San Marcos Officials Lash Out at Foes of Trash Plant

Armed with a weighty packet of comparisons and a few barbed insults, two San Marcos city officials on Friday took issue with opponents of a proposed North County trash-to-energy plant.

The proposed $325-million trash-burning plant and recycling center is a private-public venture that would handle about half of North County’s waste by 1996.

The energy-generating plant is touted by proponents as environmentally safe and financially feasible.

But to its opponents, it is viewed as a money-eating, pollution-spouting boondoggle. Among the critics is Carlsbad activist Tom Erwin.

His analysis of the plant’s costs, though, were blasted Friday by facility supporters, who called Erwin’s work “flawed” and “bogus,” and questioned his motives.

San Marcos City Councilman Mike Preston and Syd Notkin, a city planning commissioner, said Erwin and attorney Dwight Worden had falsified the financial picture of the proposed plant in their analysis, “Why Every City Should Be Against the Trash Plant” because of their personal interests in defeating the plant.

Erwin, a Carlsbad planning commissioner, “owns property close to the landfill” and Worden “has been paid over $250,000 in taxpayer dollars by the city of Encinitas to fight the waste-to-energy plant,” Preston said.

Following the press conference, Erwin said the proponents “resorted to personal attacks to cloud the issue because they have no basis to attack our figures.” He said he owns two homes, one of which is his residence, located more than 2 miles from the San Marcos site of the proposed trash-burning facility.

Preston said that Encinitas, Oceanside and other cities “have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the plant,” calling their opposition statements “completely bogus, done with smoke and mirrors.”

The San Marcos councilman blamed the opposition cities’ lawsuits and tactics for delaying the project for a decade, and for increasing the estimated construction costs from $120 million to $325 million.

The plant’s proponents contested Erwin’s claim that the costs of the facility would be too high for the amount of trash it will handle, estimating that power sales to San Diego Gas & Electric from the trash-burning plant would lower the costs to county residents.

The proponents estimated that the plant would increase the average utility customer’s bill by 11 cents a month, or increase the average household’s trash bill by 60 cents a month.

The plant, which would be built on a 16-acre site adjacent to the county’s landfill in San Marcos, would be paid for in part by increased dump fees countywide and by an increase in utility rates for all SDG&E; customers.

Erwin contends that the SDG&E; customers will subsidize the plant by paying $407 million for electricity during the 24-year term of the contract the utility signed with Boston-based Thermo-Electron, the county’s private partner.

Larry O’Donnell, consultant to the proponents group, Citizens for the San Marcos Solution, said the subsidy that Erwin cites is only an illusion because it does not take into account the costs to ratepayers if new power plants had to be constructed to provide power for the area.

He called the power purchase agreement “an insurance policy for the consumer” because it guarantees that electricity rates for the trash-plant power will not increase over the 24-year life of the contract.

Erwin, who was silenced by Preston during the proponents’ news conference, said San Marcos is the only city that has pledged to support the plant. He said several cities have pledged to boycott the facility and band together to find other solutions for their trash disposal problems.

“The only city that supports the project is the city of San Marcos, which believes it will receive over $100 million dollars in revenue during the life of the project,” Erwin said.

Officials of five North County cities are meeting with county Supervisor John MacDonald, seeking to form a joint powers authority that would resolve the area’s critical trash disposal needs by other methods.