Desert Landfill Plans in the Dumps

Back in the 1980s, when futurists issued dire predictions that Southern California was quickly running out of space for its garbage, eyes turned to the sprawling desert.

Way out there, near nobody’s backyard, was enough empty land to bury all of the region’s trash well beyond our lifetimes, delivered efficiently by train.

Today, after years of planning, bureaucratic hurdles and lawsuits, a onetime gold-mining company in Imperial County is aggressively seeking garbage for its mega-landfill. Another company, in Riverside County, hopes to receive final state permission by year’s end to fill an old open-pit iron-ore mine with trash.

But now both may have to wait years before any trash trains come churning their way.

The long-dreaded trash disposal crisis hasn’t materialized. Stringent recycling laws are cutting down the amount of garbage in the waste stream by 25% to 50% in some communities. Manufacturers are getting better at reusing material.

The economic recession of the early 1990s dramatically reduced the amount of rubbish from demolition and new construction. And when Orange County filed for bankruptcy in 1994, it opened its landfills to anyone who would pay to use them, helping refill the county’s drained coffers.

The question these days is, when will the trash-disposal crisis arrive?

There is enough landfill capacity in Los Angeles County to last another five years or more, officials predict. Ventura County figures it can go 17 years before its two landfills reach capacity. And Orange County says it can take all the trash people want to give it at least for another 15 years.

None of this is good news for the two companies that have invested tens of millions on the premise that if they built the dumps, the trash would come.

Closest to reality is the Mesquite Regional Landfill, which is ready to open alongside an open-pit gold mine near Glamis, a desert hamlet near Brawley in Imperial County that is popular among off-road enthusiasts.

The company has already sunk more than $25 million into the project and will need to spend an equivalent amount to actually build the facility, said Robert T. Filler, Mesquite’s general manager. But it won’t proceed until it wins commitments from trash lords in Los Angeles County to send garbage its way.

“As soon as we get sufficient customers, we can be ready within a year,” said Filler, a gold mining engineer who now finds himself trolling for trash. “We’ll hold out as long as it takes because, eventually, landfill capacity [in urban areas] will run out.”

A similar situation afflicts the proposed Eagle Mountain landfill, the reincarnation of the old open-air Kaiser Steel iron-ore mine halfway between Riverside and Blythe.

As far back as 1982, when Kaiser saw the end of its mining days, talk turned to filling the gargantuan pit with trash, and Mine Reclamation Corp. drew up plans to develop the landfill.

In 1989, city officials in the San Gabriel Valley--which found itself as a landfill capital, taking more trash than it was generating--and the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, which operates the huge Puente Hills landfill, embraced the concept that one day trash would have to be put onto trains and taken far, far away because of the difficulty of expanding existing landfills and the political folly of building new ones.

The idea of putting trash on rails is not foreign to the region; for three decades starting in the 1920s, organic waste from much of Los Angeles County was hauled on large gondola railroad cars to hog farms in the eastern parts of the county.

Great Interest 10 Years Ago

Saying it was time to reinvent the rail, officials 10 years ago sought proposals for massive desert landfills that would receive urban trash by train. They showed keen interest in plans by two companies--Mine Reclamation at Eagle Mountain and Rail-Cycle, a partnership between Waste Management Inc. and the Santa Fe Railroad, to build a 400-foot-high landfill between Barstow and Needles.

But Rail-Cycle has dropped out of the running.

Wary of their county being a dumping ground of Los Angeles County trash, San Bernardino County voters rejected the Rail-Cycle landfill in 1996.

At Eagle Mountain, promoters won initial Riverside County Board of Supervisors approval in 1990 and have never needed approval directly from voters.

However, their plans were sidetracked for years by environmental lawsuits that questioned, among other things, the impact the facility would have on the adjoining Joshua Tree National Park and the habitat of the protected desert tortoise.

For those reasons and others, a Superior Court judge twice rejected Mine Reclamation’s environmental impact report, saying the landfill’s impacts could not be mitigated.

Last month, a state appellate court overruled the judge’s decision, saying that Riverside County officials, their eyes open to the benefits and liabilities of the project, were free to bless it, the judge’s misgivings notwithstanding. The case is being appealed to the state Supreme Court, but most say the chances of it being heard are slim.

Now Mine Reclamation is trying to make up for lost time--and has not lost any business in the meantime because the anticipated trash crisis of the early ‘90s never materialized.

Final Approvals Are Still Needed

“At the time, there was a screaming need for landfills, but the consequences of the delay [in a crisis] were perhaps fortunate for us, because it’s taken us much longer than anyone thought to get the permits,” said Rick Daniels, who started the country’s first trash-train landfill operation in Oregon in 1988 and now heads the Mine Reclamation project.

The landfill still needs final approvals from the Regional Water Quality Control Board--which previously has approved it--and the state Integrated Waste Management Board in Sacramento, but has won all other state and federal permits. So far, $60 million has been spent developing the plans for the Mine Reclamation site--and paying for lawyers--and another $50 million will be spent constructing the landfill, Daniels said.

The challenge to both Mesquite and Mine Reclamation--assuming it is allowed to open--is to line up customers, and the sooner the better.

Each landfill, when fully operational, would be able to accommodate up to 20,000 tons of garbage a day--transported in closed containers aboard five trains, each about a mile long. (After recycling and other diversion efforts, Los Angeles County still must dispose of about 40,000 tons a day; from Santa Barbara to San Diego, about 70,000 tons of garbage are placed in landfills every day.)

Both desert landfill operators say they hope to begin slowly but as soon as possible, before everyone’s back is to the wall.

Potential customers include public and private garbage collectors who select from various public and commercial landfills, depending on location, price and which facility has reached its daily limit. Indeed, on any given day, trash from Beverly Hills can end up in Orange County--where the dumping fee for imported trash is less than for the county’s own garbage. Orange County rubbish, meanwhile, may be taken to landfills in Riverside or Los Angeles counties.

The brass ring sought by both Mesquite and Mine Reclamation is the trash controlled by the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, the king of the hill when it comes to garbage heaps.

Plan for Sorting Facility

The agency, encompassing 80 cities but not the city of Los Angeles, still embraces the eventual need for trash trains.

Today, those officials will seek Los Angeles County supervisors’ permission to construct a $60-million facility at the Puente Hills landfill, where much of the region’s trash will be sorted, some for recycling and the balance to be loaded onto trains.

That project was first proposed in 1991 and, not unlike the desert landfills, was sidetracked by lawsuits. It has cleared those legal hurdles and, financed through trash collection bills, may be operational in two years.

But that isn’t to say that trash trains will be running to the desert in two years. That decision is still to be made by the directors of the sanitation districts, who will weigh the advantages--and increased expense of a dollar or two per month to residential customers--of exporting trash against the arguments of using local landfills until they are filled.

“The overlaying public policy question is whether it’s good to have garbage trucks running willy-nilly around Southern California, causing congestion and air pollution, just because there still are landfills here,” said Steven B. Frates, a senior fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College. “Or is it better to take it to transfer stations where the trash can be put on trains?”

Financial Backers Facing Frustration

It’s the wait for that decision that weighs heavily on the financial backers of the Mesquite and Mine Reclamation landfills, and they are frustrated that the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts is not rushing into it.

Earlier this month, Stephen Maguin, head of the districts’ solid waste management department, told those backers at a regional conference that he is more concerned about determining the expansion possibilities of local landfills than hastily committing to trash trains. “There is not a rush,” he said.

Later that day, another conference speaker--whose company wants to provide the containers for the trash trains--told colleagues with a tinge of resignation: “We’ve been told, by the man who has the trash, to come back in four or five years. That’s pretty discouraging.”

Maguin said in an interview that there is no doubt that, eventually, trains will haul the region’s trash to the desert, much the same as how, today, Sacramento sends much of its garbage to Reno by train though it has local landfill capacity.

“It’s a matter of when, not if,” he said. “But this isn’t something you hurry up to do. The public policy issue isn’t to do it sooner than we need to, but to safeguard the public by making sure we have the railroad-haul capacity when we need it.”

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Mining for Trash

Because of concern that Southern California would run out of landfill space, two companies developed plans for desert landfills, in Riverside and Imperial counties. But the crisis has not materialized, so the landfill operators are aggressively seeking garbage customers in order to open anyway.