Landfill Proponent Is Betting on the Voters : Environment: Richard Chase pushes Weldon Canyon ballot measure, insisting it is the best solution. Critics disagree.

Richard Chase first emerged on the California garbage scene as a staunch opponent of landfills--proposing to build the state’s first garbage-burning incinerator in San Diego County and denouncing landfills as a “savage, uncivilized way” of dealing with trash.

A year later, however, Chase became an advocate of landfills--working in partnership with a New York company in 1988 that hoped to take trash from the San Diego area and dump it on a remote Native American reservation.

Now, Chase is the prime mover behind the controversial ballot measure to build a landfill at Weldon Canyon--playing the role of middleman trying to broker a deal between Ventura County voters and, ultimately, a major waste company.

If he’s successful, the voters will grant his Taconic Resources partnership the zoning and land-use rights that the nation’s largest trash disposal firm--Waste Management Inc.--could not win in a decade of trying.

His partnership of consultants and investors will then use those rights to seek the needed state and county permits, before selling the project to an established landfill operator, Chase said.

Chase said he does not have a buyer lined up yet. And, although he has hired former Waste Management project manager James Jevens as a consultant, he denies that he has any intention of ultimately making any kind of deal that would turn Weldon Canyon back over to the national trash giant.

“We’re doing this because the site with all the permits and approvals is worth more than the site without them,” Chase explained. “There’s nothing very mysterious about that. We think it’s a project that will be made more valuable by our efforts.”

The plan is not without risks: Before it even gets to the voters, the initiative must survive a vote by a reluctant Board of Supervisors this Tuesday and an inevitable legal challenge from the Ojai City Council.

Then, with voter approval, Chase and his partners would still have to wade through the regulatory morass required for trash disposal projects. And they would have to find a buyer for a new landfill site in an increasingly competitive market, where one major firm is already offering to ship Ventura’s trash out of the county and out of the state.

“I’ll tell you, it’s a hell of a gamble,” said Dan Van Rossen, who works for one of the county’s leading trash haulers, Big Box Roll-Off Service. “But if it works, there could be a time when you’re the only game in town.”

Gambling seems to suit Richard Chase. All his major projects--turning trash to electrical energy, shipping trash to Native American reservations and asking the voters to grant landfill zoning--display an innovative twist, a shift in conventional thinking on how to solve the mounting trash problem.

The Weldon Canyon project is no different.

“It’s counter-intuitive,” Chase said. “Generally most developers spend their lives trying to keep the people from voting on their project, because they view that as a dangerous thing.

“Our view, for better or worse, is that, in fact, the people would probably make a pretty good decision on these things.”

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Chase speaks from experience. Twice in the 1980s he won initiatives aimed at defeating his trash incinerator project in northern San Diego County. With an active campaign and a group called Friends of Recycling and the Environment supporting the project, Chase’s team prevailed.

He learned a lesson: People will vote for a trash project, so long as they don’t live near it.

It is a lesson he applied in Ventura County this spring, when he tapped east county communities and Oxnard residents for the signatures he needed to place the Weldon Canyon initiative on the ballot. The core of the project’s opposition comes in Ventura and Ojai, the cities closest to the proposed landfill.

Some of the workers gathering signatures also stressed the project’s small recycling center, rather than its 551-acre landfill, a tactic that angered foes here.

In fact, Chase has left behind angry community activists and city leaders, even some who initially supported him.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’d rather never see him in my city again,” said San Marcos Mayor Lee Thibadeau, who worked together with Chase for the incinerator in his first San Diego County trash venture.

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“There are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made in this trash crisis,” Thibadeau added. “There are going to be those people out there who are going to take advantage of that opportunity, and in my opinion, this group is one of them.”

He first encountered Chase in the early 1980s when Chase was a partner in North County Resource Recovery Associates, a private venture backing the incinerator in the San Marcos area.

Chase sold Thibadeau, and a lot of other people, on the idea of burning trash to create energy.

“The sun is going to set on (landfills) as a so-called solution, and the sun is going to rise on a solution that says we are going to recycle, and we are going to recover energy and we’re going to do it in an economically and environmentally sound manner,” he predicted at one City Council meeting.

Chase chuckled when his words were read back to him last week. “Sometimes it takes longer for the sun to set then we thought,” he said.

In this case, energy prices dropped, making it economically infeasible to build the incinerator, he said. Only the front-end recycling center was ever constructed.

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Meanwhile, Chase moved on to a new approach--shipping trash to reservations. In 1988, with his newly formed Taconic Resources Inc., he joined a New York firm that wanted to recycle trash and then ship the remainder to a landfill on the Campo Indian Reservation in southeast San Diego County.

Later, he served as a consultant in 1990 for a Pennsylvania company pushing a similar project on the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation, also in San Diego County. That project was defeated by the Native American tribes there, but the Campo project is still afloat and pending approval.

The problem is, Thibadeau said, Chase’s various projects are starting to compete with each other. The recycling center built as the front-end of the incinerator could take business from the recycling center connected to the reservation project.

So, Thibadeau charges, Chase has begun working at cross-purposes.

Chase is still working on yet another solution to San Diego County’s trash problems--a proposal strikingly similar to Weldon Canyon.

As a consultant to a group called SERVCON-San Marcos, Chase has engineered a ballot initiative to allow a landfill at a site called Gregory Canyon.

Like Weldon Canyon, the site has been the focus of years of community debate. And like Weldon, the site is now controlled by Waste Management Inc.

The only real difference is that the company behind the Gregory Canyon project is SERVCON-San Marcos, owned by San Francisco investor Jerry Riessen. Chase is acting as a consultant in that project.

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Weldon Canyon, however, is the responsibility of Chase’s own Taconic Resources. Riessen also owns an interest in Taconic, but Chase said it is only a small interest in the firm.

Since Chase announced his petition drive in April, Ventura County officials have made an effort to find out what they can about Taconic, a three-man partnership named for a western Connecticut town where Chase once lived.

The county counsel and Ojai city attorney have made quiet inquiries about the group. Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury confirmed that he had an investigator question Chase, but would not elaborate further.

Chase said the group is not in the business of building or running trash disposal sites. “We find a suitable site and get the permits and the underlying contracts,” he said.

Typically, they would act as consultants for an established waste management firm. But in the Weldon project, Chase said they are not tied to any company and are not yet making any effort to secure a buyer if they succeed in a Weldon Canyon initiative.

“We’ve deliberately left that open,” Chase said.

“I think there’s a number of firms that would be interested in it. We really would not have had any discussions with them yet.

“The only thing that’s certain,” Chase added hastily, “is it would not be Waste Management.”

Still he acknowledged: “There’s not anything in the initiative that deals with that. We cannot prohibit them legally in the initiative from being involved. We would be happy to enter into an agreement saying we would not do this.”

Many of the project’s critics remain suspicious, however.

They point out that Waste Management still controls the lease on Weldon Canyon and owns the San Diego County landfill site at Gregory Canyon. They also question Chase’s decision to hire Jevens, Waste Management’s former chief spokesman in Ventura County, as a key Taconic adviser.

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“That may or may not be a link, but it certainly raises some questions,” said Ojai City Councilwoman Nina Shelley, a foe of the landfill. Even if Waste Management is not involved now, she said, “certainly they could bid on that particular operation.”

Chase defended his decision to hire Jevens, whom he described as the “best qualified person for the job.” And he said his agreements with Waste Management merely provide for transfer of control of the property if a ballot initiative is successful.

He added that his current lease option does not portend any future involvement with Waste Management, which backed away from its Weldon Canyon landfill proposal last year in the face of certain defeat by the county Board of Supervisors.

“I think that we and they both recognize that the political reality in Ventura County, because of the history of their involvement and all the issues that were raised in that context, would be a detriment rather than an asset,” Chase said.

Waste Management, which already manages the Simi Valley Landfill, has taken an equally strong position in disavowing any interest in a future Weldon Canyon deal with Taconic.

“We have no interest in operating a landfill in Weldon Canyon,” said Bob Morris, Waste Management’s regional vice president for public affairs. “We’re not supporting the referendum, financially or otherwise.”

Instead, he said the firm is hoping to recoup some of the estimated $13 million spent trying to develop Weldon Canyon in the past. Taconic Resources has pledged to pay some of those costs if the company assumes the lease Waste Management now holds on the property.

Right now, all this depends on the Board of Supervisors decision Tuesday morning. Three of the five members have voiced their opposition to the ballot initiative, but state law requires them to add the measure to the November ballot.

If they don’t, county officials say, Taconic will probably sue. If they do put the initiative on the ballot, the Ojai City Council plans to sue. Ojai activists have proposed an alternative, namely delaying the decision for 30 days. That could put the ballot initiative off until the next election, set for March, 1996.

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But Ojai opponents of the Weldon Canyon initiative doubt the county board would agree to that. Rather, they’re hoping to win the county’s support for their anticipated lawsuit, which is expected to argue that a private firm cannot use a ballot initiative to seek such extensive zoning changes.

“We want them to go down to the courthouse with the city of Ojai and say this is a terrible piece of legislation,” said Monte Widders, Ojai city attorney.

Getting past the Board of Supervisors, the courts and the voters is still no guarantee the Weldon Canyon project will ever be built.

Right now several landfills are offering competitive rates for Ventura County’s trash, including Chiquita Canyon, near Santa Clarita, and, if approvals go through, Sunshine Canyon, near Granada Hills. Even the Waste Management landfill at Simi Valley is only processing about one-third of the garbage it is allowed to receive daily.

“All the people who own landfills are out there scrambling because they’re trying to make up for the trash they’ve lost to recycling,” said Van Rossen of Big Box Roll-Off Service.

All these sites are offering lower rates than the maximum tipping fees proposed for Weldon in its ballot initiative. Weldon’s rates would not exceed $39.87 a ton in 1994 and would climb with the consumer price index. Most of the existing landfills offer rates in the $20- to $30-a-ton range.

In addition, Browning-Ferris Industries has approached Ventura County officials with a plan to ship trash to landfills in Los Angeles County and Arizona.

“BFI was approached on Weldon many months ago, and declined to get involved,” said Hardy Strozier, a consultant for the firm. In addition to qualms about the initiative process, he said “BFI did not feel it was a profitable venture.”

Chase said Weldon Canyon would eventually be closer and cheaper than any other landfill serving western Ventura County.

“But there’s nothing in the initiative that in any manner, shape or form requires that anyone deliver one pound of trash to Weldon Canyon,” Chase said. “If we’re not economically competitive, we’re not getting any trash.

“The people in Ojai won’t have anything to worry about, because we’ll be out of business.”