North County Landfill Critics Urge Supervisors to Reconsider Rejected Site

Opponents of three proposed trash landfill sites in North County are mounting an eleventh-hour campaign intended to show that a better site was overlooked by the county staff.

The critics say they have commissioned an independent engineering report showing that a site just north of Escondido would work far better as a landfill because it is much bigger than the ones being considered in Fallbrook, Pala and Warner Springs.

The study will show that the Merriam Mountain site--actually two sites, one north of Deer Springs Road and the other along the west side of Interstate 15--can handle as much garbage as the Fallbrook and Pala sites combined, according to Jack Wireman, a member of the Fallbrook Community Planning Group.

He and others say they hope the results of the study, by a Riverside County engineering firm, will be delivered to county supervisors Monday. On Tuesday, the board is scheduled to decide which of the current landfill-site candidates should be adopted.

“It’s never too late to prevent an environmental disaster from happening, and to prevent the staff from stampeding the supervisors into a bad decision,” Wireman said.

Officials in the county’s Department of Public Works say they already know the sites that make up Merriam Mountain have a tremendous garbage capacity, but that they were rejected from consideration as landfills because of reasons other than trash capacity.

Giving critics a breath of hope was a request by Supervisor Brian Bilbray two weeks ago to have the staff give him more information on the Merriam Mountain site because of constant references to it by the critics of the other three sites.

Those critics say the county vastly underestimated the garbage capacity of the Merriam Mountain site.

The larger of the two sites is directly across the freeway from the Lawrence Welk Resort and its Champagne Village mobile home park, where nearly 1,000 people live. Residents of the park complain that they would not only look directly into the bowels of the garbage dump, but would smell it and be inundated by its dirt, since they live directly downwind.

The second site is just to the south of the Welk site and just north of the Golden Door spa on Deer Springs Road.

The Golden Door, the Lawrence Welk Resort and the mobile home park, as well as other homeowners in the region, already have hired a consultant.

“I feel like we’re fighting a phantom because the Merriam Mountain site is not an official proposal,” said Ray York, representing Welk, the Golden Door and area homeowners. “It’s hard for us to realistically and factually present arguments opposed to something that is not even officially proposed yet. Yet, (the other landfill critics) keep hammering away at the benefits of these (Merriam Mountain) sites.”

A preliminary study commissioned by the county indicated that the site opposite the Lawrence Welk Resort had a capacity of about 20 million cubic yards, and that the site to the south could handle about 23 million cubic yards.

Since the county’s original screening process called for sites with capacities of at least 30 million cubic yards, those two sites were considered too small.

A follow-up study by a different county consultant, however, found the Welk site capable of handling 92 million cubic yards of garbage, and the site closer to the Golden Door being able to handle 76 million cubic yards.

The difference was a result of the second study identifying a higher ridge line in which to contain the trash, dramatically increasing the landfill’s capacity.

The private engineering study will essentially confirm the second county study, Wireman said.

But Kathy Lehtola of the county public works department said that, even if those figures are correct, the site doesn’t deserve to be under consideration because of other shortcomings.

The Merriam Mountain site was rejected because of access problems and the proximity of neighbors and, in the case of the Welk site, the lack of earth to cover the trash as it is dumped, she said.

But opponents say the site is no more likely to bother nearby residents than are the ones in Fallbrook and Pala, and that among its benefits are its proximity to the communities that generate most of the garbage, its location alongside the freeway, and that it doesn’t jeopardize ground water, a possible problem at the other sites.