State Rejects Plan to Expand Landfill

The board charged with protecting the state’s water quality rejected a staff recommendation Thursday to expand the Azusa Landfill after opponents, including the Metropolitan Water District, called the proposal a threat to the quality of drinking water supplies for 1 million San Gabriel Valley residents.

The staff of the State Water Resources Control Board had said that the landfill, located in a sand and gravel pit, could be expanded to handle another 40 million tons of trash daily if the operators, Azusa Land Reclamation Co., agreed to install a second plastic liner and drainage system under the new portion of the dump.

Currently, the landfill has the capacity to accept 1,500 tons of garbage a day.

But on a 3-1 vote, with one abstention, the board turned down the recommendation and directed the dump operator and local water officials to seek a compromise to the long-simmering controversy over increasing the size of the landfill.

Even so, Board Chairman W. Don Maughan acknowledged he has “real doubts that there’s something that can be reconciled” between the two sides.