Ex-Candidate Pleads Guilty to Disturbing the Peace : Lancaster: Paul Malone, who ran for City Council, had originally been charged with making a terrorist threat over trash-hauling protest.

An unsuccessful candidate for the Lancaster City Council who vigorously protested a city franchise agreement with a trash-hauling company pleaded guilty Monday to disturbing the peace, his latest legal scrape since he dumped a load of trash on the front counter at City Hall.

Paul Malone, 65, who has tried to make trash collection a citywide issue, was originally accused of making a terrorist threat. In an agreement with prosecutors, the charge was reduced to misdemeanor disturbing the peace.

According to a police report, Malone went to the Lancaster office of Waste Management Inc. on Nov. 18 and told General Manager Carrol Hill: “If you think the massacre with the post office is bad, wait till I get through with you. This is not a threat; this is a promise.”

The reference was to a Michigan post office shooting four days earlier by a fired employee that left three people dead.

Antelope Municipal Judge Frank Jackson fined Malone $1,090 and gave him a 90-day jail sentence, with 80 days suspended on condition that he perform nine days of community service by Nov. 2. He was given credit for the day he was arrested.

Jackson said a typical sentence for disturbing the peace is a $900 fine or 10 days of community service.

“I think it was an appropriate disposition considering the fact he had no prior criminal record,” Jackson said. “Waste Management took it very seriously.”

The city’s trash ordinance--mandated by a state waste-reduction law--divided the city’s residential trash-hauling business between two private companies last summer, forcing about 6,500 households, including Malone’s, to change haulers and to pay more for service.

Malone first protested in August by plunking a bag of trash on the counter at City Hall. He was arrested on suspicion of littering and then was cited, released and warned by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office not to do it again.

Last month, Malone came in 10th out of a dozen candidates for City Council.

He said in his campaign that the city should have its own landfill and perform its own trash collection.

Malone said Monday that he thought that the judge was fair and that “it was a fair sentence. I still think the city should take over the trash, though.”