Judge Delays Decision on Landfill Report

Legal wrangling continued Friday over the environmental effects of expanding the jam-packed San Marcos landfill.

After a hearing, Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell said she needs until Tuesday to decide whether the county’s newest crack at an environmental impact report on the landfill’s expansion is valid. Her approval on the report is needed for the project to proceed.

Meanwhile, the dump, which serves virtually all of North County, is just about stuffed to the brink. Officials estimate that it will reach capacity by Oct. 1, forcing the region to find other places take its trash.

Last year, the county completed an EIR for the project and thought it was on the way to enlarging the landfill. But Christward Ministry, a nearby property owner, sued, arguing that the report was incomplete.

Specifically, Christward Ministry complained that the EIR failed to adequately consider the expansion’s effects on the ground water, nor did it take into account the effects of delivering clay to line the enlarged dump.

Judge McConnell agreed and told the county to fix it.

But when county officials brought their new and improved EIR before McConnell Friday, she declined to approve it, saying she needed time to consider new arguments from the plaintiff.

Michael Hogan, an attorney for Christward Ministry, argued that the county neglected to send its revised report to the public and to agencies that would be affected by the landfill expansion.

“You can never know who would have been interested if you don’t give them a chance to look at the information,” Hogan said. “When you add new information, you have to recirculate the EIR to see if affected parties view it as significant.”

Further, Hogan said, the report failed to detail the effects of clay-hauling trucks on the roads leading to the dump.

But attorneys for the county aggressively argued those points before the judge. They said clay trucks will make a “negligible” 100 trips a year after the landfill is built. And they insisted that the EIR went to everybody who legally should have received it, as well as others, and was available in public libraries.

While fighting to win approval to expand the landfill, the county is also working to line up the necessary permits to transfer some of North County’s garbage to its Sycamore Landfill near Santee.

The San Marcos landfill opened in 1979 and was expected to accommodate North County’s garbage until the mid-1990s. But because of North County’s explosive growth, the dump filled prematurely, catching county officials off guard.

Four other landfill sites are being studied by the county: one at Gregory Canyon, alongside the San Luis Rey River and California 76 at Pala; one alongside Aspen Road in Fallbrook; a third off Gopher Canyon Road near an earlier county landfill site at Bonsall, and at Meriam Mountain, a large canyon opposite the Lawrence Welk Resort on Interstate 15.

At best, a new landfill is about three years from coming on line, and county officials want to expand the 750-foot-deep San Marcos landfill with another 200 feet of garbage, giving it another seven years of life.