3 Firms to Join Bidding for County’s Trash

While Ventura County grapples with the issue of a landfill at Weldon Canyon, at least three waste companies are talking to local officials about hauling west county garbage to dumps elsewhere.

On Thursday, a representative of Chiquita Canyon Landfill asked Ventura County leaders to consider sending as much as 3,000 tons of trash a day to the site just over the county line off California 126.

In September, two more firms will appear before the county Waste Commission to bid for the county’s trash, offering to ship the waste by truck or rail to landfills in other states.

“There are billions of dollars to be made here in the next decade,” said Nina Shelley, the Ojai City Council member who sits on the commission. “I can’t blame these people for fighting over it.”

The proposals for exporting trash come as the commission, an advisory panel to the Board of Supervisors, prepares a 15-year plan for disposing of the county’s garbage.

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The commission has already drawn up criteria for landfill sites and Thursday viewed a map showing land suitable for the giant garbage dumps.

But some commission members hope that exporting the waste to existing landfills could obviate the need for any future dumps, particularly the proposed Weldon Canyon project on November’s ballot.

“We’re looking at Chiquita Canyon, and we’re looking at Sunshine Canyon (near Granada Hills),” Shelley said. “My feeling is that if we get right down to it, we’re really going to look at the market.”

But her east county colleagues on the commission were not as quick to embrace the idea. Saddled with the Simi Valley Landfill, many residents in the east county believe their western neighbors should develop a landfill of their own.

“We live with it in our own back yard, and we live with it because it’s our garbage,” said Scott Montgomery, the Moorpark city councilman who heads the Waste Commission. “To the east county, that’s the whole issue. We dispose of our trash in our own back yard. Why can’t Ojai and Ventura dispose of their trash in their back yard?”

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Currently, the western communities send much of their trash to Bailard Landfill near Oxnard, but that site is set to close in 1997. Efforts to find alternatives stalled last year, after activists beat back a proposal for a new dump at Weldon Canyon between Ojai and Ventura.

Now a San Diego County group called Taconic Resources is trying to revive the Weldon proposal, using a ballot initiative to circumvent a reluctant Board of Supervisors. That measure is the subject of a lawsuit.

At the same time, Laidlaw Waste Systems is trying to double the capacity at its Chiquita Canyon Landfill, six miles east of the Ventura County border near Santa Clarita.

To justify the expansion, Laidlaw needs to prove it has the garbage to fill an extra 180 acres. That’s where Ventura County comes in. Rodney W. Walter of Laidlaw asked the Waste Commission to send a letter to Los Angeles County officials, assuring them that Ventura is considering the landfill as an option for its trash.

Already, the landfill receives 100 to 200 tons a day from Ventura County and could handle as much as 3,000 tons a day.

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The plan is not without its problems, Walter acknowledged. Laidlaw is still working on its environmental studies, a process complicated by plans for the huge Newhall Ranch development across the highway.

What’s more, any hint of importing Ventura County trash could inflame Los Angeles County environmental groups trying to block the project, not to mention the Ventura County communities along the route.

“I don’t want everything from Oxnard and Ventura and Ojai to be going through Santa Paula,” said Al Urias, Santa Paula’s representative on the commission.

The commission agreed to send a letter to Los Angeles County officials, but made no firm commitments to use the Chiquita Canyon landfill.

In September, the panel will hear a similar proposal from Browning-Ferris Industries, which wants to ship Ventura County’s trash to Sunshine Canyon and to its La Paz landfill in Arizona. A firm called ECDC Environmental from San Francisco wants to haul the county’s waste by rail to out-of-state landfills.

But long-distance hauling does not necessarily help the environment, Montgomery argued Thursday. “There comes a point in time where the environmental impact of the haul becomes more than the environmental impact of the landfill,” he said.

Montgomery is supporting the ballot initiative clearing the way for a new landfill at Weldon Canyon. The map presented Thursday showed that the land around Weldon Canyon met all the panel’s criteria for landfills. So did the area around the Bailard and Toland Road Landfill, serving Santa Paula and Fillmore.

But the Simi Valley Landfill, if proposed today, would not meet the panel’s standards, based chiefly on ground water and zoning criteria.