Oxnard to Act Today on Recycling Plant Pact : Environment: The city would not have to pay about $15 million to maintain the former Santa Clara dump if it takes a lead role in reducing the county’s landfill use.

The Oxnard City Council will decide today whether to approve a pact with the Ventura Regional Sanitation District to build Ventura County’s largest recycling and trash-handling facility in a field on the city’s eastern edge.

City officials said they expect council passage of the project, which would be built at the district’s expense with planning help from Oxnard city employees. Plans call for the $20-million facility to be operational by June, 1994.

In exchange for taking a lead role in reducing the county’s landfill use, Oxnard would be relieved of having to pay an estimated $15 million that it will cost to keep the former Santa Clara Landfill clean and safe.

Closed in 1983 and converted into the city-owned River Ridge golf course, the landfill now must be further cleaned up and monitored until 2014 to meet new environmental regulations, at an estimated cost of $770,000 a year.

Under the proposed pact, already approved by the district board on Thursday, that cost would be spread instead among Oxnard and the other seven member cities of the district.

But officials said Monday that no one is sure whether this new pact will short-circuit existing plans for a countywide recycling center, or whether it will stall a merger between the district and the county Solid Waste Commission that is designed to put all the trash-making cities under one governing agency.

And no one is sure how much more home and commercial trash service customers in Ventura County will have to pay for the Santa Clara Landfill costs or the recycling facility, said Craig Phillips, contract administrator for the county Solid Waste Management Department.

But no matter where the facility is located, customers will have to pay, he said.

The merger of the county’s two major garbage agencies was designed to have ended six years of political argument and wasteful competition for control of area landfill and recycling facilities.

By July, the merged panel was to have chosen a site for a countywide recycling facility and continued work on long-term solutions for Ventura County’s dwindling landfill space and swelling garbage output.

But after two years and close to $1 million spent studying potential sites, no site has been chosen, and the Jan. 1, 1993, deadline for closing the county’s main dump at Bailard Landfill is approaching fast, said Oxnard City Manager Vernon G. Hazen.

“We’ve been patiently waiting for over a year for the (merger) to take place and all that’s happened is talk,” Hazen said Monday. “In the meantime, time has run out and we have to move.”

The City Council has begun pushing to make Oxnard home to a recycling center and waste transfer station for several reasons, Hazen said, including:

* City staff prefer building a privately run, publicly funded facility from the ground up so it will fit Oxnard’s needs better than would a proposed site such as the International Paper Co. building in Camarillo, which would have to be modified.

* Oxnard can save money because trucking its recyclable and non-recyclable trash to other cities would cost more.

* The city needs a transfer station, to consolidate non-recyclable trash from smaller collection trucks into larger, more economical trucks for transportation to a landfill.

The city also produces the largest amount of trash in Ventura County, about 700 tons a day, and recycles the least, 6%, compared to a countywide average of 10.6%, said Clinton Whitney, general manager of the sanitation district.

State law mandates all cities to increase their recycling to 25% by 1995 and 50% by the year 2000.

“The reason Oxnard has to take a leadership role is to protect its own interests,” Whitney said. “It has a very large job to do” to meet the state deadlines, he said.

However, the sanitation district vote was not unanimous. Ventura City Councilman Gary Tuttle, his city’s representative on the district board, cast the sole dissenting ballot in the 7-1 vote.

Many sanitation district members also serve on the Waste Commission, which had already begun narrowing its choices for a recycling facility site, Tuttle said.

“They did a complete turnaround and basically snubbed their noses at the system and said, ‘We’re going to go this direction, and we’re going to go with Oxnard, without checking if it’s the best deal,’ ” Tuttle said.

He criticized them for giving what he called “a sweetheart deal” to Oxnard without finishing the Waste Commission’s work.

And he said Oxnard gets the best deal of all the cities under the proposed pact because it no longer has to shoulder the $15-million cleanup costs for the Santa Clara Landfill alone--something which Hazen does not dispute.