EASY FOOD WASTE RECYCLING ON WAY

Program collects organic matter to be broken down by anaerobic digester

Residents of Escondido and 11 other cities in San Diego County soon will be asked to place both food waste from their kitchens and organic materials from their yards into their green waste bins, under a new organic waste recycling program.

The combined food waste and yard cuttings will be fed into an anaerobic digester, a project now under construction in Escondido, which will turn the waste generated by homes and businesses into fertilizer for farms and compressed natural gas to fuel vehicles. The new facility is expected to be up and running by February or March.

Businesses will be phased into the new organic waste recycling program over the next year, said Jim Ambroso, general manager of Escondido Disposal Inc., the private company that is building the anaerobic digester at its recycling center on West Washington Avenue.

The new facility will help local cities meet their goals for recycling organic waste set by a state law. Under that law, California cities must divert 75 percent of their organic waste from landfills by Jan. 1, 2025, and businesses such as large restaurants, grocery stores and food wholesalers must reduce the food waste they generate by providing edible food to those who need it.

Reducing the amount of organic waste going into landfills will in turn decrease greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and alleviate the ill effects of climate change, such as record heat, wildfires, droughts, sea level rise and extreme weather events, according to Calrecycle, the state agency charged with overseeing recycling efforts in California.

The agency said that organic waste including food scraps and yard cuttings make up more than half of the trash dumped in California’s

guaranteed rate of return, which are set annually by the SDCERS board based on publicly available indexes.

SDCERS data show Nisleit’s account totaled $257,700 after the first year and could grow at the same rate over the remaining four years.

Because Nisleit’s participation in the DROP program puts a limit on his time as chief, that could affect how the department responds over time to ongoing calls for policing reform. Over the summer, demonstrators took to the streets in San Diego — as they did in cities across the country — to protest the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and to draw attention to systemic racism and inequities in criminal justice.

In the face of those protests, Nisleit, with thenmayor Kevin Faulconer’s support, was the first local law enforcement leader to announce an end to the department’s use of the carotid restraint, a controversial neck hold that critics say is harmful and is used disproportionally on people of color.

Some reformists had tried for years to get the department to stop using the hold.

Within a day or so, every other department in the county, including the Sheriff’s Department, announced that they, too, would stop using the carotid restraint.

On June 24, Nisleit announced that the department had crafted two standalone policies — one that requires officers to use de-escalation techniques when safe and reasonable, and a second that calls on officers to intervene when another officer uses unreasonable force.

Since taking the helm nearly two years ago, Nisleit and the department have faced other controversies some critics say reflect a strained relationship between the department and some of the communities it serves.

Less than three weeks after he took over as chief, he launched an internal investigation into a points-based reward system for officers who made drug-related arrests and issued citations at Southern Division — a program the department killed before it was implemented.

In recent months, the department launched three high-profile internal investigations, including in September after an officer allegedly mocked on social media a makeshift memorial for a man he fatally shot.

This month, the department confirmed it had launched an investigation after some officers circulated a video clip of a film about Adolf Hitler. The clip, which had subtitles added over the images, “negatively portrays the community and department leadership” and includes a homophobic comment about the city’s new mayor, Todd Gloria, a spokesman said.

“The department will not tolerate hateful speech of any kind,” the spokesman said. “If the video was created by a department member, Chief (David) Nisleit will take swift action. This is not who we are as a department. This is not who we are as San Diegans.”

The clip was circulated after officers were spotted around a table in a La Jolla café, violating health orders that prohibited on-site dining because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The video was an apparent response to the department’s investigation into the café incident.

Since last year, social justice activists have raised concerns about the city’s Smart Streetlights program, a network of 3,000 street lights fitted with cameras and sensors. The program was sold to the city and installed in 2016 as a way to upgrade LED lights to save money and energy. Later, it was revealed to the public that the Police Department had access to the cameras for certain investigations.

“We use them very sparingly, for only the worst type of cases, very violent type of cases, or serious or fatal injury collisions,” Nisleit said last year. “But it’s our ability to use them as a reactive tool, as an investigative tip to lead us in the path of who is responsible for the crime. It actually lets us narrow our focus.”

Some community members said they were concerned that the technology could be used for surveillance, and had the potential for civil rights abuses and over-policing in communities of color.

In September, Faulconer ordered that the cameras be turned off until the city crafts an ordinance to govern surveillance technology. The announcement came days after the city floated a plan to hand over the camera management and access exclusively to police — a plan that drew immediate pushback from some community members.