Surprise Plan OKd to Keep Landfill at Lopez Canyon Alive Until 2001

Lake View Terrace residents who had been told to expect an end to dumping at the Lopez Canyon Landfill as early as 1992 learned Friday that they may have to endure noise and odors through the end of the century.

Word came in a previously undisclosed plan, approved Friday by the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, to extend the life of the landfill until the year 2001, and possibly beyond.

The $16-million plan, which calls for lopping off a ridge top and removing 6 million cubic yards of dirt to provide for additional landfill space, was sent to the City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley.

It is expected to be approved, despite objections voiced Friday by Councilman Ernani Bernardi, who represents Lake View Terrace. Council members previously have rejected Bernardi’s efforts to limit dumping in Lopez Canyon, the only city-owned landfill. Other council members also have repeatedly voted against putting politically unpopular landfills in their own districts.

“I’m not pleased,” Bernardi said Friday. “The people in the community are not going to be pleased. . . . I’m going to do everything that I can to relieve that community of having the total burden of city rubbish being dumped into their community.”

Located in the northeast corner of the San Fernando Valley, Lopez Canyon receives slightly more than half of the 6,000 tons a day of household trash generated in the city of Los Angeles, according to sanitation officials. The remaining trash is dumped at more expensive private landfills.

City officials have been predicting that the landfill would be full by 1992.

Taken by Surprise

However, city sanitation director Delwin Biagi caught the Board of Public Works by surprise Friday when he presented a plan to extend the life of the landfill at least to 2001.

The added capacity would come from bulldozing Popcorn Ridge, which would create more room inside the dump, and from space no longer needed to accommodate ash from a now-abandoned plan for a city trash-burning plant.

“Based on today’s inflow into the site, it appears that there is sufficient capacity in this kind of a plan to have that canyon be operational through the year 2001,” Biagi said.

“Are you telling us that . . . rather than the three to five years that we’ve been talking about publicly, we’re now talking about 12 years?” board member Kathleen Brown asked.

Biagi stressed that he was not proposing an expansion, but rather revising plans “to give us the capability to do a little bit more than we thought we would be able to do” within the landfill’s existing boundaries.

Biagi said the landfill’s life could be extended to an unknown date beyond 2001 if recycling efforts are successful. The City Council is considering re-enacting a law to require residents to separate recyclable waste from other trash.

“What may be not good news for the folks adjacent to the facility is good news for the rest of the city,” said Mal Toy, director of solid waste management for the Bureau of Sanitation.

Private Dumps Costly

Mike Miller, assistant sanitation director, said the longer that Lopez Canyon Landfill remains open, the less taxpayers will have to spend to have their trash hauled and dumped at costly private landfills.

“There is still a trash crisis,” Miller said. No new landfills have been established, and no existing landfills have been expanded, because of neighborhood opposition.

Miller said that if the city cannot continue sending some of its trash to private landfills, including the Sunshine Canyon Landfill above Granada Hills, Lopez Canyon would fill up in 1997, even with the proposed plan.

One reason that the city will be able to extend the life of the Lopez Canyon Landfill, Biagi said, was political defeat of the Lancer trash-to-energy project. The city had planned to deposit ash from the Lancer project in Lopez Canyon. Now, the area that had been set aside for ash can be used for refuse.

The major impact of the plan on residents will be visual, sanitation officials said. Residents initially will see the grading, but city officials plan to landscape the site.

Responding to questions from board members, Biagi said that a housing project is being built next to the landfill. Some board members wondered aloud how the city could approve rezoning the property for such construction.

Biagi said that sanitation officials were unaware of the housing project until they saw grading at the site. “We got together with the planning department to find out how this could happen,” he told the board. “It was a matter of us not being advised that the zone change and other activities were going on.”

Biagi added however, that buyers of the new homes have said they knew about the landfill, but bought the homes anyway because they were relatively inexpensive.

Bernardi and Lake View Terrace residents, meanwhile, are continuing to fight another plan by the city to dispose of up to 1,200 tons of sewage sludge a day at Lopez Canyon. Sanitation officials say they propose only to send sludge to Lopez Canyon if other landfills become unavailable. Los Angeles is prohibited from dumping the sludge into Santa Monica Bay.

Sanitation officials also have applied to the state for permission to dump all of the city’s trash in Lopez Canyon in case other, privately owned sites, are closed to the city. Currently, a state permit restricts the city to dumping the 3,500 tons a day that now go into Lopez Canyon.

Lewis Snow, chairman of the Lake View Terrace Home Owners Assn., said his group “is adamantly opposed to any expansion of Lopez Canyon, period. We have only so much canyon space in this area.”

“There are numerous other areas of Los Angeles that do not get their fair share. Perhaps some of the other council members with canyons in their districts ought to stop playing pass-the-buck on this and ought to accept responsibility.”