Landfill Payments Proposed : Compensation: Two public works commissioners say the city should consider compensating residents near the Lopez Canyon dump if it is expanded.

Challenging official city thinking, the Board of Public Works’ two most junior members said Monday that the city of Los Angeles should consider compensating Lake View Terrace and Kagel Canyon residents if the city expands the nearby Lopez Canyon dump.

“I think we owe these residents some compensation. We’re dumping all our trash next to their homes and the rest of the city is benefiting. It’s a question of fairness,” Commissioner Percy Duran III said in an interview.

Duran’s remarks came after three of the five members of the board heard two hours of citizen complaints and criticism about an environmental impact report studying the effects of expanding the city-owned Lopez Canyon Landfill to handle a huge new influx of garbage through the year 2005.

Duran, previously the president of a solid waste recycling management firm, said compensation could take several forms: Payments to homeowners to account for the devaluation of their homes due to their proximity to the landfill; providing free electrical power to residents from a small generator fueled by methane gas produced by decaying garbage; or providing municipal amenities, such as parks.

Commissioner Felicia Marcus, an environmental activist, also said in an interview that “providing new amenities” to the affected residents or otherwise “recognizing that they are shouldering the burden for the rest of the city . . . definitely needs to be seriously explored” as the board also considers the impact report.

Lake View Terrace and Kagel Canyon residents have complained that the dump--which receives most of the household trash collected by city crews and is the only facility of its kind remaining in the city’s limits--afflicts neighbors with noise, dust and odors, reducing their property values.

The expansion plan would keep the landfill open until 2005, although critics have said the city earlier promised, at least by implication, that the dump would close by 1992. The plan also would increase the intensity of dumping, from 400 to 650 truckloads of garbage per day.

Critics of the landfill, including Councilman Ernani Bernardi, the area’s representative, said the two commissioners’ remarks signal a major shift in Board of Public Works thinking.

“It’s a good idea, a very good idea. It’s most welcome and unusual,” Bernardi said. “The dump should be viewed as a form of inverse condemnation.”

“It’s a terrific concept and it’s a long time in coming,” said Rob Zapple, a member of the Kagel Canyon Civic Assn. board of directors, a group that has led the fight against expansion.

Phyllis Hines, president of the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn., a homeowners group, welcomed the suggestions. “If we can’t stop the expansion, then I think it’s a good idea for the city to soften the burden,” Hines said.

Within the ranks of Lopez Canyon’s foes there has been talk before about compensation, including a property tax discount for affected homeowners, “but this is the first I’ve ever heard it coming from people in a position to make decisions,” she said.

Only three of the board’s five commissioners were present at Monday’s lengthy hearing, during which 21 people commented on the EIR.

The fact that the board postponed a vote on the EIR was hailed as a victory by critics, even before they learned of the compensation suggestion. The city’s Bureau of Sanitation had recommended that the board endorse Lopez Canyon expansion and send its recommendation on to the Los Angeles City Council for final approval.

But Duran and Marcus balked, saying at the board meeting that they still had many unanswered questions about the project and the EIR’s analysis of its impacts.

Commission President Steve Harrington set no date for a final vote on the matter.

Duran, who is also an attorney, said any compensation should not be conditioned upon the homeowners waiving their right to sue the city or otherwise acquiesce in the expansion. “Any money would not function as a buyout of their criticism,” he said.

“Part of our task is to figure out what’s environmentally appropriate,” Marcus said. “But we should also consider what’s fair at the same time.”