Council Vote Tonight on Trash-to-Energy Plant in San Marcos

Debate over the health risks of the proposed trash-burning energy plant in San Marcos continued at cross-town press conferences Monday with the project’s developer saying its plant is safer than a landfill and a consultant to two coastal cities saying the plant may be far more dangerous than previously stated.

The ongoing battle over the pros and cons of the $217-million plant will spill over into tonight’s meeting of the San Marcos City Council, which is scheduled to vote on whether the plant should be built alongside the county’s existing garbage dump on Questhaven Road.

If the City Council approves the plant, the issue will be put to a citywide vote on Sept. 15.

Neighboring Cities

Encinitas Mayor Marjorie F. Gaines and Carlsbad Mayor Pro Tem Ann Kulchin, at a joint press conference, said they would favor their cities suing to block construction of the plant if health concerns are not satisfied. Encinitas has already hired Del Mar attorney Dwight Worden, who has sent a 10-page letter to San Marcos outlining Encinitas’ position.

Gaines and Kulchin called on San Marcos to delay its decision for three to four months so further health studies can be made.

“We feel there is a substantial question about health risk,” Gaines said.

Leland Attaway, a consulting health risk assessor hired jointly by the cities of Carlsbad and Encinitas, reported Monday that the developer’s health risk assessment of the trash plant severely understated the risks because it failed to take into account several sources of toxic emissions, including roof vents, the cooling tower and the resulting ash from the incineration of garbage.

Furthermore, the possibility of a person dying of cancer because of his proximity to the plant may be 10 to 1,000 times greater than stated by the developer, who put that risk at 1 in 10 million, the Attaway report said.

Attaway, a former top-level official with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, heads a San Rafael-based firm which has analyzed health risks associated with trash-to-energy plants in Irwindale and Azusa in Southern California, San Mateo, and Philadelphia.

The developer, North County Resource Recovery Associates, developed an inaccurate health risk assessment because of a faulty approach in analyzing the plant’s emissions, Attaway said in his report. Additionally, Attaway said, there were too many unanswered questions and possibly faulty assumptions in the health risk assessment to expect San Marcos city officials to make an enlightened decision on the plant’s safety.

Because of that conclusion, officials from both cities called Monday for the San Marcos City Council to further study and evaluate the plant’s risks before approving the project.

But Richard Chase, managing director of North County Resource Recovery Associates, countered Monday that Attaway’s report was based on misstatements of fact and that his findings were so skewered as to be incredible.

He argued that the plant’s previously updated health risk assessment did not, for instance, consider dioxin emissions from the cooling tower, ash and roof vents because the various state public health officials, in issuing permits for the plant, have already found that those would not be sources of emissions.

“Either he didn’t read those permits or he did but disregarded them and misstated the facts,” Chase said.

On Monday, Chase released his newest consultant’s report that stated that the emission of dangerous toxins from a landfill, even assuming that 80% of the gases were recovered, would still be 5.7 to 47 times greater than the emissions expected from the trash-to-energy plant.

“This analysis tells a prudent person that he’s far better off with this project than with a landfill, from a health point of view,” Chase said.

The project’s health risk assessment is still being reviewed by the state Department of Health Services and the Air Pollution Control District. Among the options to be considered by the San Marcos City Council tonight are approval of the project contingent upon it passing muster with state agencies, or a delay until the other reviews are completed.

The San Marcos City Council previously approved building the plant, but that decision was voided when a state appellate court ruled that the city erred in not first completing an environmental impact report on a general plant amendment leading the way to the plant’s construction.

Kulchin, the Carlsbad mayor pro tem, said she was particularly alarmed by Attaway’s conclusion that plant proponents did not adequately study the danger posed to nursing mothers by dioxins and furans, both known to cause cancer and likely to be emitted by the plant.

“Ingestion by nursing infants of mothers’ milk contaminated by dioxins and furans may cause health risks to such infants much greater than the general population,” said Attaway’s report. “This is because the immune system in infants is poorly developed.”

Kulchin noted that her daughter has a 14-month-old child and is pregnant.

“I thought, my God, this could hurt someone very near and dear to me,” Kulchin said. “This is a health decision, it’s not a political decision.”

Times staff writer Anthony Perry contributed to this story.