New Road Will End Clash of Trash Trucks, Homes

A daily parade of garbage trucks that for more than 20 years has left a noisy and dirty imprint on an Agoura neighborhood will end today.

Los Angeles County sanitation officials on Tuesday will open a $4.5-million bypass road that will skirt a 275-home subdivision that lies in a small valley bordering the Calabasas Landfill.

The road will be used by 500 trash trucks that dump up to 2,500 tons of refuse a day at the 416-acre dump.

The trucks have rumbled back and forth along an access road built in the early 1960s behind 27 homes. The dump’s weigh station is 20 feet from several $300,000 residences.

The new, 1.2-mile road will direct the trucks away from the neighborhood, and to a new weigh station that is out of the homeowners’ sight--and earshot.

Because the landfill will be closed Sunday and Monday, today will be the last day the old road is used.

None of the residents will mourn the diversion of the trucks. But the new road has not inspired universal rejoicing in the Saratoga Hills subdivision, six miles west of the San Fernando Valley. Some residents say the new road is uglier than the daily lineup of trash trucks. They complain that road work mutilated an attractive hillside, leaving a dusty gash.

“I think it’s a boondoggle,” said Darlene Knowles, who has lived in the area for 13 years. “The trucks never really bothered me. But they’ve flattened the pretty little hill at the front of our neighborhood for that new road.”

Charlene Raden, whose home sits 20 feet from the old weigh station, said she is tired of picking trash out of her backyard swimming pool and putting up with noise from the trucks and their drivers.

“But I’m not pleased with the way the new road looks,” said Raden, also a 13-year resident. “I hope they landscape it quick, before the Santa Ana winds come and start blowing that dirt around.”

Raden and Knowles said they voted against the new road when their Community Assn. of Saratoga Hills polled the neighborhood last year on the issue. The project was endorsed by most residents, however, including Anthony Pavasaris.

“Until they started building it, we were planning to sell our house and move,” Pavasaris said Friday. “Now, we’ll probably stay.

“The garbage trucks aren’t so bad if you’re gone to work all day. But on Saturdays? Oh, my God, it’s crazy. You can’t open the windows because of the noise and the smog and terrible dust.”

A few blocks away, Pam Kershaw’s home has the distinction of being the only one that faces the old dump road.

“You’d better believe I’m happy to see the new road,” she said. “The trucks start lining up before 8 every morning and all you hear are 70 engines rumbling. I won’t miss that. And I won’t miss every driver whose truck overheats coming to my door to use my phone.”

Other problems, she said, include trash haulers who “let their air horns go every time they pass one of their buddies. When you hear that 400 times a day, it gets on your nerves.”

County sanitation officials said landscaping will begin in October along huge hillside cuts left when 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt were bulldozed to give the new road a gentle slope that the most heavily loaded truck can handle.

Effort of ‘Good Neighbors’

“We like to think we’ve put together a pretty good effort to prove we’re good neighbors,” said Dave Snyder, project engineer for the county Sanitation Districts’ solid-waste management department.

Wayne Pickus, the Calabasas Landfill’s site engineer, said dump traffic will be diverted onto the new road starting about midday Tuesday. Actual completion of the new road and scale is still several months away.

“We’ve sent labor crews to keep the old road clean,” Pickus said. “The biggest impact on the residents has been the noise; that and the community having to share the road with the trucks.”

Pickus said the 89-acre road site was owned by entertainer Bob Hope. Condemnation proceedings were initiated after Hope refused the county’s offer of $690,000 for the property, and court proceedings are scheduled for early October to determine the final land cost, he said.

Despite its name, the Calabasas Landfill is in Agoura. It serves the West Valley area and has room to accommodate from 18 to 23 years’ worth of additional trash, according to county officials.