Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Sac Bee Dan Walters: The politics of trash plays out at end of session

Dan Walters: A big trash pile means big politics

Published: Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 3A
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California's businesses, farms and 37 million residents generate 30 million tons of trash each year, and collecting and burying it is a multibillion-dollar activity.
But while we generate all that garbage and want it whisked away, we don't want its smelly, noisy and unsightly disposal anywhere near where we live.

Not surprisingly, therefore, creating enough landfill space to handle our trash is a perpetual political issue.
As the Legislature churns toward adjournment, lawmakers and lobbyists for stakeholders in the trash trade are engaged in sharp conflicts over controversial waste disposal sites. And two bills are polar opposites in thrust.

One by Sen. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, would block a local project called Gregory Canyon that has survived the permitting process and even a popular vote.

The other, by Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, would override local opposition, including a popular vote and an adverse court decision, for expansion of a Solano County disposal site called Potrero Hills.

Vargas' Senate Bill 833, backed by environmentalists and an Indian tribe, has cleared the Senate and is pending in the Assembly.

Ma's measure, Assembly Bill 1178, backed by a coalition of trash disposal firms and opposed by environmentalists, sailed through the Assembly but may be stalled, at least for the moment, in the Senate.
While AB 1178 is particularly aimed at facilitating Potrero Hills, which is owned by Waste Connections Inc., it also could affect another controversial expansion project in Yuba County sought by Recology, a prominent San Francisco trash collection firm. And Recology's advocacy has a déjà vu quality.

A quarter-century ago, the firm, then called Norcal Solid Waste Systems, had a lucrative and exclusive franchise for collecting trash in San Francisco and also employed a lawyer named Willie Brown, who happened to be the speaker of the state Assembly.

Norcal, through a subsidiary called Tri-County Development, was trying to establish a waste disposal site in Solano County called Lynch Canyon. Legislation floated around the Capitol to fast-track approval. But it vanished after Solano County Assemblyman Tom Hannigan told Norcal's lobbyist and close Brown friend, former Assemblyman John Knox, to knock it off.

A few years later, the San Francisco Bay Guardian obtained a confidential memorandum written by a San Francisco city official in 1986 that described Brown's pledge to "push through" a state permit for the project. The FBI, which had raided Norcal's offices, investigated, but nothing came of it.

The Lynch Canyon blowup was the chief inspiration for a Solano County ballot initiative aimed at limiting the amount of trash brought into the county for disposal.

It's that ballot measure, as later applied by court decision to Potrero Hills, that the Ma bill would overturn.

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