Boxed In by Former Tenant’s Trash

SANTA PAULA — To hear Roger and Carol Anderson tell it, they have been left holding the box.

Thousands of soggy, decaying plastic-lined boxes, actually, all chopped up and spread six feet high over nearly an acre of property they own in Santa Paula.

They are the victims, they say, of an entrepreneurial tenant whose plan to turn an Oxnard paper recycling firm’s discards into construction materials went bust.

The tenant, Howard Eichen of Santa Paula, declared bankruptcy when his landlords evicted him in November after months of trying to get him to clean up the mess.

Now, facing $1,000-a-day fines from the city if the property and its estimated 12,000 cubic yards of muck are not cleaned up by Dec. 14, the Andersons have been left holding the boxes.

The Andersons, both 63, have been forced to put their retirement plans on hold. Unable to leverage a loan on industrial land they could never sell in such a slovenly state, the Andersons have had to place their Santa Barbara home of 15 years up for sale in hopes of raising the $70,000 to $100,000 they estimate it will cost to clean up the property.

“This is really a merry Christmas,” Carol Anderson said bitterly.

Reached at his Santa Paula home, Eichen said the market he found for the “fiber-cement” products he was producing dried up and forced him to go belly-up.

“There is nothing I can do,” he said. “The Andersons know how hard I tried. I just came to the end of my ability to do anything. I’m sorry to leave them with it but what else can I say?”

According to court records, Eichen declared bankruptcy Nov. 11, less than two weeks after the Andersons evicted him after months of attempts to get the land cleaned up.

The couple had used the property throughout the 1980s to manufacture oil drilling equipment. When the oil industry took a downturn, so did their company.

In March 1995, Roger Anderson signed a two-year lease with Eichen to run what he understood to be an experiment in turning a recycling firm’s discards into roofing materials, wall boards and other construction materials.

But by August 1995, the Andersons began fielding complaints about a daily parade of Oxnard city garbage trucks rumbling onto the site, just a block off Santa Paula’s historic Main Street.

A month later, the Andersons received a copy of a notice of violation that was sent to Eichen telling the entrepreneur he was not storing the huge piles of chopped materials properly. After reviewing the property, the Oxnard paper recycler, Willamette Industries, stopped shipments in mid-September.

But the piles remained.

The Andersons said that each time they threatened to evict Eichen, he threatened to file for bankruptcy and leave the trash behind. So the couple said they worked with city officials to pressure Eichen into clearing the land.

Beginning in July, they said, Eichen hauled off 93 large trash bins full of the chopped-up boxes. But by mid-September, he stopped. And by the first of October, the city had had enough. After an administrative hearing Oct. 29, the city laid the burden on the Andersons.

The couple blame the city of Oxnard, which hauled the trash to their property, and Willamette, who struck the deal with Eichen.

The Andersons offered to pay the cost of loading the piles into trash bins if the company would pay the landfill dumping fees and the city of Oxnard would haul it off.

The company, they contend, has not answered their phone calls, and city officials have refused.

Meanwhile, the couple are faced with the Dec. 14 deadline, which they say is impossible given dumping limits at the local landfill.

An attorney by trade, Carol Anderson said the couple’s only recourse is to sue the city of Oxnard and Willamette.