Landfill Expansion Plan to Get Early State Hearing : Garbage: Local officials’ pleas result in a January hearing date. San Marcos landfill is close to capacity.

Local leaders won approval Monday from a state agency to speed up consideration of county plans to expand the San Marcos landfill.

The Regional Water Quality Control Board agreed to hold a special meeting Jan. 22 on the landfill expansion issue. The meeting has been tentatively set for 9 a.m. at the Carlsbad Safety Center auditorium.

County Supervisor John MacDonald said that board consideration of the expansion request “will probably save us three weeks” in efforts to double the size of the landfill before the present site reaches capacity and must be closed.

The water board had planned to hold a landfill expansion hearing at its regular meeting in late February. About a dozen landfill expansion proponents attended the water agency’s meeting Monday in San Juan Capistrano to plead for an earlier hearing date to avoid a costly closure and possible reopening of the landfill, the only public trash dump serving some 500,000 customers in North County.

Representatives from Vista, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Solana Beach, San Diego and Chula Vista attended the meeting to support MacDonald’s request for an earlier hearing date.

The county’s application last spring to expand the landfill was rebuffed because board members said there was insufficient study of potential contamination of ground water and surface flows.

The landfill, which is within the San Marcos city limits, originally was scheduled to reach capacity and close in June. County officials delayed the closing until January, however, explaining that the amount of trash there was decreasing because of recycling efforts and the ban on dumping of construction materials.

MacDonald said Monday that the dump is now expected to close in late February.

In a final environmental report released Monday by the county Public Works Department, additional ground-water testing showed no evidence of contamination from the landfill.

Patti Newton, spokeswoman for the Elfin Forest Coalition, said that she had planned to speak in opposition to the landfill expansion, which will affect her residential neighborhood around the dump, but that Monday’s discussion was limited to the issue of date for the hearing.