Tab for Holiday Cleanup Mounts : Trash: Local officials are seeking ways to pay for the curbside collection of Christmas trees for recycling.

Ventura County cities that don’t have curbside Christmas tree recycling pickups have one thing in common: E. J. Harrison & Sons rubbish company.

While several city sanitation departments and other private haulers are absorbing curbside pickup costs this year, five cities in which Harrison is a franchised hauler are asking residents to cart their trees to drop-off centers.

But the centers will receive no more than 50% of residents’ discarded trees to turn into wood chips used in landscaping, in composting and as fuel for power companies. The rest will be tossed into regular garbage trucks, hauled to county landfills and buried with general waste.

Jim Harrison, the company’s vice president, said he is merely following the direction of officials in Ventura, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Ojai and Fillmore who do not want residents to bear any extra cost for pickups.

“If the cities wanted curbside, we would have done it,” said Harrison, whose company otherwise is considered one of the county’s most aggressive recyclers among private haulers. “We’re not trying to avoid recycling Christmas trees.”

As the second year of countywide tree-recycling programs wraps up this week, local governments still have not determined how best to dispose of nearly 100,000 Christmas trees a year in Ventura County.

Among various options now being tried or discussed: surcharges on December trash bills to underwrite tree and holiday wrapping pickups, imposition of disposal fees of $1 or $2 as is done with car tires, or accelerating development of “green-waste” recycling programs that would handle the trees along with yard waste.

There remains disagreement over how much of a cost taxpayers should absorb in recycling the trees and whether curbside pickups using two workers on each specially dispatched truck are significantly more expensive than running drop-off centers that are not staffed.

Half of this year’s chopped-up trees are being set aside for free compost. Most of the remainder will be sold to power companies in Northern California.

The price received for the chips, after figuring the cost of grinding and shipping, amounts to about $4 per ton, said Eric Werbalowsky, the city of Ventura’s recycling coordinator. That breaks down to about 6 cents per tree.

But routing the trees to wood-chip piles also pays off through savings on landfill dumping fees, which run about $34 to $44 a ton.

The city of Oxnard--which still has not introduced regular curbside recycling citywide--has been recycling trees for four years in a curbside pickup program that city officials said is almost self-supporting.

“I don’t think we’ll spend more than $6,000” on tree pickups, said recycling coordinator Stan Hakes. “That’s offset by the fact that, if we have 100 tons of trees, we’ll save $4,400 in landfill costs.”

Ventura had curbside pickup last year, but switched to drop-off centers this year because it appeared to be less costly. Werbalowsky acknowledged, however, that he has not yet calculated the cost of either method.

“We’re trying to get some extra firm numbers and allocate a per-unit cost to recycle each tree,” Werbalowsky said. “We’re trying to provide maximum diversion of Christmas trees (from landfills), without exceeding a reasonable amount of expense.”

Rubbish Control placed a $3 surcharge on December bills for its 4,000 customers in the area from Casitas Springs to Meiners Oaks this year to offset the cost of additional holiday trash and tree pickups, said Gail Searls, the company’s recycling coordinator.

The company, however, took heat from county officials for the surcharge and has since made payment voluntary, Searls said. “We are just trying to recoup some of the expense we have at this time of year,” she said.

The problem with surcharges, Werbalowsky said, is that they are unfair for people who don’t observe Christmas.

The county Solid Waste Management Department is studying a proposal to add a recycling fee of $1 to $2 on Christmas trees next year, similar to that paid to dispose of old car tires.

The fees, which would be used to underwrite the cost of curbside tree pickups countywide, may be levied on consumers at the time of purchase or imposed on wholesalers, said Lorraine Timmons, the department’s resource recovery analyst.

“It’s a user-pays type of program,” Timmons said. “We’re looking into it, but we haven’t found anyone who has done it yet.”

Harrison said the discarded trees may be best dealt with through “green-waste” recycling programs that would pick up the trees with grass clippings and bush trimmings. He acknowledged, however, that his firm is experimenting with pilot projects only in selected neighborhoods.

“Maybe in a few more years, there will be yard-waste programs in place and Christmas trees would be included in them,” he said.

For now, it’s costing G. I. Rubbish $10,000 to $20,000 to make pickups in Simi Valley and parts of Moorpark, and to run a drop-off center in Thousand Oaks, said Michael E. Smith, the company’s chief operating officer.

Smith said his company is doing the free pickups mainly to keep good relations with the two cities that extended them their franchise. Smith said he believes drop-off centers are a fairer collection method.

“People go out and buy a tree, or maybe cut one down, yet they don’t have the energy to dispose of it,” Smith said. “They may spend $50 or $100 on a tree, but they won’t give me $1 to throw it away.”