Mayor, Council Visit the Scene of the Grime : Trash: The special weekend session at the San Marcos landfill was designed to send a message to neighboring cities on the necessity of a new ‘host fee,’ Thibadeau says.

San Marcos Mayor Lee Thibadeau was “sending a message” when he held a special City Council session at the North County landfill last weekend.

The flamboyant mayor wanted all sides to see just what San Marcos had to put up with--the noise, the dust, the smell, the slow-moving traffic--in allowing the landfill to double in size.

“I think I made the point,” Thibadeau said Monday in explaining why his city deserves a $5-a-ton “host fee” for allowing North County’s garbage to be dumped within the city limits. “And I think we can claim to be the first city in the country to hold a council meeting at a dump.”

Council members voted unanimously to grant a county permit to expand the dump, but set a one-year limit on it. The council also voted to impose the fee, which will bring the city an estimated $5.5 million a year in new revenue.

Trash haulers are already charged a $23 a ton “tipping fee” by the county to cover the cost of operating the dump. The charge is passed on to householders as part of their monthly trash collection bill.

The new fee, which will cost households about 35 cents a month more, will go into force 30 days after its passage last Saturday, Thibadeau said, and will be used for whatever the council deems necessary.

County officials, faced with the closure of the San Marcos landfill when it reaches capacity later this year, plan to add 136 acres in a vertical expansion and increase the height of the trash pile by 200 feet.

Escondido Mayor Jerry Harmon, leader of the opposition to a proposed trash-to-energy plant at the landfill, did not directly oppose the expansion of the dump, but, at a hearing on the expansion permit held by the San Marcos council a week ago, he challenged the host fee as illegal.

Thibadeau said Monday that, if the host fee is challenged legally and overturned, “the permit is written so that the landfill will be immediately closed. No fee, no landfill.”

In the long-running feud between San Marcos and other North County cities over the landfill, Thibadeau proposed an escalating scale of fees and penalties unless other North County cities commit their trash flow to the proposed trash-to-energy plant in San Marcos.

The $325-million incinerator, which would produce salable electricity, is opposed by leaders of other North County cities who claim that the plant would greatly increase trash disposal costs and create the threat of toxic pollution.

Frank Mannen, Carlsbad assistant city manager, said he had not yet studied the final draft of the San Marcos council action, “but we do have concerns about the host fee.”

An assessment to pay for litter control, sound barriers and other necessary mitigation measures will not meet with opposition from North County cities, Mannen said, “as long as the fee is used for mitigating documentable and substantive impacts of the landfill.”

A limited joint powers agency has been created by six North County cities to explore alternatives to the trash-to-energy plant, Mannen said, and a report is scheduled to be completed early in the fall.

“We will take a look into this (host fee) action by San Marcos,” he said. “If it is onerous or unconscionable, we would expect the county of San Diego to represent us in coming to terms with that city.”