San Marcos Says Landfill Can Expand

Claiming that a place to dump trash is as necessary for their own residents as for the entire North County region, the San Marcos City Council agreed unanimously Tuesday night to approve the expansion of San Diego County’s landfill here.

The decision came only after Mayor Lee Thibadeau--who previously threatened to vote against the expansion--railed against other North County politicians as obstructionists and after the council said this will be the last time it bails out the county.

The decision to expand the landfill averted a regional garbage disposal crisis and heaped onto this community millions of dollars in new revenue to compensate it for continuing to serve as North County’s garbage destination.

“Some will say Thibadeau blinked,” the mayor acknowledged in his change of position. “I didn’t. I believe it is better to provide clear and honest leadership for the benefit of the entire county than to have the personal satisfaction of watching (Escondido Mayor) Jerry Harmon and (Oceanside Councilwoman) Melba Bishop eat trash. And that was a tough decision.”

Thibadeau and other San Marcos council members took to heart warnings from garbage companies operating in the county that to allow the closure of the landfill would cost residents an additional $4 or more a month to finance the shipping of their garbage to the county’s Sycamore landfill near Santee.

“I realize I can’t be a party to the burdening of the region’s ratepayers--the voters--as well as the rest of the county with higher rates, increased truck traffic and the loss of air quality while North County trash is dumped on some poor neighbor clear across the county,” Thibadeau said. “We must maintain a regional perspective in leadership.”

Much of Thibadeau’s remarks were directed against Harmon and Bishop, whom he singled out as his city’s biggest adversaries in trying to solve North County’s trash disposal problem. The two North County politicians had themselves blamed San Marcos for trying to extract a profit from the landfill business at the expense of their own residents.

Thibadeau called them “self-serving obstructionists” who created more problems for the region than they solved.

Later, council member Pia Harris noted that the mayor’s tirade was directed primarily against Escondido and Oceanside, even though San Marcos had been targeted with lawsuits by Carlsbad and Encinitas as well. “If we’re going to castigate people,” Harris said, “we ought to castigate all of them.”

In the end, the city threw no new conditions at the county, which sent two supervisors--John MacDonald and Brian Bilbray--to plea for the landfill’s expansion. The alternative--sending trash elsewhere--would create even greater environmental and economic damage, they said.

San Diego County’s trash bureaucrats came to San Marcos with hat in hand and got what they needed, and paid for: permission to heap another 200 feet of garbage atop the 750-foot-high landfill along the rural southern edge of San Marcos.

“That’s one more step in a long process,” said a relieved Bill Worrell, a top county trash official.

The decision provides the county with a place to dump garbage for a maximum of another seven years--by which time another landfill is expected to be developed--but the move rankled the owners of million-dollar estate homes and builders of two upscale subdivisions in the rural, rolling hills along Questhaven Road.

Now the county needs only the approval later this month of the California Integrated Waste Management Board to begin the expansion. That board has hired its own consultant to review the plans, and county officials say they’re not yet ready to claim success.

Had the San Marcos City Council dumped the expansion, the county would have had to declare a public emergency and seek Gov. Pete Wilson’s permission to keep the landfill open or to send garbage to another landfill, because the county doesn’t yet have the necessary regulatory permits in hand to do either.

The San Marcos landfill opened in 1979 and is expected to reach capacity in three weeks, with no other landfill open in North County to handle the region’s garbage.

The cost of winning San Marcos’ consent was the agreement to pay the city $2.80 for every ton of garbage dumped at the landfill, as a sort of payoff for shouldering the landfill burden. The fee will amount to nearly $2 million a year for San Marcos.

That new solid-waste facility fee--or host fee--will add about 40 cents a month to residential trash bills everywhere in the county but San Diego, which maintains its own landfill.

The same fee can now be collected by other cities in the county that host garbage dumps, providing new revenue streams for Chula Vista and San Diego, in which the Otay and Sycamore landfills, respectively, are situated.

Additionally, San Marcos will be allowed to keep $3.7 million it has already collected from the county since last summer.

The county Board of Supervisors earlier Tuesday formally accepted, by unanimous vote and with little discussion, San Marcos’ demands for the new expansion permit.

By then, the four North County cities that had battled San Marcos over the expansion had thrown up their hands and agreed to let the county deal directly with San Marcos on the use of the dump.

“We believe that it is the county’s responsibility to ‘do the right thing,’ ” the mayors of Escondido, Oceanside, Encinitas and Carlsbad said in a letter to supervisors last week.

“In most respects, we as cities are like passengers on a train in which the county has sole control of the throttle,” they wrote.

The cities did agree with the county that the $2.80-per-ton host fee was appropriate. The alternative to the host fee would have been a surcharge of between $4 and $10 a month on household garbage bills to pay for hauling North County’s garbage to the Sycamore landfill.

The four cities previously had sued San Marcos, claiming that a $5.50-per-ton host fee San Marcos began extracting from the county last summer was exorbitant and unilateral.

But the managers of the county’s 18 municipalities agreed among themselves in recent weeks that a $2.80-per-ton fee was rational and justified, and San Marcos agreed. With that, the four combative North County cities dropped their own complaint.

Even then, they painted themselves as heroes.

“As a result of our (lawsuit), a regional process has occurred involving all cities and the county to address the . . . fee issue,” the four cities wrote in the letter to county officials. “This has led to a better understanding among the county and all cities, and represents the type of regional cooperation that we have always supported and advocated.”

Because the host fee was reduced from $5.50 to $2.80 per ton, the four cities took credit for saving the county between $15 million and $20 million over the next seven years. Under the new host fee formula, San Marcos stands to gain nearly $2 million a year, compared to about $4 million it hoped to make under the higher fee.

Still, in their joint letter, the mayors of the four cities balked at San Marcos’ demand that it be allowed to keep the $3.7 million it already has collected in host fees over the past year, even though the landfill hadn’t yet been expanded.

“We fail to see any justification for the county to allow San Marcos to retain” that money, the cities said. Worse still, they said, is the fact that the $3.7-million windfall was based on the $5.50-per-ton.

County officials did little to explain why San Marcos should be allowed to keep the $3.7 million, except to note that if the landfill were to close, it would cost far more than that to begin shipping garbage to the Sycamore landfill.

One of San Marcos’ demands in expanding the landfill was that other cities promise not to sue San Marcos in the future over garbage issues. The Board of Supervisors noted that it has no controls over who might sue San Marcos--but promised that if there is future landfill litigation, it will come to the defense of the city and help share the legal burden.

Attorney Dwight Worden, hired to represent Escondido, Oceanside, Encinitas and Carlsbad in the litigation against San Marcos, said the four cities are willing to grin and bear the outcome.

“We told the county what we wanted it to do on our behalf, but the decision finally was between San Marcos and the county, not with us,” Worden said. “The county has so poorly managed this whole landfill situation, they’ve painted themselves into a corner where there was no alternative but to ask for the landfill to be expanded and to allow San Marcos to put a gun to their head.”

Worden said the four cities, which have since formed their own joint powers authority to explore landfill alternatives, will continue their brainstorming on long-term solutions on where to put North County’s garbage.

Worden said the city of San Marcos won the other cities’ respect, in a roundabout way.

“We thought San Marcos was inappropriately parochial, holding the region as hostage, but that’s what cities are supposed to do: to look out for their own self-interests.”

“It’s the county that we hold responsible, for knowing for 10 years that the San Marcos landfill would close and, a month before D-Day, having no alternative other than to fall on its knees and give in to San Marcos’ demands,” Worden said.

Supervisor Bilbray had no sympathy for Worden’s clients.

“If they didn’t like San Marcos’ decisions, why didn’t they take care of their own trash themselves?” Bilbray said. “If they think San Marcos has been so outrageous, why didn’t they site a landfill in their own cities?

On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors also agreed to spend $6.5 million to conduct detailed geotechnical and hydrology studies of the four North County sites now under consideration as future landfills: along Aspen Road in Fallbrook, alongside the San Luis Rey River and California 76 at Pala, off Gopher Canyon Road in Bonsall, and at Merriam Mountain, alongside Interstate 15 opposite the Lawrence Welk Resort north of Escondido.

County officials say that barring any unforeseen problems and lawsuits, one of those sites could be operating as a landfill in four years, before San Marcos is filled again.