Final OK Given to Trash Recycling Plant : Waste: North County politicians and other opponents fail to dissuade Board of Supervisors on $137-million facility in San Marcos.

A last-ditch stand by local politicians and other opponents Tuesday failed to deter the San Diego County Board of Supervisors from approving final documents needed to construct a $137-million trash recycling plant in San Marcos.

The plant, a state-of-the-art recycling and shredding facility capable of removing up to 21% of the trash now dumped in the county’s San Marcos landfill, will be financed with $140 million in low-interest bonds granted to the county by the state last week. The plant is scheduled to be in operation by 1994.

Bill Worrell, deputy director of the county’s solid-waste division, said that, if the supervisors had not approved a financing agreement Tuesday, a decade-old plan to recycle rather than dump into the San Marcos landfill would be dead. The 3-2 vote approving the final agreements guarantees that construction will start in January, he said.

The three supervisors voting for the project said they are satisfied that the financing agreement required by the credit banks involved in the bond sale does not commit the county’s tax funds, despite claims by opponents that it does.

Opponents urged county leaders to reject, or at least delay, the decision to build the plant until the financial agreement can be studied. Several speakers charged that the plant is being built at an inflated price that would have been lower if the project had been put out to bid.

Supervisors Brian Bilbray, Leon Williams and George Bailey voted for the project, which will be built on a 16-acre, county-owned tract next to the landfill. Supervisors Susan Golding and John MacDonald voted against the plant, urging that the financial and engineering contracts be checked out by independent experts.

Worrell said the recycling and shredding plant will be the first in the county to be built using funds from trash haulers who pay to dump refuse in county landfills.

But San Diego City Councilwoman Judy McCarty, in a letter read by an aide to supervisors Tuesday, called the plant “a $137-million turkey. The issue isn’t whether or not such a facility is needed, but whether the price is right,” she said.

“I’m puzzled as to why the city of San Diego would be able to purchase a facility for $29 million that recovers 50% of the recyclable materials from the waste stream and composts garbage and paper waste, while the county is paying 3 1/2 times that for a facility that recycles a substantially smaller percentage of the waste stream and does no composting,” McCarty said.

Bilbray questioned the motives of the detractors, saying that “eleventh-hour protests” have delayed the project for nearly a decade.

Oceanside City Councilwoman Nancy York said North County cities were concerned that the county would sign an agreement in which “the fine print obligates the full faith and credit of the county” if the private firm that builds and operates the project fails.

York said Oceanside and other North County cities plan to find alternatives to dumping their trash in county landfills because of concerns that the prices charged for using the landfill will escalate far beyond existing levels in order to finance the new plant.

One alternative is a 600-acre landfill on the Campo Indian reservation in southeast San Diego County. A spokesman for the Indian entrepreneurs said trash could be hauled to the site by train to avoid pollutants caused by truck traffic. The facility will be capable of handling 300 tons of trash a day for 30 years.

Former Supervisor and San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock, now a radio talk show host, wrote to supervisors opposing the project he once promoted. The recycling facility is now “a Frankenstein monster which turns what was a good environmental and fiscal deal for the taxpayer into a one-sided giveaway,” he wrote.

Fred Mazanec, an Encinitas civil engineer, said the plant is “overpriced, at a minimum by $40 million, probably by $60 million and up to $100 million” compared to similar facilities in the state.

He and other opponents urged the board to cancel its contracts with Thermo Electron Inc., the Boston-based company that will build and operate the plant, and to put the proposal out to bid.

Mazanec warned that the county is heading for “potential tremendous disaster” by going ahead with the Thermo Electron contract “because market forces will prevail, cities will pull out and go with private industry (for trash disposal) when county fees get higher and higher.”

Tom Erwin, a spokesman for the group North County Concerned Citizens, which has opposed the plant since it was proposed, warned supervisors that they are depending on consultants “who are regurgitating the facts fed to them by the county and Thermo Electron” and could obtain their goals in reducing trash dumping through recycling by cheaper and better methods.