Toland Landfill OKd for West County Trash

The Toland Road Landfill in the rural Santa Clara Valley will be transformed from a small regional dump into the main recipient of western Ventura County trash, the Board of Supervisors decided Wednesday in a 3-2 vote.

“I think we need to take care of our own waste in the county,” said Supervisor John Flynn, who along with board members Frank Schillo and Susan K. Lacey provided the votes needed to approve the expansion.

“We generate the waste, we should take care of the waste. . . . If [the landfill] is not necessary it’s going to die, it’s going to die a natural death,” Flynn said.

Supervisors Judy Mikels and Maggie Kildee, whose district includes the Santa Clara Valley, voted against the project, saying a trash crisis is nonexistent.

The vote comes barely three months before Bailard Landfill in Oxnard, the west county’s current dumping site, is set to close and two months after voters rejected a plan to put a garbage dump at Weldon Canyon between Ventura and Ojai.

Unless pending litigation stalls the plan, more than 100 garbage trucks a day will start trundling down California 126 en route to the dump, midway between Santa Paula and Fillmore. The trucks could begin the trips as soon as August. The dumping is scheduled to continue until May 31, 2027.

During more than nine hours of testimony over two days, opponents portrayed the issue as one that pitted the county’s rapidly diminishing farmland against encroaching urbanization. Kildee reiterated that theme just before the deciding vote.

“We need to begin to take agriculture very seriously, and we’re getting very close to the edge of saying we don’t want to be an agricultural county,” she said. “We need to begin making some decisions about agriculture in Ventura County and I think the way we vote today is going to say a great deal about what we feel.”

But the board majority agreed with the Ventura Regional Sanitation District’s argument that Toland represents the most environmentally benign and economical method of trash disposal.

Despite the county Planning Commission’s rejection of the plan earlier this month, county staff members had recommended approval, noting Toland was one of those “rare projects” that was more environmentally friendly than alternative methods, such as trucking trash across the county to the privately owned Simi Valley Landfill. Fees for dumping at Toland landfill are expected to be more than $10 a ton cheaper than Bailard Landfill.

Those bidding to derail the project among the capacity crowd of more than 130 people were subdued after the vote, with several saying they were not surprised by the outcome.

“You don’t take on government and expect to win,” said Gordon Kimball, an avocado grower and co-chairman of Ventura County Citizens to Stop Toland Landfill.

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He said the group had expected Lacey to be the swing vote all along.

“It was a political decision,” Kimball said. “How could she oppose Weldon [Canyon] and support this?”

Weldon Canyon is in Lacey’s district, but the issue never came before a vote of the board. Voters rejected the idea at the polls in March after a decade of wrangling, but Waste Management Inc., the operator of the Simi landfill, still retains a lease on the property.

Lacey said she reached her decision only after listening to the more than 50 speakers. The deciding factor in her vote, she said, was that nearby growers had not encountered problems with the present landfill, which accepts about 130 tons of garbage daily. Lacey said she saw no evidence that dust would harm agriculture or that ground water might be contaminated when 1,500 tons of trash are trucked to the landfill every day.

“I couldn’t find a dust issue up there,” she said. “I couldn’t find a water issue that’s going to be worsened up there. I couldn’t find them.”

Still, opponents of the landfill took the view Wednesday that the decision by the board is merely Round 3 in a longer bureaucratic battle. The sanitation district’s board had previously approved Toland, but the Planning Commission rejected it. The board’s action Wednesday overturned the commission’s advisory vote.

The district also expects to receive permits from the Regional Water Quality Control Board in June and the California Integrated Waste Management Board in July, said Mark Zirbel, the sanitation district’s lawyer.

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But opponents of the landfill cited three lawsuits challenging the adequacy of the environmental document prepared for Toland that are still pending as yet another chance to block the plan.

A hearing date for the three lawsuits--filed by a group of 13 companies and growers in the region, the Santa Clara School District and the cities of Fillmore and Santa Paula--could be set within 30 to 45 days, said Rob Sawyer, an attorney representing the citizens’ group opposing the Toland Road Landfill.

A request for an injunction preventing the sanitation district from opening the Toland dump until the legal cases are settled will also be filed, Sawyer said.

The three lawsuits essentially charge that the environmental document the district prepared “glossed over” such issues as water quality, geology and traffic, Sawyer said.

“In essence, you have a board . . . that has really voted on misinformation,” he said.

Supervisors attached a package of operating conditions to the landfill’s operation, including a ban on importation of trash from outside the county, except for garbage from Carpinteria that already comes to the county.

Also, the sanitation district will be required to double the depth of the clay landfill liner to alleviate farmers’ concerns over ground-water contamination, improve ground-water monitoring and landfill landscaping, and provide the nearby Santa Clara School District with road improvements and a school bus if requested.

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Meanwhile, the district hailed the board’s vote as the end of a long search for an answer to the region’s trash problems.

“For the last 20 years this county has been working to find a long-term solution to solid waste disposal in western Ventura County,” Zirbel said. “All the landfills that have been operating have all been short term. We have never had a long-term solution. Today the board made a very significant decision that provides that long-term solution.”

But opponents saw the vote differently. Santa Clara Valley residents say when Toland opened in the 1960s, the county assured them it would never be anything more than a regional dump.

“It’s one more time I believe we’re chipping away not only at agriculture . . . we’re chipping away at the confidence level of the electorate,” Mikels said. “It’s no wonder we have a lack of credibility.”