The meeting, in the City Council chambers on the third floor at City Hall, was packed largely by students from Nanakuli High & Intermediate School, many of whom carried posters imploring members of the council's Public Works and Economic Development Committee not to pick any of the four sites on the Leeward Coast for the new landfill.

The Council panel is slated to decide today which site to recommend, and that recommendation will be forwarded to the full council for a final vote on Dec. 1.

The five sites being considered include an expansion of the current dump at Waimanalo Gulch on the Leeward Coast. The other known possibilities include a quarry in Kailua, a coral mine in Ma'ili, Makaiwa Gulch near Makakilo and a parcel in Nanakuli.

Near the start of meeting this morning, Councilman Rod Tam, who heads the Public Works Committee, tried to get Frank Doyle, city environmental services director, to say which of the sites he and Mayor Jeremy Harris' administration favor, but Doyle sidestepped the question urging committee members to "go back and look at the record."

Councilwoman Barbara Marshall bluntly asked Doyle why Harris had "foisted" the task of choosing a new landfill site off on the Council.

But Doyle said it was the state Land Use Commission that decided the Council would have to choose a new site by Dec. 1.

State Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, a Democrat who represents the Leeward Coast, said the city had promised area residents that the existing Waimanalo Gulch landfill, located across from the Ko Olina resort and housing development, would be closed in 2008.

That promise appears to be an empty one now because the list of five alternatives includes expanding the existing landfill or developing a new one at three other potential sites nearby.

No other area on O'ahu has more illegal landfills than the Leeward Coast, which also is being considered for a new electricity generation plant and which does more than its fair share to help the state cope with the problems of the homeless, Hanabusa said.

She said the city extended its contract by 15 years in 1999 with a private operator to continue operations at the city's H-Power incinerator at Campbell Industrial Park with no notion where the ash would be buried beyond 2008, when the Waimanalo Gulch was supposed to shut down.

The contract extension may have been illegal because it bound the city to continue to pay the H-Power operator without addressing where the ash would be dumped beyond 2008, Hanabusa said.

State Rep. Cynthia Thielen, a Republican who represents portions of Kailua and Lanikai, asked the Council panel to strike the only site not in Leeward O'ahu from the list of potential landfill sites.

Thielen said turning a Kailua quarry into a landfill could result in the loss of 26,000 construction jobs and would have profound adverse effects on students at nearby Kalaheo High School.

Choosing any location will cost taxpayers millions of dollars, and could have a big effect on the value of nearby properties. The site will also require approval by the Land Use Commission, and will trigger state health and environmental reviews.

None of the owners of potential sites has expressed a willingness to sell their property, so the city would have to force a sale by condemning the land for public use. The owners of the Nanakuli site have offered another option: to operate their own dump and charge the city for each ton of rubbish.

That could cost less in the short term by eliminating the price of land acquisition and development. But the city would lose the revenue it collects from operating the Waimanalo Gulch landfill — more than $390 million over nine years, according to data collected by Tam's committee. The city administration could not immediately confirm that figure.