County, Cities Talk Trash at Dump Summit : Waste: First-ever countywide meeting ends with little agreement on solutions for the area’s refuse crisis.

Leaders of San Diego County’s 18 cities and the Board of Supervisors banged heads Wednesday over the region’s garbage crisis, with a first-ever countywide “trash summit” seemingly creating more acrimony than peace.

Clearly, the county is nowhere near achieving the unprecedented cooperation necessary if the region’s garbage will have a place to be dumped, officials concluded.

The regional meeting, staged in a convention room at Golden Hall in downtown San Diego, began pleasantly enough with requisite status reports on the county’s trash-handling abilities. In a word: it’s worsening.

Let’s break for pastries and coffee.

Then came the bad news.

County supervisors called on the cities to act responsibly and carry more of the weight in dealing with the region’s trash.

The cities asked why the county hasn’t done a better job of it.

The county said the cities are culpable and are as guilty as anyone of NIMBYism--of looking for a trash solution, but not in my back yard.

The cities wondered what the county has been doing with revenue generated from its landfills and demanded a greater role in the region’s decisions on how to deal with the trash problem.

OK, we’ll get you an audit, the county said, but if you want to help make decisions, you’d better be team players and cooperate more in the county’s efforts to handle the region’s trash.

But you’re just making a bigger mess of things, said the folks from Escondido and Oceanside. Maybe we’ll just secede from the county’s trash-management bureaucracy and deal with the problem more effectively ourselves. We’re going to take our trash and go home.

Whoa, don’t do that, said the councilman from Chula Vista, because that will put us in a bind. If North County cities don’t send trash to a regional recycling center under construction in San Marcos, then we’ll have to send our stuff up there--and that could get expensive.

And so it went Wednesday, with at least consensus on one item: there had better be a Trash Summit II.

“Well, I think we’ve elevated the issue,” remarked Escondido Mayor Jerry Harmon afterward.

George Bailey, chairman of the hosting Board of Supervisors, made it clear from the get-go that the summit wouldn’t reach any immediate answers, but it was at least good that everyone could sit down and talk about it.

The apparent futility in finding a quick-and-easy answer wasn’t lost on Supervisor John MacDonald, who quipped at one point, “I wonder who the rascal was who let the county take the (trash) responsibility from the city. It became a no-win situation when the county took over.”

The city of San Diego is the only municipality in the county that handles virtually all of its own trash, sending only a fraction of it to a county landfill. The rest of the cities throw their trash into county-operated landfills, along with the unincorporated county residents’ garbage.

The largest landfill crisis is in North County, where the existing garbage dump in San Marcos is on the brink of capacity, yet the county is years away from developing a new one. The county is not even sure where it wants to put one, let alone begin its engineering and design.

Part of the problem, Supervisor Brian Bilbray acknowledged, is that cities have the absolute right, because of their land-use decisions, to block the development of a landfill within their boundaries--thrusting the problem back into the county’s lap, even though city residents are the ones generating most of the trash.

“Do we just assume the unincorporated areas are an easy mark” for landfill sites? Bilbray asked. “Are the cities willing to give up local control for regional cooperation?”

Offered San Marcos City Councilman Mike Preston, “The people’s minds have to be changed about the NIMBY attitude. We need public officials to have the courage to do what is right for the region.”

Escondido’s two representatives--Harmon and Councilman Kris Murphy--and Oceanside’s two city council representatives, Melba Bishop and Nancy York, noted that their cities, along with Carlsbad, are discussing forming their own joint powers agency to deal with municipal garbage and might just send their trash to the Campo Indian Reservation.

The county is partner in an “excessively expensive” recycling project in San Marcos, Murphy complained, and his city wants nothing of it.

Too bad, he said, the cities weren’t asked for their advice before the county blessed the private recycling facility by promising to feed it a minimum of waste to keep it profitable--because if Carlsbad, Escondido and Oceanside pull out of the county’s trash family, the recycling center would lose more than half of its North County contributions.

Chula Vista City Councilman David Malcolm said he didn’t care all that much how North County deals with its problems. “Why can’t we (in the southern part of the county) have a separate set of rules. Why can’t we let North County get together, and South County, and central (San Diego) city? What’s good for them may not be good for us.”

Nobody else ran with Malcolm’s suggestion.

At one point, discussion turned to how much money a city should be paid, as a kind of pay-off, in return for agreeing to host a landfill within its jurisdiction and absorbing the negative impact that comes with it.

San Diego City Councilwoman Judy McCarty suggested that, instead of a host fee, that city residents get a break on their garbage bill.

The notion of impact fees to offset the hardship of accepting public liabilities such as landfills sparked a prompted a suggestion by Vista City Councilwoman Jeanette Smith. “We have a jail,” she said. “Carlsbad has a sewage treatment plant. Maybe we could rate the different negative impacts, and the cities that don’t have any would pay a little more (to the cities that do).”

Bilbray shook his head in disagreement. “You got the courts because you have the jails,” he said, and that’s your payoff.

The jealousies that surfaced during the meeting were cleanly identified by Supervisor Leon Williams.

“I’m listening to the territoriality and lack of trust . . . and I’m just wondering if we all can’t look at the problem as a region. We’re all in the same economic and social pot. Somebody’s ego or territory is at stake, rather than the problems of all the people. Why can’t we find some way . . . to make decisions for all the people?”