Gov. Brown Should Dump the Dump
Gov. Jerry Brown needs to sign SB 833. With 70-1 and 32-3 votes, it has overwhelming bipartisan legislative support. It will stop landfills from being sited on rivers, poisoning our precious water resources. It will dump the Gregory Canyon dump.
Siting a dump on a river was borne of a brainstorm by a speculator with a purchase option and transformed into the only site in the entirety of San Diego County pre-zoned as a landfill by a clever developer. It was done by voter trickery using the initiative process with a slick million-dollar brochure mailing by the trash dump developer, already rejected three times by expert consultant studies for this same site.
Voters received a fake picture of Charger Stadium overflowing with garbage, reckless hyperbole implying we desperately needed a new dump. The coup d'etat was a powerful San Diego Union-Tribune editorial endorsing the ballot box spot zone scam.
Gullible voters who never like NIMBY's bought this hook, line and sinker. No voters had heard of Gregory Canyon. No one cared. It wasn't in their backyard. The developer, the late Richard Chase of ignominious "Trash Incinerator Plant" fame, used a countywide ballot initiative to rezone the canyon as a landfill site, negating the county's general plan and zoning, stripping and usurping the land-use power of our elected public officials. Political leadership was weak. The Board of Supervisors acted like deer caught in headlights.
In the 1980s and '90s, the county paid for three separate studies of more than 100 dump sites. Every study rejected Gregory Canyon as one of the worst of 100 dump sites. The dumpsite sits on the banks of the river and is atop a vital aquifer on a bed of fractured rock.
Notwithstanding source separation, toxic waste like pesticides, solvents, paint, chemicals, lead batteries, mercury thermometers, light bulbs, electronic products, medical waste and myriad toxic compounds slip into the wastestream illegally on a daily basis on every truckload waved through the gate going to the landfill. It is not practicable to screen it out. The toxic waste breaks down over time, especially with compaction, and mixes with the rainfall pouring into the canyon, flows through rips in the plastic liner, past the corroded and crushed leachate collection systems and then through the fractured granite base into the aquifer and downstream.
The San Luis Rey River aquifers (five of them) supply agriculture and 200,000 North County residents precious water.
Nobody but a damned fool puts a toxic dump atop a precious water resource.
If we needed a new dump in the 1980s, we don't need one now.
Recycling, new compaction methods, and expanded dump capacity has eliminated any need. In 1996, California permitted two new mega-landfill sites in the desert, each with capacity for all six Southern California counties solid waste for the next 100 years.
Tell Gov. Brown to sign SB 833.
