Landfill Law May Lead to Higher Trash Pickup Rates : Environment: The state legislation mandates deep reductions in the use of dumps by cities. Massive recycling is expected to be an alternative.

Two years ago, rubbish was hardly a conversation piece in Ventura County. It was something you lugged to the curb and dismissed from your mind.

Collection rates were relatively cheap. They varied little from city to city and they didn’t go up, no matter how many barrels or bags were put out.

All of that, trash experts predict, is about to change.

A new state law will, in the decade ahead, require deep reductions in cities’ landfill usage. This, in turn, will prompt massive recycling, and--the experts warn--increase rubbish collection rates.

“It’s a state-mandated program . . . but the state is providing none of the money needed,” Kay Martin, director of the Ventura County Solid Waste Management Department, said of the law.

Complying with the new requirements, she predicted, will be a “very expensive proposition, and it will probably be funded by higher rates.”

Trash rates have gone up in some cities and are expected to increase in others in the next few months, authorities said.

Already the gap between rates in Ventura, the county’s highest-priced city, and others that have held the line has grown to where Ventura now charges twice as much as some of its neighbors to haul equivalent amounts of garbage.

A new policy called volume pricing is being advocated by environmentalists to reward those who produce less trash and punish those who produce more.

In Ventura--the only city in the county to adopt volume pricing, though others are studying the concept--many residents have complained because their bills have climbed sharply since new rates went into effect Sept. 1.

The approach is not intended to be punitive, city officials insist. Rather, it is designed to comply with a new state law requiring cities to drastically reduce their use of landfills, where rates have doubled in the past two years.

Two factors--escalating landfill charges and the cost of recycling--are most often cited as the reasons trash charges are increasing.

It costs $39.50 a ton to dump trash in the county-owned Bailard Landfill, more than twice as much as the $18.70 it cost in 1988.

Charges also have more than doubled to $30.10 a ton since 1988 at the privately owned Simi Valley Landfill, one of the other two in the county. Costs have risen 65% to $33 at the Toland Road facility between Santa Paula and Fillmore. Landfill managers say the increases are mainly because of costly anti-pollution steps they now must take.

Nobody is sure how costly recycling is going to be, though Ventura says $2.89 of its residents’ escalating bills pays for separating recyclable from nonrecyclable rubbish.

Most other cities have not yet levied recycling charges, but officials generally agree that unless newspapers, food and beverage containers and other recyclables are separated from other rubbish, it will be impossible to comply with the new state law, AB 939.

The law requires cities to cut landfill use 25% by 1995 and 50% by 2000. It calls for a fine of $10,000 a day to be levied against cities that fail to meet these reductions.

One company, E.J. Harrison & Sons Inc., dominates residential trash collection in Ventura County. Operating under various names, the firm is the exclusive hauler in four cities--Ventura, Ojai, Camarillo and Fillmore. Harrison shares trash collection with two other companies in Thousand Oaks.

Another company, G.I. Industries, is one of two residential haulers serving Simi Valley and Moorpark, and is one of three operating in Thousand Oaks.

In Ventura, Camarillo, Ojai and Fillmore--all of which are served by Harrison--charges are higher than in Oxnard, Port Hueneme and Santa Paula, where trash is collected by municipal agencies.

In Ventura, where prices are the highest, households that before Sept. 1 paid $16.35 a month for weekly collection of as much as 119 gallons must now pay $25.14--an increase of 53%--for up to 110 gallons. A bin for recyclable material is included in the service.

Ventura residents who use as many as three Harrison-provided 55-gallon barrels now must pay $31.79 a month.

By contrast, Port Hueneme provides unlimited service for $12 a month.

“The more the residents have to pay, the bigger the incentive to reduce waste,” said Eric Werbalosky, Ventura’s recycling director, explaining his city’s new rate schedule. “That, in a nutshell, is our philosophy.”

Jim Harrison, president of E.J. Harrison & Sons, says his firm could legally charge volume-based rates in Camarillo and Fillmore. It does not, he said, because officials in those cities have not ordered it to do so except when residents use additional company-provided barrels.

“In all the cities except Ventura, we only give people an extra barrel if they ask for it,” Harrison said. In Camarillo, Fillmore, Ojai and Thousand Oaks, he said, residents who put out their own barrels or trash bags in addition to a company-provided barrel are not hit with an additional charge.

“That’s the way we’ve always done things, and we’re not going to change until the cities tell us to,” Harrison said.

Even in these cities, however, service can be costly. In Ojai, Harrison’s rates were raised this month to $19.38 for a 101-gallon container. That gives Ojai the most expensive one-barrel service in the county, though its rates remain well below Ventura’s when additional trash is picked up.

Harrison and others in the industry explain the diversity in rates between cities by citing differences in terrain and distances to landfills, as well as the landfill charges.

For example, Harrison said his company’s trucks serving Ojai must travel more than 30 miles to the Bailard Landfill, between Oxnard and Ventura. He added that Bailard--which also serves Ventura, Oxnard and Port Hueneme--is the most expensive dump in Ventura County.

The cheapest basic trash rate is Santa Paula’s, where the city-run hauler charges $11.55 a month for a 100-gallon container.

Oxnard’s municipally operated agency charges $14.20 for a 105-gallon city-provided barrel and, for the same price, allows residents to put out an additional four 32-gallon bags.

Like the county’s other two city-operated systems, Oxnard’s is self-supporting. “We don’t take a cent in tax revenue,” said John Zaragoza, Oxnard’s refuse superintendent. “We even pay rent to the city for the use of our building and yard.”

Zaragoza said that despite rising landfill costs, which now account for nearly 40% of the cost of trash hauling, he is confident that the city can avoid skyrocketing trash bills. He admitted, however, that modest increases are likely.

One reason Oxnard has been able to keep its charges low, Zaragoza said, is that its trucks are automated and require only one operator.

“We’ll probably raise our rates after the first of the year, mainly to pay for recycling,” he added. “But there’s no way we’ll go to the kind of rates they’re charging in Ventura.”

Norm Wilkinson, Santa Paula’s public works director, said he, too, hopes to keep costs down through automation. “We’re converting from trucks manned by two and three people to one-man trucks,” he said. “We’re 60% converted already.”

Harrison--whose fleet is not yet fully automated--said efficiency does not explain the lower prices charged by the municipal rubbish services.

“They don’t have to pay taxes, and they don’t pay franchise fees,” he said, noting that cities typically charge him 5% or 6% of his gross revenues in franchise fees.

In Ventura, Harrison said, he does not pay a franchise fee but instead picks up the city’s garbage and cleans up after city-sponsored events at no charge.

Instead of saving money, Harrison contends, municipal trash operations have done little more than fatten city bureaucracies. When hidden costs are tallied, residents are paying at least as much for municipal service as they would for private hauling, he maintained.

“Just look at Oxnard,” he said. “Why is one of the fastest-growing cities in the state in such financial trouble that it had to make cuts in its Fire Department?”

Terry Adelman, Ventura’s finance director, has a different theory as to why municipal trash agencies can offer lower rates. “Some cities might be absorbing the added costs of trash hauling into their general funds through creative bookkeeping to avoid the political fallout of a true cost allocation,” he said.

Morteza Yassini, who owns Rubbish Control Inc. and is Harrison’s main competitor in the county’s unincorporated areas, has complained repeatedly before the Ventura City Council that Harrison has conspired with city officials to freeze his company out of commercial hauling in Ventura.

“They’ve frozen me out of the residential business in Ventura too,” Yassini said in an interview. He said Harrison owns both E.J. Harrison & Sons and Ventura Rubbish Service, the two companies that serve Ventura residences.

Rubbish Control’s basic monthly rates vary. In an area along Ventura Avenue north of the Ventura city limits, the company charges a flat rate of $16 per month. In the unincorporated beach areas near Oxnard’s Channel Islands Harbor, the company charges $12.70 a month.

Gloria Whitcomb, a Rubbish Control spokeswoman, said she doesn’t know whether prices will go up when Rubbish Control goes into recycling, as it plans to do in upcoming months.

But, she said, “I think it’s significant that our rates along Ventura Avenue are lower than what Harrison charges just a short distance away.”

Both Harrison and Ventura city officials said the reason Rubbish Control does not have a permit to operate in Ventura is that trash collection, much like utilities, functions better when a single company serves an entire city.

They said that in cities such as Thousand Oaks--the only one in the county served by not one but three different trash haulers--citywide programs and long-range planning are harder to coordinate.

Ventura officials said Rubbish Control has yet to prove it can match Harrison’s prices. They said that without the $2.89 Ventura extracts from every trash bill to pay for its recycling program, Harrison’s basic rate would be lower than that charged by Yassini’s firm in nearby areas.

Yassini’s father-in-law, Manny Asadurian, owns G.I. Industries, which provides rubbish service in Simi Valley, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks.

Although others say they are studying recycling, Ventura, Fillmore and Simi Valley are the only cities in the county with citywide recycling programs. Ventura and Fillmore process their materials at Gold Coast Recycling, which is half-owned and managed by Harrison.

Included in Fillmore’s trash bills is a $1.60 charge for recycling. Simi Valley does not charge a fee for recycling, but officials said they probably will do so in the near future.

Gold Coast is known in the rubbish industry as an intermediate processing center, or IPC. Cities pay such centers a per-ton rate for disposing of recyclable materials. In exchange, the cities receive the proceeds from the sale of the materials minus a commission paid to the IPC.

However, it may take years before recycling programs turn a profit--and it may never happen, some experts believe.

Whether recycling becomes profitable or not, “it’s definitely the wave of the future,” said Ventura finance chief Adelman, who heads the city’s waste-disposal program. “It used to be that people dumped their trash in a garbage can and it would go away, but that’s no longer the case. In the future, you’ll see people paying for what they use.”

John Elwell, Camarillo’s director of community services, agreed. “Volume-based rates are the way the nation’s going. I don’t see how we can avoid them.”

Steve Elam, Thousand Oaks’ deputy finance director, said of volume pricing: “It’s under discussion here. When our recycling program goes citywide, that could be our next step toward complying with the state law.”

Neither Simi Valley nor Moorpark has installed volume pricing, though the policy has been discussed in Moorpark.

Mike Smith, senior vice president of G.I. Industries, said his firm could, if requested, begin volume pricing in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Moorpark.

“We have no problem with the idea because we’re as concerned about the environment and landfill usage as other people are,” he said. “Undoubtedly, though, it would increase our costs.”

Not every city official is a believer in volume pricing, developed by trash experts Lisa A. Skumatz and Cabell Breckinridge in the early 1980s and pioneered in Seattle.

Wilkinson of Santa Paula believes volume-based pricing is a self-defeating proposition and hopes his city will avoid it.

“My gut feeling about volume pricing,” he said, “is that it is going to lead to cheating, be it illegal dumping, dumping into a neighbor’s trash can or burying rubbish in the back yard.” He noted, however, that volume pricing may be more adaptable in larger cities.

Some Ventura residents have complained to the City Council that volume pricing has dealt a severe blow to large families living on marginal incomes.

But, the experts predict, every Ventura County resident from Ojai to Simi Valley will be forced to make sacrifices in one way or another if the county is to deal with its looming garbage crisis.

“It’s time to bite the bullet,” said Ventura’s Adelman. “There’s no two ways about it.”