State Asks for Tighter Restrictions on Lopez Canyon

State officials Tuesday rejected as too lenient a Los Angeles County order restricting use of Lopez Canyon Landfill, owned by the city of Los Angeles, and asked the county to draft a tougher version by the end of the day today.

“We didn’t feel that it did what we asked them to do,” said Chris Peck, spokesman for the California Waste Management Board.

The county Department of Health Services acts as the state’s enforcement agency for Lopez Canyon Landfill, located above Lake View Terrace in the northeast San Fernando Valley. As the only Los Angeles city-owned dump, Lopez Canyon receives about two-thirds of the city’s residential trash. City officials say closing it will hasten a trash-disposal crisis.

Edward Avila, president of the city Board of Public Works, said he was concerned about the state’s response to the county order. Avila described the county order as “at least fair” and said the state’s proposed changes could make it more difficult for the city to comply.

Legal Questions

William Pellman, senior assistant county counsel, said the county may not legally be able to alter an order it already has issued. Pellman said attorneys would review the state request today.

At the request of the state board, the county issued an order Friday offering the city three options: Close the dump immediately, submit a plan to comply within 60 days with stringent state restrictions based on a 1978 permit, or apply for a new permit.

What bothers the state is a provision in the county order that allowed the city to rely, while it applied for a new permit, on operating guidelines contained in a 1983 engineering report, Peck said. On July 7, the state had asked the county to issue an order forcing the dump to return to a level of operations agreed to when the 1978 permit was issued.

New Order

Tuesday’s request asked the county to agree by tonight to issue a new order by Friday imposing that restriction.

Disagreement over which document--1983 or 1978--is valid forms the crux of the city’s legal challenge to the state order, which continues at a hearing Aug. 4 in Los Angeles Superior Court. The city maintains that the later report automatically became part of its permit.

“We operated under the 1983 requirements for six years and nobody said a thing,” Avila said.

The key differences between the two documents are restrictions on landfill elevation, circumference and on the number of trucks that can dump there daily.

The 1978 permit included a reference to a 1977 engineering report that limited the landfill to a 1,725-foot elevation--35 feet lower than it is now--and said it could accept trash from only 400 trucks a day. Recent logs indicate that as many as 600 trucks dump there daily. The original permit also restricted dumping to a 140-acre area of the 392-acre site, but the city has dumped outside that area in several locations.

Full in a Year

The city has said that if the restrictions of 1978 are reimposed, the dump will be declared full within a year and will have to close. The height limit is the most difficult to meet, Avila said.

Charles Coffee, who oversees the dump as director of the county’s Solid Waste Management Program, said the state’s proposed change in the order does not appear unreasonable.

However, Coffee said he would have to discuss it with attorneys from the county counsel’s office, who helped draft the Friday order.