Landfill Siting Puts Supervisors in Pinch

William Pink thought he had won. As a member of the Pala Band of Mission Indians, he figured he might have saved the future of his tribe.

Robert Summers, a Fallbrook resident, thought he had won, too, and declared that guts and conscience had beaten political expediency.

Lawrence Peabody, who lives next to nobody near the North County hamlet of Sunshine Summit, claimed victory too, not so much for himself but for the environment.

Indeed, when the San Diego County Planning Commission rejected three proposed landfill sites in North County communities last month, each believed he had dodged a bullet aimed at the heart of his neighborhood.

Before Fallbrook, Sunshine Summit and the Indian reservation could draw a sigh of relief, however, the county’s planning staff took aim once again.

Despite the planning commission’s rejection of the three sites, county planners are insisting that consideration of the sites be pursued--putting the Board of Supervisors in the awkward position of siding either with its staff or its advisory panel.

County planners say they are trying to be practical, not contrary. Time is running short in resolving the county’s trash crisis, they say, and no one has begun to look for other sites to dump the 1.1 million tons of trash that North County throws out annually. In the past 20 years, they say, the county has closed 12 landfills and opened only one--in San Marcos.

Rather than lose another year or longer in searching for other landfill locations that might prove no less objectionable, it is better, they say, to study further the sites that the Planning Commission wanted nothing to do with.

Consider the problem: The county owns and operates five landfills--in San Marcos, Sycamore Canyon near Santee, Otay Mesa in South County, and small ones in Ramona and Borrego Springs. The city of San Diego has a sixth landfill, at Miramar. In a county that can fill up San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium to the top row of the cheap seats with trash every two weeks, the six existing landfills are expected to overflow within 10 years.

As urgent as the need for new landfills, opponents of the new sites say, is the need to protect precious underground water--which is believed to sit beneath each of the three proposed sites. The trash has to go someplace, they acknowledge. But not, says Pink, on property held sacred by Indians alongside the San Luis Rey River. Not, says Summers, in a semi-rural Fallbrook residential neighborhood, down the street from a senior citizens’ mobile-home park. And not, says Peabody, on federally owned land near Warner Springs that’s a treasured habitat and fractured by underground earthquake faults.

But, since it will take five years--maybe 10--to identify, design and develop a new landfill, county planners say that process had better start yesterday, if not sooner, if the county wants a place to bury trash in the year 2000. That’s why the staff is going to ask the county Board of Supervisors in November to ignore the recommendation of its own planning advisory board.

“We recognize a lot of the concerns that were raised (in opposition to the three sites)--but we haven’t addressed them in detail yet,” said Bill Worrell, who as deputy director of public works for the county is spending much of his time trying to reconcile the county’s landfill crisis.

Worrell says he had hoped the planning commission would move to allow the landfill to be considered as an acceptable land use--a move that would have bought planners another year to research the problem, he said, but would not have set any plan in stone.

“We would have to go back in a year or so for the major use permit,” he said, at which point the county and its consultants would be better prepared, with computer modeling and other high-tech analysis, to decide if the three proposed North County sites are doable. “Then, if they want to, they could tell us ‘no’ at that point.”

Instead, the planning commission rejected all three sites as unacceptable at its Aug. 31 meeting and also rejected the environmental impact report (EIR), which analyzed the environmental pros and cons of each site, as inadequate and unacceptable.

The planning commission does not have the final say. The Board of Supervisors, which in the past has ignored the advice of its citizens’ planning advisory panel, will have free rein to vote any way it wants when it takes up the matter in November.

And, before a landfill can be built, it must be approved by the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, the county’s Air Pollution Control District, the Army Corps of Engineers and the county health department. Any of those agencies can reject the project, even if the Board of Supervisors were to approve it.

County supervisors have not yet discussed where to put a new landfill in North County, saying they haven’t gotten enough information through the requisite bureaucratic protocol to even consider the issue yet. That’s what public hearings and staff reports are for.

But Supervisor John MacDonald, whose 5th District includes North County, considered the planning commission’s vote last week a “setback,” said his chief aide, Nancy Allen.

She noted that the supervisors “very frequently” make decisions contrary to the planning commission’s recommendations and further noted that the planning commission’s vote included only four of the seven members. (One commissioner was absent; one cited a potential conflict of interest because she lives in the Warner Springs area, and a third took himself out of the discussions because he works for a public relations and advertising agency that represents Waste Management Inc., which is part owner of the Gregory Canyon site alongside California 76.)

Clearly, the supervisors will have to do something about the landfill problem, Allen said.

“On lots of issues, we have the option of not doing anything at all,” she said. “But, in this case, doing nothing is the worst option. In fact, it’s not even an option. We have to do something with the trash, and every option will be controversial.”

For her part, Lynn Leichtfuss, chairman of the planning commission, says she feels confident that the supervisors will agree with her and not endorse any of the three currently proposed sites.

“They’re also aware of the importance of ground-water storage basins, and I think they’ll want to review other sites,” she said. “I don’t think the entire board will react to the pressures that the Department of Public Works is putting on everyone--that we’re running out of space and have to react immediately. I think the Board of Supervisors is gutsier than that.

“There is a time urgency, but that can’t allow us to make an error or bad decision that might affect our water resources in the future, just because we didn’t plan far enough ahead.”

Leichtfuss said she is confident that better sites can be found. “We just need to search for them. They may be slightly closer to population centers.”

Worrell said there is too little information to know whether the ground water basins in North County would be contaminated by the landfills. The on-paper solution, he says, is a new, so-called “state-of-the-art” landfill liner--a layer of clay and a polyethylene liner--designed to contain toxins. Should it break or leak, the liquids would be channeled with rock-filled drains into a collection basin where it could be pumped out.

Critics, including some planning commission members, say they are not convinced that the liners would last into future generations, because none have been around long enough to observe.

That’s precisely why the zoning go-ahead should have been given for these landfills, Worrell says: to allow further study.

Why not, right now, begin considering other landfill sites as backup positions to the three contested sites?

“None of the other sites have been studied even to the level that these three were,” she said. “It takes time and money. Who’s to say that these other sites won’t have as many--if not more--problems as the ones we’re looking at now?”