Oxnard Discusses Landfill Closure Cost With 6 Cities : Environment: The Santa Clara dump closed in 1983, but cleanup expenses of $15 million have officials looking to spread the tab among municipalities that used the site.

Oxnard officials met with representatives of six cities on Thursday to try to renegotiate the closure agreement of the former Santa Clara Landfill that may require about $15 million in cleanup costs and other remedial work.

After the Santa Clara Landfill was closed in 1983, Oxnard accepted $1.2 million from the cities in exchange for assuming the responsibility of shutting down the dump, now the River Ridge golf course.

But new environmental regulations and possible leaks into underground aquifers have created unexpected post-closure costs of about $15 million through the year 2014. Also, Oxnard officials want to distribute the cost among all the cities that over a period of about two decades used the landfill.

On Thursday, Oxnard City Manager Vernon G. Hazen made a pitch for a financial bailout in a meeting with Ventura County Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg and the city managers of Ventura, Camarillo, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula, Fillmore and Ojai.

City managers attending the meeting said they needed to study the issue and consult their city councils before deciding whether their cities should pitch in for the new closure costs.

“It’s a tough issue and I don’t want to shoot from the hip,” Ojai City Manager Andrew S. Belknap said. “You can put an argument together both ways.”

Ventura City Manager John Baker said, “We got an explanation of how the agreement was reached. At this point I don’t have a position.”

Oxnard officials said they were encouraged by the other cities’ willingness to consider the issue. “I thought it went real well and we plan to meet again,” said Ben Wong, Oxnard’s utilities director.

But other waste experts said Thursday that a deal is a deal.

“If they were making millions of dollars from the golf course, I doubt they’d be willing to share the profit,” Camarillo Councilwoman Charlotte Craven said. She is chairwoman of the the Ventura County Regional Sanitation District, a consortium of cities that once operated the Santa Clara Landfill.

“Just because something doesn’t turn out as well as you thought, you can’t turn around and say everybody should share the burden,” Craven said.

Regardless of who ends up paying for the closure costs, all parties agree that resolving the issue is crucial to the long-term future of managing waste disposal in the county.

At stake is the formation of the so-called Ventura County Solid Waste Management Authority, a joint-powers agreement that would fuse three regional waste agencies and oversee all trash issues throughout the county.

City and county officials have been negotiating for months to create the waste authority to oversee such countywide issues as recycling and landfill management, and end years of inter-agency bickering and competition.

So far, all parties have agreed in principle to absorb liabilities created by county landfills--estimated at $100 million--into the waste authority and pay off the debt by increasing dumping fees at future landfills.

But the Santa Clara Landfill is unique because Oxnard signed an agreement in 1985 to pay all future costs related to the former dump. Now, Oxnard officials want to add the Santa Clara debt to the county’s total waste debt.

City managers throughout the county worry that Oxnard might not join the waste authority if it does not get financial assistance for cleaning up the Santa Clara Landfill. The loss of the county’s largest city could unravel the fragile agreement to form the waste authority, the managers said.

“The Santa Clara Landfill issue could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Baker said.

But Wong said Oxnard will try to avoid a confrontation at all costs. Refusing to join the waste authority, he said, “is certainly one of our options, but we are not attempting to use leverage or make threats.”

“What we are seeking is an understanding that despite an agreement that appears damaging to us, we need the other cities’ support,” he said.

The Santa Clara Landfill opened in the 1960s, and its operation was taken over by the county sanitation district in 1974, Wong said.

In the 1983 agreement, the sanitation district promised to pay $958,000 to cover the “standard” closure costs and Oxnard said it would pick up $4 million in added costs of making the landfill safe for a golf course. These improvements included covering the buried trash with a thick clay cover to prevent irrigation water from leaching into the dump.

In 1984, as the city was finishing its work on the landfill, it became apparent that the district had not properly sealed some of the landfill slopes, as required by state and federal regulations, Wong said.

At the same time, he said, the regional Water Quality Control Board required a new drainage pipeline to prevent tainted runoff from leaching into the aquifer.

These new costs led to a disagreement between the district and the city, and was settled in 1985 when the district agreed to pay the city an additional $218,000.

In exchange, Wong said, Oxnard promised that the payment was “full and final settlement of all such claims arising out of or related to the operation of the landfill.”

But now, the costs are piling up again.

Last year, the Air Pollution Control District imposed new rules to monitor gas emissions from the buried waste. Monitoring costs are estimated at $6.7 million through the year 2014.

Also, sanitation officials informed the city that there was a possible ground-water contamination that could cost about $8 million for cleanup, Wong said.

With Oxnard’s chronic budget problems, the city would be hard pressed to meet these costs, Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi said. “It would be a very, very detrimental setback,” he said. Oxnard wants the debt to be paid by dumping fees at future landfills over 30 years. Wong said spreading it around would add only 31 cents a month on the average household trash bill.