Tour of Recycling Center Fails to Secure Funding

Ventura city officials gave their colleagues from neighboring cities a grand tour of their new recycling center on Thursday in an unsuccessful effort to persuade them to share the costs of the state-of-the-art facility that opens mid-June.

Mayors and council members who make up the county’s Regional Sanitation Board were not impressed by the recycling warehouse in an industrial area of east Ventura. Within hours of the tour, the board voted unanimously to deny Ventura’s request for a $180,000 break in its yearly fees to the sanitation board.

“Ventura never asked this board for help when they planned the center,” said Camarillo Mayor Charlotte Craven, who called the recycling center “a victim of poor planning.”

“Now they are asking us ‘would you like to help us fund it?’ The recycling center was built by a city, for a city, and then it was scaled up a little.”

Although Ventura failed to get the funding, city officials succeeded in lining up one potential customer for the center

Oxnard Councilwoman Dorothy Maron said she was seriously considering sending some of her city’s garbage to the Gold Coast Center. “Maybe 100 tons a day,” she said. And Craven hinted that Camarillo “might send recyclables” to the center.

The board members began their day with an elaborate tour of the steel-and-glass office building and spacious warehouse that will collect and sell used cardboard, glass, plastics, newspapers and aluminum cans.

The city held the tour as part of its lobbying effort to get other cities to join in the experimental recycling effort.

Ventura hopes other cities will use the recycling center and help meet its promise to provide at least 125 tons of recyclable materials to the center’s operator, Gold Coast Inc., a consortium of three area garbage companies.

Sheri Eiker, Ventura’s recycling coordinator, said the city will collect about 25 tons a day from its curbside recycling program and between 75 and 100 tons from its commercial recycling program. For the city to make a profit, the center will have to process almost 200 tons a day, she said. Gold Coast has a capacity of 300 tons a day.

The city also wanted to dispel fears that it is sabotaging the Regional Sanitation Board’s plans to build its own recycling center, which is scheduled to be constructed in the next three to five years.

During the tour, Terry Adelman, city finance director, stressed that the contract between Gold Coast and Ventura clearly shows that the center could be modified or even phased out to accommodate a huge recycling center the county is planning to build on its Bailard landfill. Located between Oxnard and Ventura, the center would have the capacity to process 1,000 tons of material a day.

Sanitation board members seemed satisfied with Adelman’s explanation of how the Ventura Center would not interfere with the planned countywide facility.

“We’re not competing against Ventura,” said board member Orvene Carpenter, mayor pro tem of Port Hueneme. “We’re all in this together.”

Ventura Councilman Gary Tuttle, the city’s representative on the board, voted with the majority to deny the requested $180,000 subsidy.

“We’ll accept whatever decision the board makes,” Tuttle told the board. “But quite frankly, I’m very proud of our recycling center.

“I really think it’s going to be a financial success,” he said. “What we really want is your cooperation, because we are committed to the regional concept.”