County Will Close Dump, Lay Off 30 : Services: Shutdown of Santiago Canyon facility is part of $28-million effort to cut costs and ward off increases in landfill fees.

A North County landfill will be closed and 30 employees will be laid off as part of a $28-million cost-cutting effort aimed at keeping landfill gate fees at current rates, officials said Thursday.

The 185-acre Santiago Canyon landfill, located in Orange will be closed to public and commercial use on July 1, said Murry Cable, director of the county’s Integrated Waste Management Department.

The decision, expected to be approved by the County Board of Supervisors on June 22, would meet the board’s demand to keep all county landfill gate fees stable through 1994.

“To do that, we had to do something dramatic,” Cable said.

After the closure of Santiago Canyon, residents of Orange, Cypress, Costa Mesa, Buena Park, Stanton, La Palma, Los Alamitos, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and nearby unincorporated areas will use the county’s two public landfills instead of Santiago Canyon.

Those two landfills--the Brea-Olinda landfill, near Brea, and the Prima Deshecha landfill, near San Juan Capistrano--will take up the slack in private dumping, Cable said. Commercial waste will be diverted to those two dumps as well as Frank R. Bowerman landfill south of Irvine.

Residents can also use transfer stations, which are primarily privately owned facilities that have higher gate fees than county landfills.

The Santiago Canyon dump--originally slated for closure in 1995--will not be formally closed until 1997 at the earliest, officials said. The Brea-Olinda landfill is not planned for closure until 2013 and the county’s two other landfills are scheduled to close in the 2030s.

For the past several months, officials have said that use of the Santiago Canyon landfill would have to be scaled back. But Thursday’s announcement was the first time officials indicated that it would be virtually closed.

Gate fees--the costs paid by landfill users to dump their trash--have risen from $4.90 per ton in 1983 to $22.75 per ton now, but the revenue is not sufficient to cover the costs of running the county’s four landfills, Cable said. Increased recycling and less dumping by building contractors has combined to lower revenue from the fees by $25 million since 1987, he said.

Officials said they would have to raise gate fees by $7 per ton to keep the Santiago Canyon dump open, which would result in monthly residential trash fee increases countywide of $1.03 to $1.78.

Because it is the only county landfill located on leased land, “Santiago Canyon is currently the most expensive landfill we have to operate,” Cable said.

The county pays monthly rent to the Irvine Co. equal to 25% of the gate fees collected at the site, he said. Closing the site will save $13 million in rent over the next two years.

Officials expect to save another $14 million in equipment, soil that would have to be trucked to the site to bury trash, a planned pipeline and closing costs.

Cymantha Atkinson, a spokeswoman for the Waste Management Department, said that 30 of 34 employees--including equipment operators, inspectors, truck drivers, supervisors and others--at the site have received layoff notices. The cutbacks will eliminate about 10% of the department’s work force and trim about $1 million from the department’s budget.

“We’re trying to find employees other positions within the county,” Atkinson said, “but regardless, there are going to be layoffs.”

Officials expect the four remaining employees to maintain the dump, she said. Although the landfill will be closed to everyday use, it will be open to limited commercial use on one day every three months.

“Except for that one day of the quarter, there won’t be any trash there for the workers to bury,” said Atkinson.

C.R. Transfer Inc. of Stanton, the only company which hauls trash to the landfill in large trucks, will be allowed to dump 500 tons of garbage in 25 trucks four times each year, she said. The landfill currently takes in 2,450 tons per day.