Supervisors Move to Block Private Dump Site : Trash: Another roadblock is put in front of Gregory Canyon’s operating as a privately owned landfill.

Reaffirming their commitment to publicly owned landfills, San Diego County supervisors Tuesday threw another obstacle in the path of a giant trash company’s bid to put North County’s ever-growing refuse stream in a Pauma Valley canyon.

The board’s 4-0 vote to keep future landfills in government hands “will make it much more difficult for Gregory Canyon to be a privately owned landfill,” said William Worrell of the county’s Department of Public Works. “It sends a message to the industry: Don’t try to do a privately owned landfill. If you want to do a landfill, you have to work with the county.”

A spokeswoman for Waste Management of North America, which has purchased the 1,600-acre canyon in the hope of turning some of it into a high-tech landfill, said she was “disappointed and confused” that a county in dire financial straits would adopt a policy that precludes financing the new facility with private funds.

Nevertheless, Gabrielle Soroka, project manager for Waste Management, said the company already is talking to county officials about a public-private partnership at the site that would involve the county’s buying or condemning the canyon. Waste Management would operate the landfill for the county, much as a private company operates the county’s dumps today.

The county has identified Gregory Canyon and a site off Aspen Road in Fallbrook as the two potential North County dumps, and officials are continuing to scour lower North County for other sites. The Aspen Road site is in the hands of private landowners and also would have to be purchased.

The county badly needs a successor to its San Marcos landfill, which is virtually full and now scheduled to close in March. With a new landfill unavailable until late 1995 or 1996, the board is desperately scrambling to win permission to expand the San Marcos landfill before it closes.

Tuesday, the supervisors approved a supplemental environmental impact report ordered by a Superior Court judge, who ruled in September that the study’s water analysis was inadequate.

Opponents of the expansion--including one woman who presented the supervisors with a jar of small bones and other refuse she said birds had picked up from the dump and dropped in her yard--ridiculed the latest report showing that the expansion would not contaminate ground water.

But North County Supervisor John MacDonald said he is “firmly convinced that we have taken every precaution that expansion of the San Marcos landfill will not contaminated water in the area. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t support the expansion of the landfill.”

Worrell said he expects another lawsuit, perhaps from Christward Ministry, which owns property next to the San Marcos landfill and initiated the first lawsuit. The organization is appealing Judge James R. Milliken’s ruling against it on other issues.

A special meeting of the Regional Water Quality Control Board, which must issue a permit before the San Marcos landfill can expand, has been set for Jan. 22 in Escondido. Other permits must also be obtained.