San Marcos Council Delays Landfill Vote

Because its neighboring cities weren’t ready to discuss payoffs Tuesday night, the showdown on whether to allow the expansion of North County’s landfill was delayed two weeks by the San Marcos City Council.

With Mayor Lee Thibadeau holding to his promise to try to get the city out of the landfill business once and for all, the council voted 4 to 1 to delay deciding whether it should allow the garbage dump in its city to be expanded so it can take trash for seven more years.

At issue--as it has been for a year--is whether the residents of some, or all, of San Diego County’s other suburban cities should be assessed pocket change monthly to compensate San Marcos for playing garbage host.

For San Marcos, that compensation could amount to an annual $4-million windfall, making it worthwhile to look the other way and plug noses as garbage trucks continue to parade through town.

The other cities now have two weeks to decide whether San Marcos should be allowed to extract the host fee--and how much. And San Marcos council members said Tuesday night that if the other cities’ proposal doesn’t satisfy them, they’ll let the landfill close, sending the county into the logistics and political nightmare of where to put North County’s trash.

“Last year, I reluctantly voted to keep the landfill open. If the county had approved the trash-to-energy plant here, as we did nine years ago, the problem would already be solved,” Councilman Corky Smith said.

Of the looming deadline for a final decision, Smith added, “The eighth of next month is it (for a decision), then it’s adios, Charlie.”

After Councilman Mike Preston was told that if city permission for the expansion isn’t given by Sept. 8, the landfill is doomed to closure because the dump will be filled by Oct. 1, he offered:

“I’ve heard council members say that that (closure) wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

Thibadeau was firm in his opposition to extending the landfill’s life. “We’ve tried to consider the needs of the whole region for years, and our mistake was (initially) approving (the expansion) 1 1/2 years ago, thinking the other cities would work with us.”

It was then that San Marcos said it also would institute the $5.50-per-ton host fee, leading to a lawsuit from four other North County cities.

Council members Mark Loscher and Pia Harris argued that before the city decides unilaterally to close the landfill, the other cities should be given one last opportunity to pay a host fee.

Even though city managers from around San Diego County have been meeting for a month to try to resolve the host fee issue among themselves, and are said to be close to some sort of agreement, their respective city councils have yet to take up the issue for formal approval.

Already, San Marcos has collected $3.8 million in host fees--paid not from residential and business trash bills but by the county itself, from its own trash-revenue coffers. The money is in an escrow account, and among the sore points raised by the other cities is that that money should be returned because the landfill hasn’t yet been expanded.

The bad blood that was evident at Tuesday night’s meeting reflected the poor relations between San Marcos and its neighbors for the past 10 years over garbage, ever since San Marcos offered to host a controversial trash-to-energy plant alongside the landfill.

The city embraced the technology of burning garbage to generate electricity, partly as a way to reduce the reliance on the landfill and also because the city stood to make millions of dollars in revenue for its role in the project.

Joining a long list of opponents to the project, the cities of Escondido, Carlsbad and Encinitas sued San Marcos over the trash plant, claiming it was environmentally unsound and a financial boondoggle. The cities argued that to pay for the $200-million-plus plant, their residents would eventually be socked with the bill as the cost trickled down to them.

Plans for the trash plant eventually crumbled because of increasing costs, a parade of time-consuming lawsuits and increasing wariness by county officials that the plant would be a financial liability to the county as well.

Still, the county contracted with the would-be builder of the incinerator to at least build a major recycling plant alongside the landfill, a $100-million-plus project that, to this day, other North County cities claim is too risky, too expensive and not worthy of their support.

Through the years, trash still was dumped at the San Marcos landfill the old-fashioned way, as county officials set out to find its replacement. That process has proven futile, too, with one search expanded into a second as officials looked further into the backcountry for a dump site--then reversing their tracks and deciding, instead, to reconsider previously dismissed sites that are closer in to the urban areas.

Today, four landfill sites are under consideration by the county: at Gregory Canyon, alongside California 76 and the San Luis Rey River at Pala; off Aspen Road in Fallbrook, off Gopher Canyon Road near Bonsall, and in a canyon tucked inside Merriam Mountain, north of Escondido and on the west side of Interstate 15--and opposite the Lawrence Welk Resort.

At best, developing a new landfill is at least four years off, so the county’s Department of Public Works, which oversees the countywide trash landfill system, is desperate for the expansion of the San Marcos landfill.

If approval is given by both the City Council of San Marcos and later by the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board, the county will top the existing, 750-foot-high landfill with two feet of clay so it can take another 200 feet of garbage. That vertical expansion, engineers say, should buy North County another seven years or so of garbage storage--by which time the replacement dump should be available.

San Marcos officials initially embraced the expansion of the landfill--which they annexed into the city years ago so they could capture whatever revenue the dump might generate in the years to come.

San Marcos wanted to add to that cash cow the host fee, as compensation for the hundreds of garbage trucks driving through their city and the wear and tear on the city’s streets--and reputation.

The host fee infuriated Escondido, Oceanside, Carlsbad and Encinitas city officials, who sued San Marcos, saying it was arbitrary, too high and unfair because the landfill hadn’t even been expanded yet.

The cities ceremoniously dropped the lawsuit last week--after it became a moot issue anyway. Because a Superior Court judge ruled that the expansion couldn’t move forward because the environmental impact report was insufficient in addressing the repercussions of the expansion, the San Marcos City Council rescinded its earlier permission to expand the landfill.

But now that the judge has approved the environmental impact report, the host fees are back on the agenda as far as San Marcos is concerned.

Despite the protests of the North County cities over the host fee, other officials in the county agreed that maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all--as long as the formula for collecting the money was fair on a countywide basis, and as long as other cities that host landfills could reap the same kinds of financial benefits for themselves.

If a countywide host fee is adopted, it would also generate revenue for Chula Vista, home of the Otay landfill, and the city of San Diego, host to the Sycamore landfill. On the other hand, the residents of San Diego would be immune to paying the host fee because the city runs its own, independent landfill and is not part of the county’s trash management system.