D.A. Won’t Probe Landfill Claims : Investigation: A judge’s request that the county’s fee practices be scrutinized is declined due to lack of evidence.

The district attorney’s office has decided not to investigate claims of favoritism in the levying of county landfill fees, despite a request from a judge who cited “troubling allegations” over the issue, officials said Wednesday.

The decision infuriated the local trash hauler who first raised the issue, but the prosecutor who handled the case said he saw little choice.

“I am unable to find any evidence of a crime which would justify an investigation by this office,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Guy N. Ormes wrote this week to Superior Court Judge James P. Gray, in a letter received Wednesday by lawyers in the case.

In a letter last month to the district attorney, Gray suggested that authorities may want to look into “troubling allegations” that the county had undercharged some of the haulers who use its four landfills. “Many hundreds of thousands of dollars” could be at stake, Gray wrote.

Lawyers for the county had asked Gray to delay the request until the Board of Supervisors could review the issue.

The allegations stemmed from a lawsuit now pending against the county by South Coast Refuse Corp., an Irvine-based trash hauler that has been at odds with the county for more than a dozen years over its permit and contract-bidding procedures. The firm claims it has been shut out of some markets.

The firm is seeking $281,000 from the county, maintaining that the county gave financial breaks to about 20 local trash-hauling firms in parts of 1990 and 1991, using a different--and less costly--method of determining how much they owed for dumping their garbage in county landfills.

Neither county officials nor South Coast Refuse have been able to explain why some haulers received the apparent price breaks.

Nevertheless, South Coast Refuse officials assert that the practice meant that either the county lost out on millions in revenue to these firms or it overcharged many other haulers, who were paying more. The county switched to a uniform fee system in 1991.

“I’m so angry,” South Coast Refuse co-owner and operator Madeline Arakelian said Wednesday after learning of the district attorney’s decision. “A judge asks for an investigation and they won’t do it? This is just unbelievable.

“I think it’s collusion, corruption in our government. That’s a charge I’m going to make in public,” she said.

Arakelian claims that the county has carried out a “vendetta” against her firm because of her challenges to its landfill practices. “The audacity of this absolutely floors me,” she said.

But Gray was stoic about the decision.

“I thought it was appropriate to call the matter to (the district attorney’s) attention, and I did. They have satisfied themselves (that there is no need for an investigation), and that’s fine,” the judge said.

“I’d probably do it again,” he added.

Ormes said in an interview that he spoke with lawyers for both the county and South Coast Refuse to decide whether there were grounds for an investigation.

“We’d have to be able to define a crime somewhere out there, and nobody’s alleging there’s a crime here,” he said. “We could go out and spend days and weeks investigating anything and everything, but I don’t think that’s a real good idea.”

Gray had also suggested last month to the district attorney that the county’s landfill practices might be of interest to the Orange County Grand Jury.

Ormes responded in his letter to the judge, dated Monday, that he would pass the matter along to the grand jury if Gray desired, but that he doubted it would be of interest to the panel “because the disputed (landfill) practice seems to have been corrected over 18 months ago.”

For years, the county used an inexact formula--known as the “K-factor”--to charge haulers for the trash they dumped in county landfills, based on the size of the load. The county switched to a more precise method in 1991, when it began to actually weigh the loads of all haulers.

Ormes said in an interview that the grand jury generally exercises it role as governmental watchdog to investigate only current policy problems, rather than past ones.

“Everyone seems to concede that if there was a problem, it’s been corrected,” Ormes said. “I don’t know why (the grand jury) would care. . . . It doesn’t have pizazz.”

Gray said he has no plans to pursue the issue with the grand jury.