Landowners Are Boxed In by Recycler’s Failed Experiment

To hear Roger and Carol Anderson tell it, they’ve been left holding the box.

Thousands of soggy, decaying plastic-lined boxes, actually--all chopped up and spread 6 feet high over nearly an acre of property they own in Santa Paula.

They are the victims, they say, of an entrepreneurial tenant whose plan to turn an Oxnard paper-recycling firm’s discards into construction materials went bust.

The tenant, Howard Eichen of Santa Paula, declared bankruptcy when his landlords evicted him last month after months of attempts to get him to clean up the mess.

Now, facing $1,000-a-day fines from the city if the property and its estimated 12,000 cubic yards of muck are not cleaned up by Dec. 14, the Andersons have been left, well, holding the boxes.

The Andersons, both 63, have been forced to put their retirement plans on hold.

Unable to leverage a loan on industrial land that they could never sell in such a slovenly state, the Andersons have placed their Santa Barbara home of 15 years up for sale in hopes of raising the $70,000 to $100,000 they estimate it will cost to clean up the property.

“This is really a merry Christmas,” Carol Anderson said bitterly.

Reached at his Santa Paula home, Eichen said the market he found for the “fiber-cement” products he was producing dried up and forced him to go belly up.

“There is nothing I can do,” he said. “The Andersons know how hard I tried. I just came to the end of my ability to do anything. I’m sorry to leave them with it, but what else can I say?”

According to court records, Eichen declared bankruptcy Nov. 11, less than two weeks after the Andersons evicted him following months of attempts to get the land cleaned up.

The couple had used the property throughout the 1980s to manufacture oil drilling equipment. When the oil industry took a downturn, so did their company.

In March 1995, Roger Anderson signed a two-year lease with Eichen to run what he understood to be an experiment in turning a recycling firm’s discards into roofing materials, wallboard and other construction materials.

But by August of that year, the Andersons began fielding complaints about a daily parade of Oxnard city garbage trucks rumbling into the North 13th Street site, just a block off Santa Paula’s historic Main Street.

A month later, the Andersons received a copy of a notice of violation that was sent to Eichen stating that he was not properly storing the huge piles of chopped materials. The Oxnard paper recycler, Willamette Industries, stopped shipments in mid-September, but the piles remained.

By last winter, the city was complaining about a stream of orange water running off the property and down Main Street. Fortunately, the Andersons said, the runoff was not found to be toxic.

The Andersons said that each time they threatened to evict Eichen if he did not clear the trash, Eichen threatened to file for bankruptcy and leave the trash behind.

So the couple said they worked with city officials to pressure Eichen into clearing the land.

Beginning in July, they said, Eichen hauled off 93 dumpsters full of the chopped up boxes to the Toland Road Landfill near Santa Paula.

But by mid-September, he stopped. And by the first of October, the city had had enough.

Following an administrative hearing Oct. 29, the city laid the burden on the Andersons.

It was a move the couple said they understand, considering that much of the paper-plastic mix of trash sits dangerously close to an oil pipeline that runs along the nearby railroad tracks.

Where the couple is placing blame is with the city of Oxnard, which hauled the trash to their property, and Willamette Industries, which struck the deal with Eichen.

The Andersons offered to pay the cost of loading the piles into dumpsters if the company would pay the landfill dumping fees and the city of Oxnard would haul it off.

The company, they contend, has not answered their phone calls, and city officials, who say Eichen still owes the city $30,000 in past-due bills, have refused.

“It’s something that went bust for [Eichen] and it’s something that’s between him and the owner of the property,” said Ruben Mesa, Oxnard’s solid waste superintendent. “He really did a number on everybody. I think he burned everybody in sight.”

Michael A. Hage, manager of the Willamette plant near Oxnard’s Ormond Beach, said the company has no legal responsibility to help the Andersons but said the company is still digesting the Andersons’ plight.

“We’ve been duped, the city of Oxnard has been duped and it looks like the Andersons have been duped, and that’s the sad reality of it,” Hage said. “I would have thought this thing would have been settled a long time ago. [The Andersons] kind of sat on their hands for a while.”

Hage said that about two years ago, Eichen had worked for weeks before finally persuading company officials that he could make something out of Willamette’s discards--cardboard boxes sent by supermarkets from across the Southwest that were laced with Styrofoam, plastic liners and other materials that made them impossible to recycle.

The company agreed to pay Eichen to take the material. He said he did not know how much Eichen was paid, but it was equivalent to what it would have cost the company to dump the material into the landfill. The company did not save any money, he said.

After about a month, Hage and other Willamette officials visited Eichen’s operation to see how business was going. He saw that piles and piles of the material had been allowed to stack up.

“We saw this stuff around, and we said, ‘What are you doing with this, Howard?’ He said, ‘I’m going to use it,’ ” Hage said. “I cut him off. I don’t think it’s right for anyone to go ahead and just pile this stuff up on someone else’s property.”

On that much, at least, the Andersons and Willamette agree.

But in the meantime, the couple is faced with trying to rid the property of the trash by the Dec. 14 deadline, which they say is an impossible task given dumping limits at the Toland Road Landfill near Santa Paula.

An attorney by trade, Carol Anderson said the couple’s only other recourse is to sue the city of Oxnard and Willamette.

“That seems like fun,” she said sarcastically. “That’s what everyone wants to spend the next two years doing. But we might if they won’t accept the responsibility to help us.”