Indians Have Change of Heart Over Dump : Waste: Los Coyotes tribe takes steps to invalidate its lease with a Pittsburgh company for a North County landfill.

In a setback for a proposed North County trash dump on Indian land, the Los Coyotes Band of Mission Indians has moved to invalidate a lease it negotiated with a Pittsburgh waste-management company, federal and tribal officials confirmed Monday.

At a tribal meeting Sunday, the Los Coyotes Indians approved a resolution rescinding the agreement with Chambers Development. In addition, tribal chairman Banning Taylor, whose signature appears on the lease that was notarized in October, signed an affidavit Sunday declaring that he never signed the document.

“My name was forged on that lease,” Taylor said Monday.

Late Monday, officials at the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs were still evaluating the resolution and the affidavit, which were hand-delivered in the afternoon. But Virgil Townsend, an official in the BIA’s Riverside office, said that, if the two documents are judged to be legal according to tribal law, the 500-acre landfill proposal could be abandoned.

“In general, this proposal is driven by requests from the tribe,” he said. “If the tribe withdraws its request, the BIA will stop all work on the project.”

The 41-page lease has been the focus of intense scrutiny in recent months because it includes significantly looser environmental controls than those required under state rules. Although the tentative agreement promises the tribe as much as $1 million a year in revenue, it also requires that the tribe waive its legal immunity and return all the money if Chambers wins a judgment of breach of contract.

That agreement can only be made final after the BIA completes environmental impact assessments and solicits community input--a process that will be halted, Townsend said, if the tribe’s opposition to the project is judged to be genuine.

Officials at Chambers expressed disbelief Monday that their plans, more than a year in the making, could be threatened by the tribe’s action.

“I don’t think by doing something like that you can simply void something that’s been ongoing and in which there has been participation of the band’s (tribal) council as well as a lot of its individual members,” said Ed Wiles, Chambers’ manager of corporate development. “You can’t go buying an automobile and drive it for 12 months and then sit down and say, ‘I hereby invalidate this purchase agreement for this car. It doesn’t exist.’ ”

But BIA officials said the tribe does have some flexibility.

Gil Stuart, a BIA natural resources officer, said environmental meetings on the project have been tentatively scheduled for late June. But, if the tribe’s Sunday action is deemed to be properly executed, he said, those public hearings could be canceled.

“As far as I know, if the tribe passes a resolution saying they don’t want it anymore, that’s it--no matter what Chambers thinks,” he said. “It would be the end of the whole thing.”

Taylor, the tribal chairman, said Monday that the tribe forced him to sign the resolution Sunday, saying he would have to resign his post if he did not follow tribal rule and convey the group’s wishes to the BIA.

Constance Maxey, a tribal member who attended the Sunday meeting, recalled that Taylor repeatedly insisted that he never signed the lease in the first place.

“I said, ‘Banning, the lease was notarized.’ And one of the other members said, ‘Do you mean that somebody forged your signature? Do you think it was the company?’ He said, ‘I didn’t sign it.’ She said, ‘Banning, I will type up an affidavit. We’ll support you 100% if somebody’s forging your signature.’ And he signed it.”

The affidavit states that, even though Taylor’s signature is notarized, by an Escondido notary named Helen Marie Zarate, he never “appeared before such a person.”

Zarate, who works at California Indian Legal Services in Escondido, said Monday that she notarizes so many documents each day that she could not specifically remember Taylor’s visit six months ago. But she said that, if her stamp appears on the document, she executed it correctly.

“I go strictly by the rules,” she said. “If I need an I.D., I would ask for one.”

Wiles, the Chambers spokesman, was incredulous that Taylor claimed not to have signed the lease. Although he did witness the signature, he said, other company representatives did.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Taylor himself seemed confused in a Monday interview. He maintained that his signature had been forged, although he didn’t know by whom. But he also defended entering into the agreement with Chambers, explaining that the tribe’s economic desperation made the lucrative deal difficult to resist.

“Why not? Don’t everybody want money?” he asked. “They offered these guys $5,000 a month just to do environmental studies. Who wouldn’t accept it? Tell me who wouldn’t? In these old woods up here where you can’t get 50 cents a year out of there. We thought we were doing the reservation good by getting some money.”

In a statement released Monday by the Coalition for Indian Rights, two tribal members described the rescinding of the lease as a victory.

Gilbert Campbell, a vocal landfill opponent, said, “The decision . . . reestablishes the sovereignty of native Americans and their desire to live in peace and harmony with the land.”

Kevin Siva, another tribal member, said, “Our reservations are vanishing, and we want to protect the only resource we have--our land. Our land is our culture, our heritage. We don’t want it to be a dump.”

The Los Coyotes tribe is one of three in San Diego County that have signed formal agreements with out-of-state waste firms.

A hazardous-waste recycling and treatment facility has been proposed for the La Posta Indian reservation in southeastern San Diego County. Another proposed non-hazardous landfill, on the Campo reservation, is pending approval by federal agencies and may be built as soon as 1992.