District Urges Big Expansion of Landfill : Santa Paula: The proposal infuriates some area residents and growers’ representatives. They fear additional pollution.

A small landfill in a canyon east of Santa Paula should be expanded to accept more than 10 times the trash now dumped there each day, regional trash officials said Tuesday.

An expanded Toland Road Landfill would serve as a backstop in case a proposal to build a new dump at Weldon Canyon north of Ventura is rejected or delayed, officials of the Ventura Regional Sanitation District said.

The expansion would also buy the county time after the Bailard Landfill in Oxnard closes, probably at the end of 1993, officials said.

In addition, nearby O’Leary Canyon should be studied as a potential long-term landfill to accommodate waste from the entire western half of the county, said Clinton L. Whitney, district general manager.

“Even if Weldon were approved right now and we get the extension at Bailard, we will still need more interim capacity,” Whitney said. “And what happens if Weldon is not approved or doesn’t come on line before 1995?”

The recommendations, which will be considered at a district board meeting Thursday, would move the district toward its goal of maintaining a publicly owned and operated landfill to compete with the proposed Waste Management Inc. operation at Weldon Canyon, Whitney said.

The recommendations infuriated some area residents and growers’ representatives who saw the move as one more insult to the agriculturally productive Santa Clara River Valley.

Roger Campbell, a Fillmore city councilman and lifelong area resident, objected to bringing waste from the west county to the Toland landfill, which, without the extra refuse, would continue to serve Santa Paula and Fillmore for the next 50 years.

“This is a prime example of the county trying to dump on this area again,” Campbell said. He referred to a planned county jail near Santa Paula, a rock company’s proposal to expand sand and gravel mining near Fillmore and the placement of farm worker housing on agricultural land near Piru.

Campbell said the sanitation district should support Waste Management’s proposal to build a landfill at Weldon Canyon, which was identified by a 1985 county study as the best site in the county.

“It is not an environmentally sound idea to have trucks going all over our valley and polluting our air to bring waste from the west end of the county out here,” he said.

Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, said the air quality, and subsequently the orchards and crops, would suffer from the additional miles the trucks would drive to deliver the trash.

“I don’t see why the Santa Clara Valley has to bear the burden of disposing trash for Ojai and the rest of western Ventura County,” he said.

The city of Ojai and area environmentalists have objected to the Weldon Canyon site, located just east of California 33, which connects Ventura and the Ojai Valley.

Pat Baggerly, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Coalition, which opposes Weldon Canyon, said the group would prefer that the district continue looking for a new site to locate a long-term landfill that would be publicly owned and operated.

The sanitation district “has been our insurance against a monopoly by Waste Management Inc.,” she said. If the district does not continue its search, it would be wasting $160,000 of public money that was spent on a recent site selection study, she said.

Waste Management, which holds a development option on the Weldon Canyon property, proposes building a landfill to accommodate waste from the western county. But environmental organizations and sanitation district officials have worried that the private company would have a stranglehold on the county if it operated the area’s only landfill. Waste Management also operates a landfill in Simi Valley that serves the eastern part of the county.

With a final study on Weldon Canyon due to be released Thursday, supervisors could vote on Weldon Canyon as early as February, county planners said. Supervisors are also being asked to extend by two years the permit to operate the Bailard Landfill in Oxnard, which now expires at the end of 1993.

Whitney, the district general manager, said his top recommendation is to expand Toland’s capacity from 135 tons a day to 1,500 tons a day, raising the level of trash in the canyon 50 feet higher than is allowed under the current permit.

Increasing the daily dumping would shorten the life of the landfill from 50 years to as little as 12 years. Securing permits and performing studies could take about four years, Whitney said.

His next-most-favored option is to expand Toland with the provision that the district study O’Leary Canyon as a long-term landfill site. In a district study of potential landfill sites released earlier this year, O’Leary Canyon was ranked 18th on a list of 35 sites because of a potential for earthquakes and other environmental problems.

Securing the permits and performing environmental studies would take seven to 10 years for O’Leary Canyon, he said.

If O’Leary Canyon is found to have fatal flaws, Whitney proposes a third option: to evaluate all 34 other sites on public health criteria only, considering such issues as air and water quality.

“That would get us a short list a lot quicker,” he said.

In addition, Santa Paula City Councilman Les Maland said expanding Toland could make it a more efficient operation and lower prices.

“We have a mom-and-pop operation. . . . The person running it is like the Maytag repairman--he doesn’t have a lot to do,” Maland said.

But Frank Brommenschenkel, manager of Santa Paula Water Works Ltd., which delivers water to the city of Santa Paula, said the expansion of the landfill or development of a new one nearby raises questions about possible effects on ground-water quality.

“Any time you have that going on upstream there is always the potential for ground-water contamination,” he said. “Anything that is larger is potentially more dangerous.”

Santa Paula area resident Ronna Jurow, a Ventura physician and open-space advocate, said the area is already being targeted for too many projects.

“With the jail and mining, it would just finish the area off,” she said.

Times correspondent Paul Payne contributed to this report.