City, County Might Build Competing Recycling Plants : Garbage: Oxnard says it can’t wait for others to choose a site. But the efficiency of duplicate facilities is questioned.

Even as local governments move toward creation of a single countywide Waste Authority in 1993, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors and the Oxnard City Council on Tuesday approved separate plans for construction of large trash recycling plants that would compete with each other.

The county supervisors ratified a proposal that could lead to approval of a trash recycling station in the west county by the end of the year.

The Oxnard council, meanwhile, voted to seek proposals immediately from companies that want to build and operate a $20-million recycling and waste-transfer station in southeast Oxnard. City officials said they face time pressures and can’t wait for the county plant to be built.

County officials said that if two competing plants are eventually built in the west county, the public will pay the price because two smaller facilities would be less efficient than one big plant.

Supervisor John K. Flynn, whose district includes Oxnard, said he hopes his home city will abandon its unilateral proposal and join with the county and other local cities to build just one west county plant.

“You need the tonnage of all of the cities in order to keep the price down,” Flynn said. “So eventually the people of Oxnard would be on the losing end because they would pay more” to dump and recycle their garbage.

The Board of Supervisors endorsed a proposal under which the county would join local cities to support a single west county plant. The board approved spending $195,000 to hire a consultant to determine the best location for recycling facilities in both the west and east counties.

But the Oxnard council, rejecting an appeal by county officials for a unified plan, decided to begin soliciting bids from companies that want to build the Oxnard facility. The council also agreed to purchase an option to buy a 15-acre parcel near Del Norte Boulevard and Colonia Road for the plant.

City officials said that Oxnard produces enough garbage--about one-third of that in the west county--to justify a separate plant, though they are confident other cities will decide to use their facility as well.

And they said they have grown tired of waiting for the county and other cities to agree on where to build a plant to recycle county wastes and to sort refuse for transfer to a landfill.

Oxnard is faced with the scheduled December, 1993, closure of the nearby Bailard landfill, where the city dumps its trash. It also must abide by a state law that requires cities to recycle 25% of their trash by 1995 and 50% by 2000. Oxnard now recycles only 6%.

“We need to have a place to go,” Oxnard City Manager Vernon Hazen said at an evening council meeting. “One of the things in this business is that you never want to be without a place to take your garbage.”

Hazen said that Oxnard is so far ahead of the county in planning the new facility that west county cities will ultimately bring their trash to the Oxnard plant.

He said the plant makes sense because of the urgent need to recycle large amounts of trash and because of a tentative deal struck with the Ventura Regional Sanitation District that would relieve the city of a huge financial burden.

The city is obligated to pay the $15.4 million cost of monitoring and cleaning up the old Santa Clara Landfill in north Oxnard, on which it built the River Ridge Golf Course.

The city assumed that responsibility in 1985 in exchange for ownership of the property, but new environmental laws have increased the cost of monitoring the landfill tenfold, officials said.

Under an agreement approved by the city council and the sanitation district’s board in June, the district would own the Oxnard recycling plant and oversee its operation. The city would guarantee that all its trash goes to the facility.

And, in return, Oxnard would be able to pay its $15.4-million obligation by charging trash haulers extra fees to dump rubbish at the facility.

The sanitation district has wanted to construct a recycling, waste transfer and composting plant in the area of the proposed recycling facility for several years.

District General Manager Clint Whitney said the city’s proposal is a good opportunity to build a plant at a location the district had decided was preferable to numerous other sites.

“We spent almost $1 million to evaluate 26 sites” in the west county, Whitney said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if Ventura hauls its garbage to Oxnard it will cost them less than if they haul it to Camarillo.”