Landfill Ruling Causes Scramble for Alternatives

San Diego County officials met behind closed doors Tuesday to try to figure out how to deal with North County’s trash, now that a judge has sidetracked, if not derailed, plans to expand the San Marcos landfill.

And the only decision that they agreed to announce publicly is that they’ll meet again Friday to continue their brainstorming, and hopefully come up with some recommendations for the Board of Supervisors next week.

“I can’t tell you” what the options include, said Deborah Castillo, the spokeswoman for the county’s Department of Public Works, who attended the meeting. “We’re not at a state where we’re willing to discuss things publicly.”

At issue is where to dump North County’s trash--enough to fill 300 or so garbage trucks five days a week--once the San Marcos landfill reaches its legal capacity height of 750 feet. That day is expected to come in July or August.

The county had believed it had all its ducks lined up to expand the landfill by then by increasing its height by another 200 feet--or enough to accommodate another five to seven years of garbage.

But on Monday, San Diego Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell ruled that the county’s latest environmental impact report on the ramifications of the landfill expansion had a few holes in it.

While the county proposed using a clay liner to separate the existing landfill from its second-story addition as a way to prevent new toxins from leaching into the ground water, the county didn’t discuss the environmental consequences of the clay liner itself, she said.

Additionally, the county didn’t adequately respond to public criticisms of the EIR and didn’t adequately distribute the document for public feedback.

County officials say it will take another six to nine months to fix the EIR and run it through the various administrative hoops--long after the landfill is expected to reach its capacity.

So what’s the county to do?

“In the Public Works Department, this (problem) is our No. 1 priority,” Castillo said.

On Monday, Castillo said the options included seeking emergency approval from the various state agencies to allow the county to exceed its current capacity, or to close the landfill down, at least temporarily, and start shipping garbage to the Sycamore Canyon landfill near Ramona or, in a worse-case scenario, further south to the Otay landfill.

On Tuesday, Castillo was tight-lipped on even those options.

“We met, outlined some options, eliminated some and assigned teams to investigate other ones that we’ll discuss in further detail when we meet again on Friday,” she said.

The meeting was chaired by Lari Sheehan, deputy chief administrative officer for the county, and attended by representatives of the County Counsel’s office for legal advice, and the Public Works Department.

Apparently one of the issues at hand is the use of the clay liner itself, the major stumbling block in the EIR.

Gary Stephany, chief of the county Health Department’s environmental health division, said Monday that he questioned the use of clay as an effective liner, especially because of debate over how it would hold up as the landfill settled.

On Tuesday, Castillo indicated that the use of clay had come up in the brainstorming, but would not elaborate. “That’s part of the whole legal decision,” she said.

Use of the clay, she said, was the idea of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board as a way of protecting the ground water.

Not so, said Robert Morris, a senior engineer for the water board who has worked on the San Marcos landfill issue.

“The county’s consultants came in with a proposal to put in a liner, a clay cover, between the existing landfill and the proposed (expanded) landfill,” Morris said.

“We said, ‘You may have differential settlement. How can you demonstrate this proposed liner meets the criteria and achieves the performance standards of a normal liner that’s located on bedrock, on firm ground?

“The county consultant came back and said that not only will we use the clay liner, but we’ll use intermediate clay covers--a foot of clay at every 20 feet of trash--as part of our mitigation.”

That solution, coupled with other engineering solutions to monitor the possible contamination of ground water, was convincing enough to win the approval of the regional water board, Morris said.

The notion of transferring North County trash to the Sycamore or Otay landfills already has been rejected, at least for now, by the county Board of Supervisors.

By a 4 to 1 vote, the board decided last November against approving the wholesale shipment of trash out of North County until an environmental impact report studying the consequences of that action was completed. North County Supervisor John MacDonald was alone in saying he was ready to ship garbage out of the region to other landfills.

South Bay Supervisor Brian Bilbray has said he is steadfastly opposed to shipping North County trash to other parts of the county.

Bilbray is on vacation this week but his administrative assistant, Jeff Stafford, said, “The trash can pile up on the streets of North County, as far as Brian is concerned. The North County got themselves into this mess.”

Board Chairman George Bailey said Tuesday that “we’ll do nothing to endanger the people’s health. We’ll work every angle with the state to get permission to expand the landfill.”