For months last year, Chiquita Canyon Landfill officials forewarned of cost increases if the ongoing environmental crisis there forced it to close.
Then on Jan. 1, they abruptly closed the facility.
In the months since, Santa Clarita has been working with Burrtec, its waste-management provider for residential service, to figure out how much more it will cost residents to send their trash to Sun Valley versus Chiquita in Castaic.
The rate announced in the agenda for Tuesday’s City Council discussion states: “If approved, residential customers will see rate increases between 14% to 25%, and commercial customers will see increases between 6% to 25% based on container size and frequency.”
A chart provided by the city describes that as a $7.52 monthly increase for the average home, which uses 96-gallon carts. The city’s proposed standard residential rate puts it just shy of a comparable county rate, $37.39 versus $37.49 per month, according to data from the city.
L.A. County Department of Public Works officials confirmed Friday a rate adjustment associated with Chiquita’s closure is possible; however, an apples-to-apples comparison is difficult because county residents might pay a different rate depending on where their service area is.
Burrtec said its request includes money to cover the past six months of disposal to Sun Valley. The company plans to recover these costs over the remaining 96 months of its contract with the city.
“To ensure that each route has sufficient capacity to collect all the garbage set out for collection in one load, Burrtec is proposing to reduce the number of accounts assigned to each route by approximately 9%, requiring the creation of additional routes,” according to the request.
The city staff report also states the contract change came with data to support the “extraordinary rate adjustment.”
After the landfill was notified of its pending closure due to capacity issues, its owner, Waste Connections, threatened to sue in October. An email around that same time from a waste-management lobbying group threatened that “every customer in Los Angeles County will see large rate increases” if the landfill closes, and the anticipated amount was between $96 to $120 per year per household.
The 12-month prorated negotiated rate increase in front of the City Council on Tuesday would come to $90.24.
There’s no plan to reopen Chiquita Canyon Landfill. Officials have yet to figure out what’s causing its subsurface reaction. State and federal regulators have been working on the problem for nearly two years.
Los Angeles County, as well as more than 2,000 residents, are involved in lawsuits against the landfill over the “elevated temperature event” at Chiquita Canyon. Trash is burning at 245 degrees dozens of feet below the surface, producing an extraordinary amount of a chemical pollution called leachate and landfill gases, which residents say are responsible for a wide range of local health concerns.
