Landfill proposal met with skepticism

The plans of Sonoma County to dump its 400-acre landfill by leasing its trash-mashing operations to a private company encountered considerable skepticism during a public forum Monday.

Although the 3-hour session was billed as informational, many in the 100-person audience and among the dozen panelists indicated opposition.

Panelist Michael Allen, district representative to state Sen. Pat Wiggins, compared privatization of landfill operations to the 1990s debate over leasing Community Hospital to Sutter Health. "When you take something from the public sector and move it over to the private, it can create disaster," he said.

Allen, who was a labor union leader at the time of the hospital debate, said he and Wiggins, D-Santa Rosa, "believe the waste stream has great economic value" and "the evidence shows that privatization is not the best course of action."

However, county Public Works Director Phil Demery, one of the few panelists supporting private contracting, said, "this is the only way we can get an in-county landfill."

He suggested that if environmental interests truly want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions currently created by 65 trash-truck trips daily to dumps outside Sonoma County, they'd do better to pressure city governments to send their trash to the landfill reopened under private contract.

The landfill on Mecham Road was closed to commercial trash haulers in 2005 after the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board determined there was evidence of contaminants seeping into areas outside of two sectors of the dump.

Demery said consultants for the county estimate cleanup costs at $70 million, but critics say those estimates are grossly inflated. They contend the county can reopen the landfill and turn a profit by installing windmills and methane gas production facilities at the Mecham Road site.

Several times, Demery clashed with panelists such as Alan Strachan, a developer whose business partner Dennis Hunter is co-owner of North Bay Corporation, the waste hauler that stands to suffer if a different private company controls the landfill.

Strachan advocated establishment of a Materials Recovery Facility that he claimed would process 90 percent of all trash. Under private control, landfill operators would be motivated by profit generated by trash collection tipping fees, he said.

"If it is private, then the pressure will be to bury and not to recycle," Strachan said.

Demery, however, said that, with nearly 65 percent of trash collections now being directed to reuse and recycling, "we are only going to be able to get another 5 percent out of the trash can." He said that reuse of the remaining 30 percent would require installation of expensive technology that hasn't proven successful elsewhere.

"This is not about recycling," Demery said. "It is about what to do with the contents of the rest of the trash can."

Exactly what Sonoma County plans to do about reopening the landfill remains the subject of closed-door negotiations between county officials and large private waste developers interested in securing the business. Demery said county administrators expect to be able to unveil details, such as the impact on homeowners' trash collection rates, to county supervisors in June.

At that point, county supervisors will hold public hearings that should provide more specifics than did Monday's public policy debate.

You can reach Staff Writer Bleys W. Rose at 521-5431 or bleys.rose@pressdemocrat.com.