CITY SMART: How to thrive in the urban environment of Southern California : Targeting Scavenger Hunters : Long Beach’s best intentions are being trashed as neighbors of a recycling center complain that it draws transients and criminals.

Long Beach planners admit they were pretty naive about setting up the city’s first recycling center six years ago.

The city optimistically crafted general rules on how the center should be run. No one suspected it could sometimes draw transients, prostitutes and drug dealers into the surrounding neighborhood.

“This was at a time when recycling was something that everybody was looking at as a good thing,” said city zoning officer Bob Benard.

But experience has turned officials, residents who live near the center and police a bit cynical. As a result, the city is making regulations tougher for new centers, which the recycling industry says could hinder a business full of good intentions.

Despite changing hands at least three times since it opened, PCH Recycling at 101 E. Pacific Coast Highway, the city’s first full-service recycling facility, has for years drawn complaints from its neighbors, residents of the Wrigley neighborhood in west-central Long Beach.

The residents say some of the center’s customers pilfer their garbage for items they can sell and dirty their alleys. Even worse, they allege, after the scavengers cash in stolen empty bottles and cans, they become customers for drug dealers and prostitutes who still come around despite recent police crackdowns in the area.

Lately, the situation has become unbearable, says Dan Cangro, crime committee chairman for the Wrigley Assn., a residents group.

It and other groups have petitioned the city to revoke the center’s business license or control its problem customers.

If that doesn’t happen, the association may file a lawsuit, he said. “It’s not a question of whether the business is a good business or not,” Cangro said.

“It’s like flies to honey,” he said. “We have [vagrant recyclers] habitating there.”

The center’s management says it is being blamed unfairly for larger societal ills.

“If [poorer customers] weren’t scavenging, what would they be doing?” said center supervisor Gary Lane, who works for Wilmington-based Potential Industries. He added that transients frequented the neighborhood long before his company took over the facility.

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The conflict is nothing new to California. In 1991, complaints about scavengers prompted the Pacific Beach community in San Diego to request an exemption from a state law requiring all cities to allow recycling centers in areas where stores sell high volumes of recyclable beverage containers.

State Department of Conservation officials opposed the exemptions until a pilot program approved by the state Legislature instituted a mobile recycling unit for the community. The department is now monitoring the program, which makes recycling pickups at various locations five days a week.

Recycling officials say neighborhood efforts to close recycling centers simply make scapegoats of businessmen who have no policing power.

“They’re attacking the wrong thing,” said Joe Massey, executive director of both California chapters of the National Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, which has more than 1,800 members across the country. “You can’t blame recycling for the social ills of the society.”

Environmental groups have a similar view.

“We’re just moving [problem customers] around,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, a nonprofit environmental group. “Shutting down recycling centers is shortsighted.”

Long Beach began toughening restrictions on new recycling facilities years before it closed a center for the first time last year. The Planning Commission revoked the license of a West Long Beach center after three employees pleaded guilty to buying stolen merchandise such as aluminum window screens. Officials have revoked no other recycling licenses, but neighbors’ complaints recently led another center to close.

Restrictions on PCH Recycling are more liberal than those on newer stations in the city. For instance, Planet Recycling in North Long Beach, which opened a year and a half ago, cannot accept recyclables delivered in a shopping cart. The Rev. Charles Patrick, manager of the center, says that the rule puts him on unequal footing with competing facilities, but that it probably costs him no more than 10% of his business in the area.

Until the Wrigley Assn. and other groups got the attention of City Council members, neighbors of the Pacific Coast Highway center say, they thought their hands were tied. When the city would send out health inspectors to cite the facility for such problems as rodents, management would quickly remedy the problem, while the bigger problems remained.

But new options may be on the way. Planning Department officials will ask residents Wednesday what specific changes they want the center to make. Possibilities include shortening operating hours and limiting the center to drive-in customers. Any major changes to the center’s operating restrictions would require a public hearing by the Planning Commission and could be appealed to the City Council.

If that fails, residents may try to prove that the center represents a nuisance to the neighborhood. If they can, they may be able to pressure the commission to close it.

Another option involves suing the center under a new legal procedure designed to fight landlords of drug-infested apartment buildings. If they can show the center disrupts the neighborhood, each claimant could win $5,000 in small claims court. The tactic has never been tried against a recycling center.

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Jim Kuhl, director of Long Beach’s nearly 3-year-old curbside recycling program, says the city has a stake in the scavenging issue, too. For one thing, he said that if hassles with scavengers discourage residents from recycling, the city could face state fines. State law says that cities must show by the end of this year that they have reduced by one-quarter the amount of garbage they put in landfills during 1990.

Kuhl’s department has set aside $80,000 to pay undercover police detectives to spend a few hours weekly guarding the city’s 18-gallon curbside recycling bins. As with similar programs across the country, he said the enforcement not only answers some residents’ complaints about scavengers, but also safeguards the city’s $3-million-a-year share of residents’ recyclables.

City Councilwoman Doris Topsy-Elvord, whose district includes the PCH facility, said she will continue to work with residents on the problem, but she doubts it will ever be totally resolved.

“We don’t like people taking out of our trash cans,” she said. But, she added, scavenging “is darn near impossible to eradicate.”