LUMBERYARD LOGS: City seeks answers

Those “hard-to-service” Lagunans who haven’t been getting recycling pickup service from Waste Management for a year or so now have someone in their corner.

City officials are demanding answers from the giant waste hauler as to why nearly 300 residences can’t be provided with recycling hauling in addition to their regular trash service.

The city’s head of public works, Steve May, wrote a pointed letter to David Ross, senior district manger of Waste Management of Orange County in January requesting a formal written response from the firm about why recycling can’t be picked up on Point Place in South Laguna.

John Arnold, a Point Place resident, has been writing letters to the editor and generally not letting the issue die down, after noticing last year that his carefully separated recycling items were being thrown in the trash by the garbage men.

Waste Management’s solution at that time was to remove the recycling bins from the street, so at least people weren’t going to the trouble of separating discards only to have them trashed.

The waste hauler had just negotiated a five-year contract to pick up Laguna’s trash and to provide recycling service at the same time. But some streets in Laguna are so difficult — dangerous, really — to service that recycling was considered optional. To reduce the chances of accidents, Waste Management decided to limit the service to 280 households on these streets to one garbage-only pickup. City officials agreed to this plan and a list of non-recycling addresses was drawn up.

Folks on these “hard-to-service” streets would have to lug recycling themselves or forget about it. But then Waste Management continued to deliver recycling bins to most of these streets and never told people they were wasting their efforts by pitching into them, because these bins were being emptied into the trash instead of carried away separately.

When Arnold began crying foul this deceptive practice stopped, but now that the jig is up, we can only surmise that residents of these “hard-to-service” areas are now questioning why recycling isn’t being offered to them in this very “green” city.

In his formal written response, Ross at Waste Management says Laguna Beach is such a problem area that, before the hard-to-service street list was devised, the city — with its precipitous and winding roads — accounted for about half of the company’s accidents. Now that some roads are limited to one garbage pickup, the city’s safety record has improved by 700%, Ross said.

Upping the ante, city officials are apparently considering the possibility that Waste Management is in violation of its contract by not providing recycling services to the entire city, which could open up a whole can of wormy garbage.

Waste Management insists its contract allows it to curtail the service when deemed necessary, so some head-to-head combat over recycling and safety appears to be looming.

For his part, Arnold isn’t terribly optimistic that he’ll ever get recycling service back on his tiny, beach-adjacent street.

But he certainly has gotten the city’s — and Waste Management’s — attention.

Bye-bye Bistro

The restaurant business in Laguna Beach just keeps spiraling — down.

The abrupt closure of Rick’s Partners Bistro after more than 30 years is a sad shock to many. The cozy French restaurant on South Coast Highway at the atmospheric Peppertree Lane was a fixture for a generation. Now it’s shuttered, a casualty of some kind of dispute among shareholders, we’re told.

Chef Rick Sadlier himself hadn’t been at the restaurant since November, his attorney Tim Carlyle tells me.

Apparently Rick had the magic touch to keep the restaurant going; the establishment had originally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, seeking to reorganize and stay in business, but has ended up in Chapter 7 bankruptcy, liquidation, which is where the restaurant is now.

Rick’s joins a lengthening list of eateries that have folded up their tents and left the city. Javier’s is only a mile or so away in Crystal Cove, but is still sorely missed.

The Cabana has closed for remodeling and will reopen in another format, we’re told.

Robilio’s Ristorante has become Nirvana on Broadway and Beach Street.

Right now, it’s a demolition derby here in the Lumberyard Mall, where Cedar Creek closed up shop over Easter weekend, and the new lessees are hard at work to redo the interior of the place.

I was fortunate enough to have had a nice lunch at Partners not too long ago, with Rick at the helm, and would never have dreamed the place would be history just a few months later.

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at cindy.frazier@latimes.com.