MISSION VIEJO : Residents to Vote on Trash Contract Issue

Voters will get the chance to ensure that all future trash contracts are put to competitive bid as the City Council voted last week to put the issue on the November ballot.

The ordinance would require waste companies to cover several emerging waste-disposal issues in their proposals, including recycling and public education programs. Trash contracts would be limited to five years and include a mandatory yearly review process.

Although the council could have made the same ordinance a law without voter approval, no future council can change a measure passed in a city election without going back to the voters.

“If it’s passed on the ballot, then it is embedded in concrete,” Councilman Robert D. Breton said. “It would ensure that all future councils would have to adhere to the ordinance.”

The ballot-question proposal stems from an 18-month dispute over the trash contract between the city and the municipal trash hauler, Dewey’s Rubbish Service Inc. of Irvine. The two sides ended their long-running quarrel last month with the firm conceding $1.2 million in rate rollbacks for Mission Viejo households during the five-year contract, which expires in 1995.

City officials claimed that the trash firm overestimated the amount of garbage hauled from Mission Viejo, then overcharged families for the service. Dewey’s disputed the city’s allegations.

During the extended dispute, city officials hired prominent environmental legal help and say they learned much about the waste-hauling industry and trash contracts.

Breton, who made competitive bidding a platform in his 1990 council campaign, said that opening the contract to other firms is the “only proven way to ensure the highest level of service at the lowest cost that the market will bear.”