Trash Firm Says Dump Lease Sale Less Likely : Weldon Canyon: Waste Management is encouraged by county supervisors’ refusal to consider a ‘bad-boy’ ordinance.

Encouraged by two favorable decisions Tuesday by the county Board of Supervisors, a Waste Management of California official said the company has put “on the back burner” the possible sale of its lease of the Weldon Canyon Landfill site.

“What I heard today is a positive sign,” said Michael E. Williams, president of Waste Management’s Ventura County operations. “They basically said, ‘Let’s get on with it and get a decision made.’ We’re encouraged by the fact that we’re off the stall position.”

The company’s proposal to build the Weldon Canyon dump at the mouth of the Ojai Valley has been on hold since April, when the board told county planners to consider four alternate landfill sites and to study a plan to ship county trash out of state.

Then after a Santa Clara County grand jury indicted Waste Management for alleged theft this month, a spokesman confirmed that the company was interested in discussing the sale of its Weldon Canyon lease to the county.

But on Tuesday, a divided Board of Supervisors boosted Waste Management’s hopes to own and operate a landfill for western Ventura County’s trash.

First, the board refused to consider a “bad-boy” ordinance that could have barred Waste Management from doing business with the county because of its history of legal misconduct.

Then Supervisors John K. Flynn and Maggie Kildee directed county lawyers and administrators to meet with Waste Management officials to outline options for the Weldon Canyon proposal.

The supervisors are expected to publicly discuss those options in about three weeks, and the board may give the giant trash company a sign of where it is heading on the landfill issue, Flynn said.

“It seems to me we have to find a way to make a decision one way or another,” Flynn argued. “Either vote it up or vote it down.”

Kildee said she also senses growing frustration among the cities of the west county about the board’s delay on a Weldon Canyon decision.

That proposed 110-acre, $30-million landfill would replace the Bailard dump near Oxnard, which is scheduled to close in late 1993, as the primary landfill in the west county.

The board’s decisions Tuesday were not necessarily victories for Waste Management, Flynn said after the meeting.

“Our decision could go against Waste Management,” he said. “But I do know we need to get the decision-making process moving again. And I think it will go that way now.”

Waste Management survived a scare Tuesday when the board split 2 to 2 on Supervisor Maria E. VanderKolk’s plan to draft a “bad-boy” ordinance that would have barred companies with criminal histories from receiving county contracts. Supervisor Vicky Howard was out of town on personal business.

VanderKolk and Supervisor Susan K. Lacey, whose Ventura-based district includes Weldon Canyon, voted to direct county lawyers to draft an ordinance similar to state and federal laws that ban doing business with tainted companies.

VanderKolk, whose proposal was backed by Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, argued that the ordinance would be aimed only at companies with “a long history of dishonest, unscrupulous behavior” and not at those guilty of isolated infractions.

The county has laws that protect citizens from “noisy neighbors and unleashed dogs” but not from corporate criminals, she said.

But Flynn and Kildee said the new law was unnecessary, too costly to research, too complicated to implement and would send the wrong message to local businesses.

“No one wants to do business with a bunch of crooks,” Flynn said. But the proposed ordinance already has prompted a “fear that runs through our business community.”

Kildee cited a county counsel estimate that it would take several hundred hours to research the legality of the ordinance, and said that even then it would be very difficult to craft a law that worked.

“I guess it reminds me of being pregnant,” she said. “What is being a little bit criminal?”

Mendocino County--the only county in the state to seriously consider such an ordinance--revised its draft law 13 times before abandoning it in frustration in 1989, Kildee noted.

“There are concerns about whether we should do business with Waste Management, and we should look very closely” at those, she said. But that does not mean that a broad “bad-boy” ordinance is a good idea, she said.

In an interview, however, VanderKolk argued that the law might have been an effective way to separate two issues intertwined in the Weldon Canyon proposal: whether Waste Management should operate the landfill, and whether Weldon Canyon is an environmentally sound location for a dump.

“I don’t think the board can make a clean decision on the merits of Weldon Canyon as a landfill,” she said, “because the history of Waste Management will always color that issue.”

VanderKolk’s wariness of Waste Management, the nation’s largest trash company, has increased not only because of the recent Santa Clara County indictment but because of a warning in March by San Diego County Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller.

Miller, responding to a Waste Management proposal for a new landfill in San Diego County, warned that public agencies should use “extreme caution” when dealing with Waste Management Inc., the parent company of Waste Management of California.

The prosecutor cited a 1991 Ventura County Sheriff’s Department survey that found that the fast-growing rubbish company had paid $52.3 million in fines nationwide in the 1980s. The survey listed 10 criminal, 22 environmental and 23 civil antitrust actions against the company--including several for price fixing.

Waste Management officials have repeatedly said that nearly all of their legal problems have resulted from the activities of former owners of recently acquired subsidiaries.

A company spokesman has said the San Diego report was “replete with inaccurate statements and half-truths taken out of context.”

Times staff writer Tina Daunt contributed to this story.