Rally Urges Opponents of Dump to Speak Out

Critics of the proposed Sunshine Canyon Landfill expansion demonstrated in Granada Hills Monday, urging residents to oppose the plan at a county hearing this week.

About 25 people attended the Bee Canyon Park rally, complaining that the larger dump would create health hazards and destroy an oak forest.

Browning-Ferris Industries is seeking to extend its 230-acre landfill, located north of Granada Hills in the city of Los Angeles, onto 542 acres it owns nearby, just outside the city limits.

The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission began a public hearing on the proposal in November. The hearing resumes at 9 a.m. Wednesday in the County Hall of Records.

“There is nothing on God’s green earth that can justify destroying a forest and turning it into a dump,” Granada Hills resident Joan Sander told people at the rally.

Sander is an organizer of a new group called Friends of the Sunshine Forest. She said Browning-Ferris plans to cut down more than 8,000 oaks to expand the landfill.

Other speakers said dust blowing off the present landfill has created health problems. “We demand the county of Los Angeles conduct an epidemiological study of this area,” said Robert Birch, a Porter Ranch resident who is active in Friends of the Sunshine Forest.

Browning-Ferris district manager Dean Wise said most of the dust generated at the landfill is kept there.

Frank Cox of the North Valley Coalition said some Granada Hill residents have lived near the dump for 31 years and should not have to put up with an addition more than twice as large.

“The unprecedented size of this thing is just hideous,” he said.

Wise, of Browning-Ferris, said the expansion is urgently needed because Los Angeles is running out of dump space. “We looked at all the other alternatives that could be used as landfill sites,” he said Monday. “We felt ours was the site with the least amount of environmental impact” and could most quickly win the needed government permits.

He said the company recently redesigned the proposal so that only 6,600 oaks would be removed over 50 years. Wise said the company has agreed to plant 17,000 oak saplings elsewhere in the county and guarantee their survival for five years.

Landfill opponents have complained that the saplings, which will take decades to mature, are not an adequate replacement for the forest. And because Browning-Ferris could plant them at scattered locations throughout the county, they said, the full oak forest would not be replaced.