19 Landfill Sites Identified in North County : Refuse: List will be trimmed to four before consideration by county supervisors in January.

Nineteen possible landfill sites--smaller but closer to North County’s population centers than ones already under consideration in Fallbrook and Pala--have been identified for further study by county officials.

The sites, from Oceanside to Valley Center, will be winnowed to the best four candidates for presentation to the County Board of Supervisors in January. Officials hope one or more smaller sites can supplement larger landfills they still hope to develop in North County.

Among the sites is one that is just a few blocks from a sprawling residential development in Oceanside and another in the northeastern corner of Escondido that has been considered for an upscale, golf course community.

Others are situated along the border of Oceanside and Camp Pendleton; near the mountain ridgeline separating San Marcos from Harmony Grove; in the Rancho Cielo area between Rancho Santa Fe and Escondido; in Gopher Canyon northeast of San Marcos; on the west side of Interstate 15 north of Deer Springs Road; in Valley Center southwest of Valley Center Road and Lilac Road; between Escondido and the Hidden Meadows community; east of Escondido and north of the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and south of Lake Hodges west of Rancho Bernardo.

Several of the sites were previously identified--and discarded, after they were deemed too small to meet the criteria at the time for choosing a landfill. Now, they will be reconsidered.

Prominent among those is the Merriam Mountain site, actually a pair of side-by-side landfill candidate sites north of Deer Springs Road and across I-15 from the Lawrence Welk Resort.

The county’s Public Works Department already is pursuing larger landfills along Aspen Road in Fallbrook and in Gregory Canyon at Pala. Both have met strident local opposition.

The Fallbrook site is near an open water reservoir, a residential neighborhood and a seniors mobile home park. The Pala site is alongside the San Luis Rey River and aquifer, and is proposed to be privately owned and operated, which is contrary to existing county policy.

In the face of that criticism, the Board of Supervisors told its staff to look for smaller, more centrally located landfill sites, and the Butler/Roach Group, a consulting planning firm, has identified 19 such candidates, some of them resurrected from previous studies.

The bulk of North County’s trash is now taken to the county landfill at San Marcos, but it is expected to reach capacity in January. Because it takes seven years or longer to identify, get permits for and develop a landfill, the county is trying to figure out what to do with North County’s garbage until a new dump is available.

Officials say there’s no certainty that any of the 19 sites will qualify.

“All of these sites meet the minimum engineering requirements, a broad-brush look that says that, yes, we could somehow put a landfill there,” said John Rollin, program coordinator for the county’s solid waste management office.

Consultants will now more closely evaluate each of the sites and disqualify those which, for any number of reasons, would be impractical.

Oceanside Mayor Larry Bagley said he had little difficulty finding reasons why the two potential sites within his city were impractical.

He said a site just north of Oceanside Boulevard and east of El Camino Real, west of the sprawling Rancho del Oro residential development, “is just ridiculous,” and that the other candidate site in his city--where Vandegrift Boulevard crosses into Camp Pendleton--”is just about as bad.”

The Oceanside Boulevard site is too close to residential neighborhoods, he said, and the other one “is as far north as it can go in our city and would put all the traffic through our city,” he complained.

And each site, he said, is too small to provide a long-range solution.

“They have such limited capacity, they’d be filled in less time than it would take to get the permits to develop them,” Bagley complained. “We all have the NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) syndrome, but, if they’re going to pick a site, it ought to at least be one that will last a little while.”

Bagley said he is confident that both sites will quickly be eliminated from serious consideration once the planners examine the candidate sites in greater detail.

And that, exactly, is what planners are doing over the next two to three months, Rollin said.

Each of the preliminary sites survived the initial screening because it was not above an active earthquake fault, an aquifer or an aqueduct, near an airport, at the site of an endangered or rare species habitat or next to densely populated neighborhoods.

Each of the sites will now be studied and graded on how it measures up, Rollin said, and then ranked.

The ranking criteria will include such factors as garbage capacity, vehicular access, the availability of cover soil, the type and depth of ground soil, adjacent land uses, wildlife habitat, the amount of water flowing through and the cultural, sacred and archeological value.

By the time county officials hold their next public meeting to update their landfill search--on Oct. 17 at Escondido City Hall--several of the sites will probably have been ranked so low as to be effectively disqualified, Rollin said.

Kathy Lehtola, the county’s principal solid waste program manager, said each of the sites is believed to be able to accommodate trash up to 300 feet deep, either in a canyon or slightly mounded.

More precise calculations will be made in the next round of studies, she said.

And so far, she said, the issue of which sites would meet the least amount of public opposition hasn’t been an issue. “We’re still at the technical stage,” she said. “Politics aren’t our concern.”

Oceanside’s Bagley said he understands the county’s problem in finding a politically feasible site, but that he isn’t necessarily sympathetic.

“Every site they’ve come up with has been fought tooth and nail by someone. No matter where they decide to put the landfill, it will be unpopular with a certain group of people,” Bagley said.

“But this is a decision that should have been made five or six or seven years ago.”