Oracle wants action, not trash talk

But since then, the county has done little to remedy the situation, residents say.

"This is not an issue that the county considers high priority," said KC Newnam, an eight-year resident of Oracle who has spearheaded a group pushing to get the transfer station moved. "Our feeling, though, is this is important enough that the county should take this seriously."

Waste Management has applied for an industrial-use permit and a rezoning of 2.93 acres for the transfer station, which is on the extreme eastern end of Oracle, an unincorporated community of about 4,000 along Arizona Route 77.

As part of its application process, Waste Management held an open house Tuesday night at Mountain Vista Junior High School, 2618 W. El Paseo, to discuss the transfer station's future. About 70 people attended, Newnam said.

An "oversight" led the Oracle Transfer Station, along with a handful of other facilities in the county, to go this long without being rezoned for industrial use, Pinal County Manager Terry Doolittle said.

Pinal County got out of the trash business in the mid-1990s when it sold its landfills and transfer stations to private outfits, Doolittle said.

While under the county's ownership, he said, the facilities were exempt from zoning laws that would have required the land to be zoned industrial rather than general rural.

Now, he said, the process has begun to get the Oracle transfer station and waste facilities in Kearny, San Manuel and Stanfield zoned properly.

Newnam, though, said he opposes the rezoning. He said he and many of his neighbors would like to see the facility moved out of town.

"I'm absolutely against anything that will keep it here," Newnam said. "My preference is that they move it far enough away that it doesn't interfere with anything in town."

Newnam said the transfer station is an eyesore for nearby residents, some of whom live within 150 feet of it. He also said the garbage brought there each day causes flies to swarm on his land.

"It's just not conducive to that area," Newnam said.

Doolittle said he has talked with the Arizona State Land Department about finding a site near Oracle where the transfer station could move, but the state has not been receptive to the options Pinal County has proposed.

Doolittle said he also has talked with officials in the small town of Mammoth — which recently annexed more than 10,000 acres northeast of Oracle — about moving the transfer station near where a wastewater-treatment plant is planned for that town's proposed Cielo master-planned community.

Pinal County's long-term goal is to get the transfer station moved out of Oracle, but that depends on how the area grows and develops.

"We could be looking five to 10 years down the road," Doolittle said.

The Oracle facility takes in between 30 and 35 tons of trash a day, said Don Cassano, Waste Management's government and public affairs director for Arizona. That's the equivalent of about six or seven garbage trucks' worth of trash, which is hauled in each day by trucks from Waste Management and other trash haulers before being moved to landfills farther north.

Waste Management is amenable to finding an alternative site for the transfer station, Cassano said, but in the meantime it has made efforts to minimize the facility's negative effects on Oracle.

Those efforts include installing a grass berm to screen parts of the station from neighbors, as well as installing a scale for residents who want to dump their trash there.

The transfer station is part of a Pinal County voucher program that allows residents to use the facility up to three times a year at no charge.

"It serves as sort of a safety valve to prevent illegal dumping," Cassano said.