Barred from using the Lompoc Landfill, Vandenberg Space Force Base currently hauls its garbage to one of the dump’s competitors in Santa Maria. The city of Lompoc predicts it may be forced to do the same within the next decade, when the landfill has no space left to fill.
During the Lompoc City Council’s Sept. 3 meeting, Solid Waste Manager Keith Quinlan said the Lompoc Landfill “has an estimated life of approximately 10 years remaining,” during a talk on the dump’s fee structure.
“We are in the stages now of starting to plan for what to do next and there are a couple different options,” Quinlan said. “We have the possibility of expansion of the current landfill. … Another option is a transfer station, … trash would come in there; it’d be dumped into a large trailer; taken out and transferred, likely to the Santa Maria Regional Landfill.”
Lompoc Utility Director Brad Wilkie told the City Council that staff “had talked about how we might be able to incrementally set aside funds to pay for a transfer station, so it’s not just one big, huge cost at the time that we have to change from delivering to our landfill to going elsewhere.”
“It is something we need to prepare for,” Wilkie said. “It’s going to be less expensive for us to set aside money to build a transfer station than it is to go out and borrow money at the time that we determine that we have to do this. … So, it’s better for us to prepare now than later.”
As for potential funding, Wilkie and staff recommended that the city avoid resorting to fee increases for non-resident users of the Lompoc Landfill partly to maintain competitive rates.
“I’m a little confused with staff’s position on the whole competition thing because I think as we’ve heard … we don’t necessarily want to compete with Santa Maria for this kind of business because of our landfill size,” Councilmember Gilda Aiello said.
Wilkie compared the situation to walking a tightrope.
“It’s a balancing act between revenues and volume, because we don’t want to take so much in, and that’s one reason why we don’t take the volume from Vandenberg,” Wilkie said. “We want to … retain that 10 years or 15 years of life because it’s very valuable to us and our residents.”
The state mandates the city of Lompoc to keep track of the landfill’s waste volume each year partly “to calculate what we have to have set aside in that cash reserve to meet our obligations for the closure/post-closure obligations,” Wilkie explained.
“That number right now is around $6 million, but the cash we’re holding is less than that because the expectation is we grow the cash that we have on hand up to that $6 million between now and the time that the closure happens,” said Wilkie, who added that landfill surcharges in the past led to revenue drops, and inspired some franchise haulers to dump their junk at the Santa Maria Regional Landfill instead.
If revenue from the Lompoc Landfill falls short of what the city needs to reach its $6 million closure target, Wilkie warned the council that the city may “just have to collect more on the [trash] collection side to make sure that we’re meeting our financial obligations.”
To avoid “inflating the cost to the consumers over time,” Councilmember Jeremy Ball agreed that staff needs to plan ahead on the landfill’s future, “because it’s going to cost us either way.”
Aiello motioned for the City Council to accept staff’s recommendation to keep the landfill’s fee structure for the time being, but also direct staff to return in September 2025 with an update. The motion passed 5-0.
