County Settles Suit on Abandoned Landfill : Environment: It takes responsibility for maintaining the Paradise Hills dump, which leaks methane.

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a settlement Tuesday that gives the county the responsibility of maintaining an abandoned landfill in Paradise Hills, which has been leaking methane gas.

The settlement could cost the county $5.4 million over the next eight decades, but that figure is much less than the $56 million the county might have had to pay if it did not agree to take responsibility for the dump, according to the county counsel.

The county had owned and operated the Old Sweetwater Landfill, near Goode Street and Manzana Way, from its inception in 1948 to its routine closure in 1960. In the ensuing years, the dump and the area around it changed hands several times, ending up with Treetops Unlimited, which built 680 residential units near the landfill.

Responsibility for the management of the landfill and 30% of its ownership was transferred to the homeowners association when the houses and duplexes were sold in 1984, a fact that homeowners said Treetops kept secret from them when they bought into the development.

It wasn’t until 1987, when a methane-collecting system failed and the county’s Air Pollution Control District fined the residents of the Hillsborough development for gas emissions and equipment violations, that the homeowners realized their predicament, they said.

Since then, the residents have sued numerous parties, including the developer and the county, to recover the costs of maintaining a landfill they don’t want.

Now, after four years of litigation, the residents are finally out of the landfill business. They couldn’t be happier.

“As a homeowners association, we thought we’d be doing things like taking care of swimming pools and setting up rules for people to play basketball, and not things like running a landfill,” said Anne Krueger, president of the Hillsborough Master Homeowners Assn.

Although the landfill did not pose a health risk to the area, homeowners contended that they should not be responsible for maintaining one, and that it decreased property values.

Krueger said that, for the past two years, banking institutions have been unwilling to lend money to people buying homes in the area, making it impossible to sell the homes.

“We had a lot of military people who wanted to sell their houses but were forced to rent them out,” Krueger said.

The residents sued the county last year, asking for $56 million, the cost they projected for maintaining the dump during the eight decades it could continue emitting the gas, a normal byproduct of landfills. Instead, the county agreed to take over the dump.

“The approach really represents a win for both sides,” Deputy County Counsel Scott Peters said, noting that the homeowners will be able to get out of the landfill business while the county will encounter a “modest” fiscal impact.

The estimated maintenance cost per year is about $100,000, with intermittent additional repair costs, but it is unclear how long that will have to continue, Peters said.

The county will also have to bear the responsibility for any unforeseen damages that may be incurred by the landfill, such as ground-water contamination, Peters said.

“The risks of owning a landfill are substantial ones, and we are burdening the risks of regulatory compliance costs and anything that might happen to the landfill,” Peters said.

Because the county already maintains dozens of active and defunct landfills, it already has expertise in the field, and overhead costs such as insurance and maintenance will be much lower, said Gary Aguirre, attorney for the homeowners.

The county now must begin $3.5 million in repairs to the landfill’s gas-collecting system, money that will come from the homeowners association and which is part of settlements from related lawsuits against other parties.