State Workers Dumped Trash in Ravine

There was something vaguely familiar to Ralph Kelly about the scene that flickered across his living-room television screen.

It was coverage of a news conference that showed a work crew laboring over trash alongside Mulholland Drive near Kelly’s home, and it reminded him of a home video shot by his stepson.

But there was one important difference.

In the TV news report aired this week, workers were shown taking trash out of a ravine. In the home video, made two years ago, workers were shown throwing trash into a ravine.

On Friday, Kelly’s blurry, two-minute segment was causing a stir in Los Angeles and in Sacramento, as city and state officials scurried to identify the crew--each group hoping that the helmeted, uniformed workers did not belong to them.

But, by day’s end, the finger was pointing toward the California Conservation Corps, a state agency.

“It’s unfortunate, but it sounds like our crew,” said Susanne Levitsky, Sacramento spokeswoman for the corps. She said the Mulholland incident is the first cleanup complaint her agency has received.

Opponents of a city plan to designate Mulholland as a “scenic parkway” quickly pointed to the tape as proof that illegal trash dumping will never be controlled along the 22-mile south rim of the San Fernando Valley.

Advocates of the scenic corridor proposal sought to dismiss Kelly’s tape as depicting an isolated event, however.

“This is a great embarrassment to us,” said Joseph Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, whose group hires cleanup crews for Mulholland Drive.

“I don’t think one miscreant crew is proof that trash can’t be cleaned up on Mulholland. This does not flaw our plan, not at all. But I agree that what that one crew did was despicable.”

It was Edmiston who staged Monday’s news conference to announce a plan to pay for permanent trash-cleanup crews for the mountain roadway. He said litter control is a major stumbling block to approval of the parkway plan.

Need to Control Trash Problem

“It’s a key issue,” he told reporters, as a uniformed work crew toiled behind him to haul junk from the ravine. “Nobody wants to see their community trashed. We will not be able to have a successful plan unless we get a handle on the trash problem.”

Kelly’s two-minute segment, taped in 1985 from his back patio by Mark Vance, shows a uniformed work crew tossing bottles and other litter over an embankment and into dense underbrush instead of placing the trash in plastic bags carried by crew members.

“I’d forgotten all about that tape until I saw the TV show this week,” Kelly said. “Here was Edmiston talking about planning overlooks and taking care of trash when they can’t even handle what they’ve got.”

Foes of the parkway plan have complained that new scenic overlooks and trails will lure people who will dump more trash in the mountains.

On Friday, Edmiston disputed that contention, however.

He said that his state-chartered conservancy has worked with city street-maintenance and parks crews and with outside cleanup crews on the trash problem. He said his agency has spent about $140,000 over the last two years on cleanup efforts.

Edmiston said he would have immediately sought to fire the trash-throwing crew and would have pressed criminal littering charges against its members if Kelly had reported the incident in time to identify the workers.

Nonetheless, officials spent Friday afternoon viewing a copy of the tape in an effort to learn what agency was responsible.

Pat Howard, director of Los Angeles’ Street Maintenance Bureau, said he was certain the crew was not his.

“The key is the blue helmets,” he said. “We wear light-yellow helmets.”

Anna Sklar, a spokeswoman for the city’s Board of Public Works, said the blue or gray color of the uniforms in Kelly’s tape proved municipal parks or sanitation workers were not involved, either.

The uniforms resembled those worn by the California Conservation Corps, officials decided.

None of the corps’ current 2,000 members was involved in a 1985 incident, however, said Levitsky, the spokeswoman. Workers’ contracts only run for a year at a time, she said.

Still, Edmiston said, the conservancy will think twice before it contracts again for cleanup work with the California Conservation Corps. It now is using the independent Los Angeles Conservation Corps for trash removal, he said.

“We’d have to get assurances from the CCC that, if we use them again on trash, they’ll be better supervised,” Edmiston said.