Foes to Urge Demise of Proposed Landfill : Trash: Supervisors will consider a request by the dump’s operators to delay hearings on the project. Planners want firm to provide a comprehensive plan for county garbage disposal.

Anticipating defeat of the proposed Weldon Canyon Landfill, opponents of the controversial project plan to pack the Board of Supervisors meeting this afternoon and urge its speedy demise.

Board members, most of whom have said they oppose the dump, today will consider a request by the operators of the landfill to delay hearings on the project.

“It would be foolish for us to assume that this project is definitely going to be killed,” said Andrew Stasse, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Weldon Canyon Dump. “We’re going to have plenty of people there to remind the supervisors that we are concerned.”

But a roomful of angry landfill opponents did not stop the county’s Planning Commission last month from granting Waste Management of North America a six-month delay in hearings on the landfill. In a 3-2 vote, the commission said they wanted the company to use the delay to come up with a more comprehensive plan to dispose of the county’s garbage.

The city of Ojai and the Coalition to Stop Weldon Canyon Dump immediately appealed the delay to the Board of Supervisors, accusing Waste Management of trying to buy time to increase support for the project.

If supervisors grant the appeal today, the proposal will be sent back to the Planning Commission for consideration later this month.

Kim Bonsall, who owns the 6,500-acre canyon between Ventura and Ojai along with two siblings and her father, Shull Bonsall, said the landfill proposal has been “sabotaged by a small group” of outspoken activists.

“I’m going to be at the meeting representing all the people who support the landfill,” she said. “I think the board is smart enough to know that the opponents don’t represent the general population of Ventura County.”

A majority of the five-member board--Supervisors Maria VanderKolk, Susan K. Lacey and Maggie Kildee--has said it will grant the appeal.

“Future plans for managing the county’s waste are ongoing--they don’t depend on whether Waste Management gets this six-month delay,” Kildee said. “It is wrong to unite the two.”

“We’ve done the studies, we’ve looked at alternatives,” Lacey said of the project, which has been tangled in reports and studies since it was first proposed eight years ago. “I’m ready to proceed to a public hearing.”

Supervisor John K. Flynn, who previously was strongly in favor of the landfill, said Monday that he may change his mind and oppose the delay and the dump.

“I’m beginning to change the way I look at this whole subject,” said Flynn, who added that he is working on an alternate proposal for trash management in the county. “I think we almost have to say that a new landfill is something that we can’t have.”

Supervisor Vicky Howard said she would still support the delay and the landfill.

“We’ve worked on this for so many years, six more months is not going to hurt anything, and it may just give us some important information that we need to go ahead with this,” Howard said.

If the delay is denied, the Planning Commission could hold hearings on the landfill proposal at its July 22 meeting, county Planning Director Keith Turner said. Once the hearings are completed, the Planning Commission would make a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors for final consideration.

The board would then make a final decision on the landfill, probably sometime in August.

A staff report released last month backed the dump, trimmed to a third of its originally proposed size. But VanderKolk, Lacey and Kildee have said they would vote to reject a landfill of any size in Weldon Canyon.

Meanwhile Waste Management, bracing for defeat, sent a letter to the board asking to be included in the county’s future trash plans, with or without a dump at Weldon.

“We’re here for the long run,” said James M. Jevens, Waste Management project director. “What that means kind of boils down to whatever the final disposition is at the board meeting.”