Waste Reduction Consultants in Demand as Cities Race to Comply : Environment: Getting a jump on cutting trash may cost more in the long run than some local governments expect.

The official title of a new law aimed at reducing the amount of trash going to landfills is the Integrated Solid Waste Management Act. But privately, California bureaucrats have dubbed the state statute the “Consultants’ Full Employment Act.”

Local governments, lacking the staff and expertise to comply with the law’s required paperwork, and aware that noncompliance could result in daily fines of $10,000, have stampeded the handful of environmental consulting firms with experience in the field.

The statute is “a consultant’s gold mine,” said Leslie Legg, an analyst for the National Solid Waste Management Assn., a Washington-based trade group representing trash haulers, recyclers, landfill operators and consultants.

Already, consulting firms have added new divisions, opened new offices and hired new employees to meet the skyrocketing demand for their services. The danger, many officials and industry experts warn, is that inexperienced consultants will provide cities with costly but superficial plans that fail to meet the state’s requirements.

The market for consultants is lucrative. Fees for drafting a city’s plan for complying with the law’s goal--reducing the amount of garbage going to landfills 25% by 1995 and 50% by 2000--can range from $50,000 to $200,000, officials and consultants said. For groups of cities that join together to hire a single consultant, fees can reach $900,000.

“The price of not having developed a cadre of trained municipal officials is paying through the nose for consultants who may or may not be able to give you the best advice,” said Joan Edwards, who is coordinating recycling for the city of Los Angeles, which expects to hire several consulting firms. “There’s a lot of gambling going on.”

Cities around Los Angeles County are rolling the dice. The city of Glendale in January agreed to pay $200,000 for services related to the waste law to a San Francisco-based consulting firm that already was working for the city, said Kerry Morford, the city’s assistant public works director. He said he expected the preliminary draft of the plan to be before the Glendale City Council later this month.

In June, the city of Palmdale hired a Santa Rosa-based firm at a cost of $173,000, in an attempt to beat the rush to hire consultants. “A lot of cities are panicking,” said Leon Swain, the city’s senior civil engineer.

Agoura Hills is considering teaming with Westlake Village to hire a consultant. The two cities have begun shopping for firms and have gotten estimates ranging from $75,000 to $190,000. “Some of the estimates are staggering,” said Agoura Hills City Planner Mike Kamino.

But some consultants cautioned that cities ought not cut corners on drafting the plans, which are supposed to analyze the composition of the city’s garbage and propose ways of reducing its volume. Governments which try to save now may be confronted with far greater costs later, they said.

In a practice known as “low-balling,” consulting firms sometimes offer to draft waste reduction studies at fees far below the average, said Eugene Tseng, a private consultant and executive director of EcoSource, a nonprofit group that develops waste management training programs.

The practice allows new companies to “get their foot in the door” and helps established firms “build up relationships for long-term work,” said Tseng, whose students at UCLA are drafting a waste reduction plan for the city of Azusa.

But the “low-balled” contracts often leave out necessary services that confront cities later in the form of additional consultants’ fees, Kamino said.

“The cities that haven’t done this kind of work don’t know necessarily what the right balance of work is,” said Richard Hertzberg, a senior consultant for Resource Integration Systems, a nationwide firm that opened a Los Angeles office Sept. 10.

Accurate counts of the number of waste management consulting firms are difficult to come by, but a 1989 survey by Legg’s organization found no more than 10 nationwide with experience in drafting the kind of waste studies required under the California law, she said.

The statute, authored by Assemblyman Byron D. Sher (D-Palo Alto), was signed by Gov. George Deukmejian on Sept. 29, 1989.

One of the companies seeking to seize the opportunity presented by the new state law is R.W. Beck and Associates, a nationwide environmental consulting firm in business since 1942. The company has 30 workers in California--25 hired since the statute, said Gregg Foster, a recycling specialist for the firm. “I can’t say that that was totally a result of the bill,” he said. “But certainly it played a major role.”

Cities could comply with older waste management statutes simply by burning their trash more efficiently. But the new law requires them to produce less garbage, and to do that they must persuade the public to change its wasteful ways.

The shift in legislative focus has caused consulting firms to hire people trained in politics and public relations rather than engineering.

Among the new breed of waste reduction consultants is Foster, 25, who majored in public administration in college and spent a year writing guidebooks and organizing conferences on recycling before he was hired by R.W. Beck.

The shift away from hard science, some in the field said, has made it tougher for municipal officials to distinguish between qualified and unqualified consultants.

“Recycling is a people-oriented kind of thing, not so much a technical-oriented kind of thing,” said Bill George, recycling coordinator for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, which operates area landfills. He has organized consortia enabling a number of cities to jointly hire a single consultant. In addition to consultants who have marketing and waste management experience, he said, “I want to see people who are activists--who have experience at the grass-roots level.”

Some question the value of such generic political skills. “I absolutely think there is such a thing as recycling expertise,” Edwards said. “I just think consultants are going to be hard-pressed to fulfill the high expectations that municipalities have for them because the consultants are stretched very thin.”

The California Integrated Waste Management Board, the agency created by the legislation to oversee its implementation, included in its May newsletter a warning to city officials that the board “accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of the information provided by others or in forums not endorsed by the board.”

The state is compiling a list of waste reduction consultants for distribution to government officials, said Steven Ault, acting manager of the waste generation analysis branch of the board’s local planning division. But inclusion on the list does not imply endorsement by the state, he stressed.

If history is any indication, some consultants said, the current demand for consulting firms will subside in a few years.

“The boom that you see now in the solid waste management area is the same type of boom you saw in the early ‘80s in hazardous materials,” said Tseng, referring to federal legislation involving the Environmental Protection Agency.

Other consultants are more confident that the good times are here to stay.

“These solid waste problems that we’re dealing with today are only going to get worse,” said Fred Kisner, program manager for contracts dealing with the statute for EBA Waste Technologies, the firm that was awarded Palmdale’s contract. “If you’re in the solid waste business, that certainly would suggest that there’s work on the horizon.”