Four Top Sites for Proposed Landfill Identified : County: Nineteen options for a North County dump are under consideration, with two already being studied. Supervisors will narrow the list in February.

A county consultant has identified four sites as the best of 19 options for an auxiliary North County landfill.

County supervisors will consider in February which sites to study further.

Landfill sites chosen by supervisors will be added to the two already under study--the Aspen Road site in Fallbrook and the Gregory Canyon site alongside the San Luis Rey River in Pala.

Supervisors have said that, even though both of those sites should be studied further, additional sites closer to population centers should be explored to help alleviate North County’s trash crisis.

The primary North County landfill in San Marcos is expected to be full by February and closed.

County consultant Trish Butler initially identified 19 other sites and, on Thursday, she identified her four favorites. They are:

* Loma Alta, at the site of an abandoned sand mining pit north of Oceanside Boulevard and east of El Camino Real in Oceanside.

* Gopher Canyon Road, in unincorporated county territory north of San Marcos, east of Elevado Road.

* Merriam Mountain South, just opposite the Lawrence Welk Resort, on the west side of Interstate 15 and north of Deer Springs Road.

* South of Lake Hodges, west of I-15 and just south of the lake’s dam, west of Rancho Bernardo.

Although all 19 sites previously announced will be forwarded to the Board of Supervisors for discussion, additional study will now be done on the four best candidates, said Bill Worrell, deputy director of the Department of Public Works.

Worrell said Friday the Oceanside site is especially attractive because it poses the least threat to ground water, and he said both the Oceanside and Lake Hodges sites are attractive because “the closer you are (to population centers), the lower the cost to haul the garbage.”

He said a sister site to the Merriam Mountain site, closer to Deer Springs Road, didn’t score as highly because it was closer to the San Diego Aqueduct than the site just north of it.

Butler, the consultant, said more information about how she scored the sites will be available in about six weeks.

The whittling-down process brought increased anxiety to some people as they saw sites near their homes score high in the general rankings and a relief to others who saw sites near their homes being scored poorly as landfill candidates.

The focus on the auxiliary sites, meanwhile, has done little to relieve critics of the Aspen Road site in Fallbrook and Gregory Canyon site in Pala,

“That’s the horror of the whole thing--they’re applying new criteria for the new landfill candidate sites, but not applying that new criteria to Aspen or Gregory Canyon,” said Diana Rice, who lives near Gregory Canyon.

“The county is still going full speed ahead with the studies of those sites, based on different criteria, and that really bothers us,” she said.

Butler said each of the sites under consideration would sustain damage to natural habitats if converted to a landfill, and that the supervisors would have to weigh those concerns against the need for new landfills.

Black boxes indicate the four sites identified as best of the 19 options for a North County landfill.