The proposed expansion of the John Smith Road Landfill from 95 acres to 483 acres and the impact it will have on rates for residents and businesses were the subject of a presentation at the May 11 special meeting of the San Benito County Integrated Waste Management Regional Agency Local Task Force.
The current plan would increase the airspace capacity of the landfill, the total volume of space available for the disposal of waste, from 9.3 million cubic yards to 48 million yards. That would allow the amount of waste accepted to increase from 1,000 tons to 2,300 tons per day.
One option offered in the presentation was for a transfer station to be used instead, setting up an area where incoming waste could be triaged into different categories and be either recycled, composted, or taken to a distant landfill. Creating a new compost facility was presented as a possible add-on to either the expansion or transfer station plans.
Prior to public comments, task force chair, John Freeman explained that transporting waste out of the county to a landfill in another city would be prohibitively expensive compared to disposing of it in the county.
“The last time I was costing out a truck on a bid, I used $150 dollars an hour,” he said. “And that was seven or eight years ago. I don’t want to guess that price now, but with inflation, I know it’s well north of about $200 dollars.”
Freeman used the landfill in Marina as an example, saying it was approximately 43 miles from Hollister.
“Traffic is rough, particularly right now,” he said. “It took me an hour and 10 minutes to get from San Juan to Hollister tonight. Can imagine a truck just sitting there in traffic, and the meter is going? And nobody is going to charge you by the mile either—they charge by the hour.”
The half-dozen people speaking at the hearing had similar complaints about the expansion plans.
Maureen Nelson, who described herself as a resident of the Santana Ranch development, said that the visual depictions of the landfill site were based on aerial photographs taken before Santana Ranch was built and therefore did not accurately show the site’s proximity to nearby housing.
She also argued that a transfer station was preferable and that the increased cost of waste management for Hollister consumers might result in changes in the way residents handle their own waste.
“If we continually add to the size of the landfill to protect the costs,” she said, “people are not going to reduce their waste, they’re not going to recycle, and they’re not going to do the organics. You have to have a reason to do it. When you talk money, they change their minds since it hits them in the pocketbook.”
After the meeting, BenitoLink spoke to some of the residents who attended the meeting, including Carly Robles.
“I think this landfill expansion is a mistake,” Robles said. “Making the landfill five times larger is going to make Hollister known as the trash can of Silicon Valley. There’s going to be water pollution. There’s going to be noise pollution. There’s going to be light pollution. It is just disrespectful to the Hollister Community.”
Resident Brigitte Thorp told BenitoLink one of her concerns is the increased traffic from fleets of garbage trucks traveling to the landfill that would be crossing through Hollister on its main roads.
“How are you going to promote organic farming and the wine trail when you have these trash trucks coming through all the time?” she said. “It’s an absolute contradiction. And the greenhouse gas emissions, even with mitigation, are unavoidable. The landfill is a huge CO2 emitter, and if there’s no wind blowing in Hollister, we could also have really bad-smelling air. What are we going to do about that?”
Thorp said the route for out-of-county waste vehicles proposed in the environmental impact report would include southbound Hwy 101 and Hwy 25 as well as eastbound Hwy 156—already heavy in traffic—bringing the trucks through business districts and near schools, including the new Gavilan College campus, before reaching the landfill.
Previous BenitoLink articles concerning John Smith Road Landfill:
San Benito County seeks new landfill operating pact
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