UCLA Group Urges City to Drop Lancer Trash Plan

A team of UCLA faculty and graduate students jumped into the controversy over city trash burning Tuesday, contending that the Lancer plant proposed in South-Central Los Angeles poses a much higher risk than officials admit and would be a costly way to dispose of garbage.

The UCLA group, which includes some environmental activists, urged the city to abandon its plan for three large trash-to-energy incinerators and instead to stress mass recycling to reduce the demand on canyon landfill dumps.

They were joined by State Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who Tuesday called Lancer an “economic disaster” and questioned the wisdom of building incinerators in the Los Angeles basin, “where we are already forced to breathe the dirtiest air in America.”

City sanitation officials, who have recommended incineration as the key to future trash disposal, were consulted by the UCLA group, but they were nonetheless critical of the report’s methods and conclusions.

For instance, the financial calculations were dismissed as ill-informed “desk-top analysis.”

“I would say it just lacks depth,” said Drew Sones, the city’s fiscal analyst for the Lancer project.

The UCLA report heaped its most serious criticism on a recent health risk study performed by a city consultant that judged the Lancer incinerator as the safest of more than 50 such refuse-to-energy projects in the nation.

That study of health risks was hailed by its author, University of California, Berkeley, professor Allan H. Smith, and by the city for taking pains to err on the side of safety. However, the UCLA group said the study was far less conservative than billed and they accused Smith of making assumptions that ensured the risk would appear low.

City officials declined to comment on the integrity of Smith’s health risk study Tuesday. Various agencies, including the state Department of Health Services, and a nationwide committee of doctors convened by the city are reviewing the study and plan to make public evaluations of the work.

The UCLA report, prepared by students in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning with help from other disciplines, also asserted that the city has misstated the costs of electric power generated by the Lancer project to make the project appear feasible. It claims that the cost of disposing of trash could reach $100 a ton if the true cost of power is included and if the ash residue in the incinerator must be disposed of as a hazardous waste.

The city currently spends less than $10 a ton to bury garbage in mountain landfills, but the few local landfills still accepting trash are expected to be filled in the early 1990s. The Lancer project would slow the use of landfills, but costs could rise to $53 a ton, Sones said.

Less Support for Burning

Even at that price, however, there are signs that the political backing for trash burning may be weakening. The City Council has given sanitation officials permission to begin work on Lancer several times in the last few years, with the understanding that burning would be the most economical way to get rid of most trash when landfills are full.

However, new pollution controls that the South Coast Air Quality Management District plans to require for Lancer have driven the cost up significantly--and unexpectedly--in the last few months. Meanwhile, some council members have expressed interest in obtaining land in Elsmere Canyon north of the San Fernando Valley for a new landfill.

Cost Too High

If a new landfill so close to the city were to become available, some city officials feel Lancer might appear too expensive.

“If Elsmere Canyon comes together, then I think Lancer is dead--and it may be dead anyway,” Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the council’s Finance and Revenue Committee, said Tuesday.

The UCLA report was written by master’s degree candidates after six months of research as a project that took the place of a thesis. The work was supervised by adjunct professor Robert Gottlieb, an environmental activist and author who also sits on the board of the Metropolitan Water District. He is regarded as a critic of the district’s power practices.

One of the students, Rubell Helgeson, was active in the successful City Council campaign of Ruth Galanter, a staunch Lancer critic elected this month in an upset of council President Pat Russell.