to be able to distribute it in order to do that, you haven’t completed the loop. In the case of water, you have to make sure you do the whole process or you can’t do any of it.

I think that other areas that have treatment facilities are going to find that what we do will be to their benefit as well, for the same reasons, and that they too, once they take a closer look at it, they will be motivated to do the same thing.

Tom Erwin, 47, holds licenses as a real estate broker and commercial aircraft pilot, but has been in semiretirement since the air traffic controller’s strike in 1981. Erwin, 47, has lived in Carlsbad since 1979, and serves on its planning commission and oversight committee for growth management. He has been fighting the San Marcos trash plant almost full time for four years.

The control and management of growth. That’s it in a nutshell. Our issues are peripherally tied to that. Our problems are all tied. How we in North County choose to manage our growth will dictate the problems that we have or the lack of problems that we have in the future.

Carlsbad has a growth management plan that overall is a terrific plan. These are the items that have to be satisfied along with any development in our community. We have our community broken into zones. There has to be overall zone plans for each area, addressing development through build-out and how they will satisfy these different areas as follows, not necessarily by importance:

City administrative facilities, libraries, waste water treatment capacity, parks, drainage, circulation, fire department, open space, schools, sewer collection, and water distribution.

That’s what we have to address, and any time that anyone comes in with any project, that project has to be keyed into this and they have to show how all of those areas will be satisfied. That way we don’t all of a sudden wake up one morning with major problems. Every segment has to grow in concert with the other segments. We don’t overbuild and then say, gee, we forgot to have open space, or gee, we forgot to have parks, or gee, we forgot to have schools.

Another thing we’re going to have to address ourselves to pretty soon, which is a non-growth issue, is that over 90% of our water is imported. If we lose our water source through some emergency, we would be in a real problem.

Now, Carlsbad keeps a two-week supply of water. We have some communities in North County, I understand, that have less than two-days supply of water available to them. This is a major problem that we’re going to have to address because that 90%-plus water that’s imported all comes across the San Andreas fault. If we were to have a major shift on that fault, we could lose our water supply, it is projected, up to six months. As far as long-range planning, that is a major problem.

Environmentally, although I have concerns, I know we have enough good people fighting the good fight, that I don’t see any great problems happening. Because any time anything starts to happen, we have so many people that pounce on it.

For example, the SDG&E; expansion project down here. Because of what happened in Alaska and what happened in Huntington Beach, there was already a call for a possible ordinance in the city of Carlsbad for any ship that comes in to refuel at the SDG&E; plant, that they have to be a double-hulled vessel. We have so many people that pounce on this stuff so fast, that I’m not real concerned about us missing something there.

Larry Aker is vice president of regulatory affairs for the Pacific Treatment Corp., a company that treats hazardous waste. He formerly worked with the toxics division of the county Health Services Department. He is a resident of Escondido.

Contaminated or abandoned sites in North County. That’s my primary area of expertise. If we limit the discussion to contaminated or abandoned sites in the county, the Chatham site, in south Escondido, is clearly the most complex, the most polluted, the most studied site in the county.

It is actually significant because it’s a detriment to the development of the immediate neighbor and could be, I guess--scratch the I guess--could be a potential threat to anyone who’s on the site and certainly is one that is continuing to pollute ground water. We need to qualify it and say that’s there’s never been any evidence to indicate that it represents a threat to any humans off site. But just simply because there are places where one could actually come into contact with the pollutants on site, it remains a threat actually to public health to anyone on site.

It’s of particular interest right now too, because the state and the community are facing a May 8 deadline, a regulatory deadline, that would mean that if the site has not been substantially cleaned up by May 8, then the cost of cleaning the site up will be much, much higher.

The third phase of the federal regulations on hazardous waste, banning the landfilling of certain materials, goes into effect. What that means, is the cost of disposal after May 8, for the types of materials at that site, will be much much higher. So while the state has devoted about 1.2 million dollars and then they got some additional money after that, to work on the site, that money is going to be inadequate if they wait until after May 8. I think the state, when they were down at a community meeting about two weeks ago, had notified the community of the need to move rapidly on the site.

There is another site in North County besides Chatham that deserves some mention and that’s the ground water in Santa Ysabel . . . has also been contaminated from underground tanks. Because of the ground water contamination, the dependence of some of the people in the community on ground water, as their source for both drinking water and domestic use--actually it’s a fairly small contaminated plume--is really significant in that community.

Most of North County is not dependent on ground water for its domestic water use, we use imported water. But in Santa Ysabel, they are dependent, or they were in the past, dependent on ground water. So there are some wells there that have been condemned, and essentially a moratorium on new well drilling in that area because of the contaminated water.

A third thing needs to be mentioned, a third area of contamination and that’s all over North County. There are numerous, literally hundreds of sites that have been contaminated with gasoline or with diesel from underground fuel tanks. The county is going through a process right now of requiring, via state law, that they be cleaned up. In most cases, the only thing that’s contaminated is soil, and so it doesn’t pose any kind of a problem. In some cases, there is ground water contamination, but no dependency on ground water, so they don’t really represent an acute issue.

The perspective on all of this ought to be that North County is actually free from very many significant abandoned hazardous waste problems, due, in part, to the fact that they’ve been cleaned up over the past 10 years. The county has maintained a very active program, industry has really gotten behind the notion of cleaning up.

The hundreds of sites that have been cleaned up can be documented. They really represent a substantial effort in North County to clean sites up. Certainly that doesn’t say that we need to diminish our efforts to try and get the Chatham site, Santa Isabel, and all the rest of those hundreds of contaminated soil sites cleaned up, but there really are very few additional surface contamination sites.

Dwight Worden, 42, is an environmental attorney in Solana Beach, which also was his home from 1970 to 1981. He has lived in Del Mar for the past nine years. Worden served on the Coastal Commission in 1977 and was an alternate on the state coastal commission the same year. He represents the city of Encinitas in its opposition to the San Marcos trash-burning plant.

In general, the adverse effect of growth, primarily manifested in traffic congestion. The second priority is the solid waste problem, recycling, the probing of trash, landfills, air quality is high on the list. I guess you’d call it an environmental problem, but preservation of the remaining natural open spaces is a very high priority.

Traffic is very gloomy. I-5 runs something like 250,000 cars a day. It is predicted to go to 350,000 cars a day by 2010, which means it will be gridlock. And that’s assuming the highway goes from the current 30,000 cars a day to 100,000 cars a day. So, that’s something pretty significant. On the traffic front, we’re looking a L.A.-style gridlock in North County.

In 1992, there will be commuter-rail service for the first time, so people will be able to commute from Oceanside, Carlsbad, Del Mar, etc., down to San Diego, and get out of their cars. And that will help, but even the commuter-rail system won’t really solve the problem, only make it somewhat better.

The trash problem: We have one landfill in North County, in San Marcos, that is somewhat full right now. The Board of Supervisors has been trying for 10 years to locate a new landfill, and they can’t, they haven’t done it. Where’s our trash going to go?

On the positive side, recycling is starting to happen. Del Mar and Solana Beach, Carlsbad and a number of the other North County cities now have curbside recycling, where they give you these colored buckets and you separate your aluminum, your glass, your newspapers, plastics, and that can make a big difference. We’re aggressively moving forward on composting, where you take lawn clippings, trees, all of that kind of stuff which takes up a lot of room in landfills. Through composting you can reuse it.

And a related issue is sewage treatment. We’re very controversial in the North County. We have a plant in Oceanside, one in Carlsbad, and one in Cardiff, all of which have ocean outfall, discharges, treated sewage going into the ocean. There’s a lot of controversy about whether people are getting sick because of it.