18 Cities Pool Resources on Recycling Plan : Trash: Group effort will save money and staff time in meeting new state law intended to cut landfill use.

Eighteen cities in the Southeast area of Los Angeles County are joining together to work on a comprehensive recycling plan to comply with a tough new state law requiring cities to eventually cut in half the amount of garbage being carted to landfills.

City and county officials said the group effort will save participating cities tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of staff time.

“We all thought, ‘This is silly, let’s do this as one project, save some money and come up with a more defensible plan to present to the state next year,’ ” said Norwalk Urban Planning Director Daniel Keen, who is acting as the group’s chairman.

But even so, city officials concede they have a monumental task before them and warn that residents will no longer be able to put out their garbage with the “out of sight, out of mind” ease of the past.

The new law, passed by the Legislature last fall, requires every city to come up with a comprehensive plan to identify how much garbage it sends to landfills, what kind of garbage it is and how it can be reduced through recycling or other measures. Each city must then implement a plan to reduce by 25% the amount of garbage taken to landfills by 1995. By the year 2000, cities must reduce by 50% what is hauled to landfills.

If the city and county officials fail to come up with a plan by July 1, 1991, or fail to implement it once the state approves it, they could face $10,000-a-day fines.

“It’s very, very, very difficult to comply with, but we are not sitting back and crying about it,” said Michael Mohajer, assistant division engineer for the waste management division of the county Public Works Department. “We aren’t saying we can’t do it.”

City and county officials said the law will mean belt-tightening, a conscious effort by residents, businesses and industries to use less and recycle more, and more than a few headaches.

“In the end, everyone will pay one way or the other,” Mohajer said. “We (county and cities) don’t have the revenues and the law requires the costs be passed on to the generators, and we are all generators.”

Cities now planning to study recycling together include Bell, Cudahy, Downey, Pico Rivera, Whittier, Bell Gardens, Santa Fe Springs, Artesia, Cerritos, Norwalk, Bellflower, Commerce, Huntington Park, Maywood, La Mirada, Lynwood, Paramount, South Gate and the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County.

Officials from these cities--the Southeast area group is one of six in the county--plan to hire consultants to find out how much garbage, and what kind, is produced throughout the area.

“It (grouping) greatly reduces the cost,” said Bill Ralph, Downey public works director. “It’s silly for me to do a study on supermarket refuse when Norwalk has exactly the same market, run by the same people, and already has the information.”

Once the study is completed, each city will be presented with a list of options to reduce the garbage flow to landfills. The bill sets forth three reduction measures: recycling, composting and “source reduction,” a term that can mean anything from using both sides of paper when writing to using less packaging, county officials said.

City officials said they do not know how much it is going to cost taxpayers or how extensive the recycling program will be, but they say it seems clear that simply carting stacks of newspapers, plastic bottles and aluminum cans to a nearby recycling center will not be enough.

Residents, for example, likely will be asked to separate “green waste”--hedge clippings, dead leaves and lawn trimmings--for recycling in addition to aluminum, glass and papers. Officials in Cerritos and Downey already are talking about starting green waste programs.

Of the 18 cities, only Downey and Bellflower operate recycling programs. Downey’s curbside recycling program, which has been in operation for almost 15 years, is the oldest and most established in the area, and city officials said it keeps out of landfills an estimated 3% to 5% of the estimated 200 tons of garbage produced in the city daily.

None of the cities are close to the 25% reduction goal set by the bill, city officials said.

“We all agree we have to do something, that something dramatic has to happen,” Bell City Manager John Bramble said. “But this piece of legislation should have been passed three years ago. They should have given the cities at least three years to plan this. Such a short turnaround makes proper planning difficult.”

State Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier), who was a member of the Assembly committee that wrote the legislation, said that although he is sympathetic to the complaints of city leaders, “If we didn’t set some standard, some deadline, then nothing would be done. The fact is we are running out of space in our landfills, we can’t site new ones because of the NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) syndrome, so recycling is a very attractive means to expand the capacity of our landfills.”