Homeowners Near Landfill Left in Limbo : Garbage: County reneges on offer to buy homes after Water Quality Control Board delays expansion of San Marcos dump.

Bob Haberman is going to march up to the dais at next Tuesday’s County Board of Supervisors meeting and tell those elected officials just how he feels.

“How am I supposed to feel when I have to write out a check for in excess of $2,000 for my property taxes? I feel like I am paying you people to violate my civil rights.” That’s what Haberman is going to say before he pays his April 10 tax installment on a house he thought he had sold to the county.

Haberman is only one of 22 homeowners and businessmen whom the county promised to rescue by buying their properties, which are in the path of a planned expansion of the San Marcos landfill.

But the trash dump expansion has been halted by the Regional Water Quality Control Board, which wants proof that the landfill isn’t polluting streams and underground aquifers before it gives its blessing to doubling the size of the dump.

So last week, supervisors postponed action on purchasing the Haberman home and another property--both of which were threatened earlier with condemnation actions if the owners did not sell their properties to the county.

“My heart goes out to Mr. Haberman,” Supervisor John MacDonald said, “but realistically, if the regional board isn’t going to let us expand the landfill, then we can’t very well spend money buying the additional property.”

MacDonald, whose supervisorial district includes the Elfin Forest community and the landfill, is almost as frustrated as Haberman.

The county board has ordered its staff to appeal the regional board denial of the project to the state Water Resources Control Board and is also seeking a hearing on the issue before the state agency.

For Haberman, it all seems a bad dream.

After the Board of Supervisors approved the $25.5 million San Marcos landfill expansion last November, he contemplated bankruptcy as his only out. But the county came through with a $650,000 offer for his stately old home, and Haberman “signed on the dotted line” in the waning days of 1990 and bought a replacement home in Rancho Penasquitos.

“Now it looks as if they are trying to renege on their agreement,” Haberman said, and he is again contemplating bankruptcy.

“Based upon getting the written offer from the county toward the end of last year, I figured I wasn’t going to do any better, so we decided to catch the real estate market at a good point and acquire another property,” he said.

Haberman continued, “We figured it would give us a little extra time to settle our affairs and move. Now we’re paying on two mortgages, and the only thing I think I can do is go out and declare bankruptcy.”

Haberman’s house was one of a half-dozen properties the county said it would condemn unless the owners agreed to sell at fair market value.

Another 18 property owners were notified by the county’s property acquisition division that they had a choice of either accepting the county’s offers for their homes or remaining in Elfin Forest but giving up any right to sue the county over the landfill expansion.

Evelyn Alemanni and her husband, Joe, almost made the same mistake as Haberman did.

The Alemannis decided to accept the county’s offer, if it was reasonable, and they set about looking for another home--one away from the noise and dust and litter caused by the landfill.

They found a place in Rancho Santa Fe, but held up on making an offer until the county-hired appraiser placed a price on their Elfin Forest home.

“But, even after the appraisal was complete and they knew what they were going to offer us, they wouldn’t give us a dollar figure. They just said, ‘use your best guess.’ ”

The Alemannis finally took a flyer, first getting their real estate agent to call county property officials and find out if the offer they were making on the Rancho Santa Fe home was “in the ballpark” of the price they would be paid for their present home.

The agent was assured that it was. A week later they received notification from Supervisor MacDonald’s office that the county’s home-buying was on hold.

“It was a good thing that the seller dragged his feet and we never entered escrow,” Evelyn Alemanni said. “I don’t know what we would have done.”

Roger Enns, an optimist, believes that “somehow this whole thing will work out somehow, but I have no idea when that sometime will be.”

Enns is an Encinitas real estate broker, wise in the ways of property sales. He feels the county is being fair, perhaps even generous, in the offers it was making on the affected properties.

His own home is in the buffer area where owners have the right to sell to the county or to stay and suffer the landfill outfall. At least he thinks he’s in the buffer.

“After they approved the landfill expansion and offered to buy us all out, we received a letter from the county saying we were within the buffer zone and outlining their offer to buy our property,” Enns said.

“Then we went to a meeting with some of the county people, not the supervisors, and they said that we and three other properties were not on the list. The only explanation they could give us was that someone forgot to turn the page,” that the four Elfin Forest properties omitted from the list were on another page of the county plat maps, and some staffer forgot to follow through.

Enns plans to take the county up on its offer to buy once the error is corrected and if the county succeeds in obtaining its expansion permit from the water control board.

County supervisors plan to discuss the issue again April 23, but MacDonald doesn’t see a solution coming that soon.