S.D. County Buys Time on Landfill Expansion : Trash: San Marcos facility can be used beyond capacity while county seeks expansion approval.

San Diego County can dump trash into the San Marcos landfill beyond its current capacity, county officials learned Monday, buying them time to persuade the state that they have properly designed and engineered the garbage dump’s planned expansion.

While the county remains on the brink of a garbage crisis, officials issued a sigh of relief that they weren’t yet at the end of their rope.

“We still need a permit, but the string is a little longer,” said Bill Worrell, deputy director of the county’s Department of Public Works, which has sidestepped one hurdle after another in trying to expand the landfill.

With the landfill expected to reach its current capacity on Oct. 1, a busload of county officials drove to northern Orange County on Monday. They hoped to win the recommendation of a committee of the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board that the landfill be expanded.

But the waste board’s own staff advised last Friday against the county’s plans, saying the county failed to show it had properly designed and engineered the expansion.

State engineers said they weren’t convinced the county had properly designed a large retaining wall to prevent the landfill from slipping into a $100 million recycling center, now under construction alongside the dump.

Also at issue is the stability of the slopes of the heightened landfill, which will grow from 750 feet high to 950 feet high with a second layer of garbage. That expansion will allow the landfill to accommodate another seven years’ of garbage, by which time the county hopes to have another landfill operating in North County.

On Monday, the waste board committee said the county can have until Nov. 10 to fix the design deficiencies.

The authority for the county to overfill the garbage dump in the meantime will be in the hands of a county official.

Gary Stephany, director of environmental health services for the county’s Department of Health Services, admitted that he wasn’t sure he had that power until Monday. State law allows the person in charge of enforcing waste management laws for counties--in this case Stephany--also to change the existing operating permits.

This means Stephany, watchdog over the way the county runs the landfill, also can let his county bosses use it even after it reaches capacity.

That power given to a county employee was characterized as “a strange and incestuous relationship” by Evelyn Alemanni, one of three landfill expansion opponents who addressed the state board Monday.

Another critic, Patricia Newton, chastised Stephany’s office for its “historical lack of regulatory fortitude” in serving as a landfill watchdog.

But state officials said waste management laws allow for one arm of a local government agency to police another arm of that same government entity, unless there is some showing that the local enforcer has abused its discretion.

Stephany, wearing the hat of state enforcer, at first asked Monday whether the state board would consider issuing an expansion permit conditioned on the assumption that both sides could, in coming weeks, agree on the design and engineering work.

Such conditional permits were not customary, responded Jesse R. Huff, chairman of the committee. The better way of handling the problem, the attorney for the state agency said, would be for Stephany himself to permit the over-filling while the technical details were worked out for ultimate approval.

Stephany said he will draft an order allowing parts of the landfill to grow by 10 feet--providing more than enough space to serve North County until a final decision on the expansion is made.

In the meantime, both sides agreed to meet Sept. 30 to discuss the engineering details of the expansion--details, the state staff says, that have been lacking so far.

“There’s been a lack of basic information for us to study,” said one state geologist, who asked not to be identified. “It’s not that the information is hard to get, but it’s not always quick to get. It is possible to build a retaining wall that works, but we need the details.”

David Janssen, the county’s chief administrative officer, suggested his frustrations with the state staff.

“We know what they want: (ground) borings to justify the engineering work. But they only asked for those last Thursday,” he said. “Now that we know what they want, we’ll give it to them.”

Worrell added: “We thought the staff would be happy without having to see the full-blown field reports. I wish they had told us (what they wanted) two months ago.”

Because of state-mandated guidelines on how quickly approval must be given for a landfill expansion, based on when the expansion permit was requested, the deadline for a decision is Nov. 10.

If the county still cannot win the state waste agency’s expansion approval by then, it will have to either win Gov. Pete Wilson’s emergency approval to still use the San Marcos landfill--or transfer North County’s garbage to the Sycamore landfill near Santee.