Too-Full Dump Losing Money in Trash Shift

Touted as the answer to Ventura County’s trash-disposal problems for the next three decades, the oft-maligned Toland Road Landfill has weathered its share of legal assaults over everything from noise and traffic to suspected earthquake faults lurking below.

Now the problem is too much trash--a sad irony for an operation dependent on a steady flow of junk.

With Toland regularly hitting its limit of 1,500 tons per day throughout 1997, there is no longer enough room to handle hundreds of tons of trash generated each day in Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

Garbage from those cities and the Navy bases is now being shipped clear across the county under a new deal with the Simi Valley Landfill.

While this is good news for the Simi Valley dump, which benefits financially from the shift, it’s bad for Toland’s operator, the Ventura Regional Sanitation District. In the world of waste disposal, lost trash means lost money.

Now averaging just 1,000 tons per day with the loss of Oxnard and Port Hueneme’s trash, the landfill’s revenue projections are falling short by an estimated $50,000 each month, officials say.

Sanitation district officials are scrambling to find ways of covering the financial loss.

“It’s a sizable chunk of money,” said Bill Smith, the district’s general manager. “It’s taken half of our business and diverted it.”

Before the diversions began in early December, all trash from the Ojai Valley, Ventura, Camarillo, Oxnard, Port Hueneme and the Santa Clara Valley went to Toland, a once-tiny landfill between Fillmore and Santa Paula that has seen a tenfold increase in garbage since the 1996 closure of Bailard Landfill in Oxnard.

But the decision to funnel all of the west county’s trash to Toland proved more than the landfill could handle, officials say.

Trash from Oxnard and Port Hueneme alone averages about 1,000 tons per day, and as high as 1,400 tons during spring and summer months.

Over the past year, Toland has often hit its daily tonnage limit by noon. Landfill officials were forced to limit trash recycling and transfer stations in Oxnard and Ventura--where all trash must first go for sorting before being trucked to the landfill--to about 650 tons per day each.

That was enough to satisfy the Gold Coast Recycling and Transfer Station in Ventura, which sorts trash picked up from Ventura through the Ojai Valley.

But it left the Del Norte Regional Recycling and Transfer Station in Oxnard in a bind.

With the new limit at Toland, station managers were left with several hundred tons of trash each day that had no place to go.

“You can’t leave 400 or 500 tons on the floor every day--and, God forbid, have a fire,” said Ruben Mesa, Oxnard refuse superintendent. “This allows us to start clearing our floor.”

But it also creates problems for the sanitation district and, during its regular meeting today, the district’s governing board will begin discussing how to reconcile the financial fallout from the loss of Del Norte’s trash.

Smith said Toland’s high trash volumes this year have fattened the sanitation district’s budget to the point where the financial losses can be handled through the end of the fiscal year in June.

But next year’s spending plan is a different story.

The board will have to face an array of options to ratchet down spending.

Options include everything from reducing landfill operating hours--an option Smith favors--to the politically unsavory option of increasing dumping fees, which ultimately could raise rates for homeowners and businesses.

“If we can maintain 1,000 tons a day, we shouldn’t have to raise tonnage rates,” said sanitation district board Chairwoman Judy Lazar, a Thousand Oaks city councilwoman. “That’s our goal.”

Mesa said the Del Norte station has been sending about 600 to 700 tons of trash each day to Simi Valley since early December.

However, Del Norte continues to send 150 to 200 tons of trash each day to Toland, an amount that Mesa and sanitation district officials say will likely increase as the landscaping-heavy spring and summer months settle in.

Although the privately run Simi Valley Landfill charges transfer facilities about twice Toland’s rate of $18 a ton, Mesa said Del Norte’s private operator was able to cut a deal for a more competitive rate.

For the Simi Valley Landfill, the deal with Del Norte will go a long way toward satisfying a years-long effort to improve the dump’s financial viability.

Simi Landfill Division Manager Dan Vidal acknowledged that the landfill has tried for years to attract more trash to keep the operation financially viable, even threatening to import trash from Los Angeles County, a move that worried more than a few city officials.

“This definitely helps us,” he said.