L.A. Panel Kills Toxic-Waste Transfer Station Plan

A Los Angeles City Council committee action last week has killed a consultant’s controversial suggestion that a toxic-waste transfer center be built in the East San Fernando Valley area, city officials said.

The council’s Public Works Committee instructed the city’s bureau of sanitation to study aplan to dispose of toxic wastes that does not include the transfer station concept. The plan, designed to protect ground water from further contamination, would include a method of monitoring the toxic wastes produced by businesses and having a private contractor haul them away.

Although the transfer station proposal became a political issue because four of five proposed sites were in Councilman Howard Finn’s district, city officials said politics played no role in rejecting the idea.

“Financially, it just didn’t make sense,” said Bob Alpern, chief sanitary engineer for the bureau of sanitation.

A report submitted to the Southern California Assn. of Governments in January by SCS Engineers, a consulting firm, said the transfer station might be the hub of a toxic-waste collection system, a place where petroleum, solvent and acid wastes collected from East Valley firms could be stored temporarily before being shipped to recycling and disposal sites. The report named the five potential locations. Four were in the East Valley, including city-owned property adjacent to the Department of Water and Power’s electric generating plant in Sun Valley, and the fifth was between Glendale and Griffith Park.

But city officials said statistics in the same report indicated the centralized system would save little money. The cost of collecting a 30- to 55-gallon drum of waste and transporting it to a transfer station would be $89, while the average cost of carting the same drum directly to a disposal site would be about $90, the report said.

Finn, a member of the Public Works Committee, said that, although many constituents told him they did not want a waste-collection station in the district, and one opponent made it an issue during his recent reelection campaign, “economics alone made my decision.”

The other committee members, Joel Wachs and Joy Picus, also said the transfer station should not be part of a hazardous-waste collection plan.

The committee voted instead to have the sanitation bureau consider making the East Valley a test area for a different program that would encourage businesses to properly dispose of wastes. Alpern said one possibility is having all producers of small amounts of hazardous wastes pay a fee to the city that would be refunded if the waste were disposed of properly. Alpern said the sanitation bureau also is trying to get authority from the state and the county Department of Health Services to check records of waste producers to determine if the material is being disposed of legally.

Alpern said he also hopes for the passage of state legislation that would allow the cities to contract with private hauling firms to help dispose of the waste.

The push for a hazardous-waste collection system was spurred by the discovery several years ago of traces of trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, both solvents suspected of causing cancer, in East Valley water wells.

12 Wells Closed

Unacceptable levels of the chemicals have led to the closure of 12 of the Department of Water and Power’s 73 wells in the North Hollywood-Van Nuys area, and to the shutdown of four of Burbank’s 10 wells.

The consultants’ report said that some businesses dispose of hazardous wastes illegally because of the high cost of hauling them to authorized disposal sites.

The sanitation bureau is expected to issue its report to the council committee within two months. Any proposal would have to be approved by the full council.