Trash Panel to Request Longer Life for Landfill : Sanitation: The Bailard dump is scheduled to close Dec. 7. Officials are seeking a three-year extension.

With no new Ventura County landfill in sight, trash officials voted Thursday to seek state and county permission to keep Bailard Landfill open for more than three years past its Dec. 7 closure deadline.

All nine directors of the Ventura Regional Sanitation District voted to try to extend the life of the landfill.

Open off and on since 1961, the sanitation district-run site--on unincorporated land midway along Victoria Avenue between Oxnard and Ventura--accepts 1,400 tons per day of western Ventura County’s trash, and is the largest landfill in the county.

With permission from the county Planning Commission, Board of Supervisors and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, it could remain open until May, 1997.

Yet while the votes to approve the plan and the environmental impact report supporting it came unanimously, they also came with criticism.

Oxnard Councilman Andres Herrera, a member of the board, said that despite his “yes” vote on behalf of Oxnard, which accounts for fully half the dumping at Bailard, “we cannot wholeheartedly support it.”

“We don’t have a problem with the report,” Herrera said. “We do not support an extension of the landfill. It’s high time we look at that landfill and close it properly and stop it being used as the dumping ground in Oxnard for the western watershed. It’s gone on for too long.”

Oxnard officials also have warned that if the extension is approved, they will levy a one-time fee against the sanitation district to mitigate the effects of continued truck traffic--along Oxnard streets to Bailard--totaling up to $1 million.

Fillmore Councilman Donald Gunderson, chairman of the board, said, however, that unless Bailard stays open, there are few alternatives other than paying more to truck west county trash to landfills in Los Angeles County.

“We’ve been working against a deadline for a number of years,” he said. “Unfortunately, movement toward that date has failed to provide the motivation and stimulation for alternatives to take place in the county. . . . We would be doing a public disservice if we did not have at least one alternative for waste disposal in the western county.”

The landfill will continue to cause dust, traffic, noise and air pollution, said Bob Mason, senior project manager for Environmental Solutions Inc. of Orange County, which drafted the EIR.

It also will continue to draw on Oxnard’s drinkable water supply and leak into its undrinkable supply--known as the semi-perched aquifer--that already is contaminated with chemicals from nearby agricultural fields.

Sanitation district officials, however, do not know the extent to which Bailard is contaminating that water source, Mason said.

The California Integrated Waste Management Board filed a letter warning that the sanitation district may be required in the future to begin monitoring wells downstream along the Santa Clara River that could help determine how much of the contamination Bailard is causing.

And Gerard Kapuscik, manager of the Channel Islands Beach Community Services District, warned that the underground water pollution could be damaging an important source of brackish water that could be used if a seawater desalination plant is built nearby.

Kapuscik called for the district to test water in wells downhill from the landfill to determine how much the landfill is contaminating the water.

But sanitation district General Manager Clint Whitney said afterward that the district already monitors wells downhill at the northwestern edge of the landfill, where tests detected traces of vinyl chloride, a byproduct of trash decay.

“We have offered to take and follow the evidence--and we only have evidence in one well of elevated levels of vinyl chloride--if the Regional Water Quality Control Board deems that it’s necessary,” Whitney said. “We have no obligation simply because we’re operating the site to go find all the pollution in the region. That’s a ridiculous assertion.”

Whitney said some of the vinyl chloride might be flowing downhill from the defunct Santa Clara and Coastal landfills, to the northeast of Bailard, that the sanitation district operated in the 1980s, adding, “we’re talking about Bailard, not other sites.”

The Bailard extension plan also caught flak from Patrick Forrest, secretary-treasurer of a group calling itself Voters Against Bailard.

“We are going to be very active in our attempt not to open Bailard,” he said. “We feel that having a landfill in a flood plain and over aquifers is . . . not the place to have a landfill.”

And it was opposed by the Surfrider Foundation, which sent a letter expressing fears that leakage from the landfill dump is continuing to foul underground water supplies that eventually reach the Pacific.

NEXT STEP

The county Planning Department will review county staff comments on the Bailard extension proposal and make a recommendation to the Planning Commission, which will then forward its recommendation to the Board of Supervisors for a vote. The district also must gain permission from the Regional Water Quality Control Board to keep Bailard open. The entire process is expected to take six to seven months.