L.A. City and County Bury the Hatchet in Joint Landfill Project

Billing it as a historic moment, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to end its long garbage disposal feud with the city of Los Angeles by forming a partnership to jointly confront the region’s growing garbage problem.

Under the agreement, the city and county would create a huge dump in Elsmere Canyon in the Santa Clarita Valley. The city of Los Angeles would be entitled to dump a large portion of its garbage there.

Perhaps the biggest winners in the proposed pact, which still must be approved by the Los Angeles City Council, are Westside activists who have vehemently opposed the county’s effort to operate landfills in Mission, Rustic and Sullivan canyons. The county’s sanitation districts would agree never to use the three Santa Monica Mountains canyons as dumps.

Rustic and Sullivan canyons would be preserved for public recreational use. The agreement would permit the county to sell its Mission Canyon property, which at one time was a county landfill, to a third party.

Other potential winners could be San Fernando Valley residents, who have lobbied to close the city-operated Lopez Canyon landfill near Lake View Terrace. Under the agreement, the city dump will close within a year after the Elsmere Canyon facility opens.

The pact, however, does leave open the possibility of reopening Lopez Canyon if Elsmere Canyon is full and can no longer accept garbage. Some activists have charged that the proposal to close Lopez Canyon is an attempt to deceive them into supporting the agreement.

The proposal has outraged the Santa Clarita City Council, which last month voted unanimously to oppose the dump. Critics contend the landfill would pollute Santa Clarita air and underground water supplies and lead to traffic jams.

The board approved the agreement Tuesday on a 3-1 vote, with Supervisor Pete Schabarum opposed.

“I think today this board has the opportunity to take a major step toward laying the foundation for meeting the solid waste disposal (needs) for Los Angeles County for several decades,” Supervisor Deane Dana said before the vote. “And that’s what this tentative agreement creating this solid waste management joint powers authority represents.”

Supervisor Ed Edelman, whose district encompasses much of the Westside, agreed.

“I think this agreement between the city and county is a historic agreement,” Edelman said. “It recognizes for the first time that we both face a common enemy, and that is the failure in the past to work together to solve a very important need.”

The earliest sanitation officials could open the Elsmere Canyon landfill, which has a capacity of 190 million tons, is 1995. The dump would be operated by a new joint city-county public agency, which would need approvals by various government agencies certifying the dump is environmentally safe.

In an effort to appease Santa Clarita officials, the agreement includes provisions that the dump authority would pay that city 5 cents for every ton dumped at the site. The city of Los Angeles also would donate 50 acres it owns in Saugus for a Santa Clarita civic center site, and another 160 acres in Saugus would be transferred to a Castaic Lake water agency.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Santa Clarita City Councilman Dennis Koontz unsuccessfully urged the supervisors not to approve the plan until an environmental impact report is completed. Saying he is disappointed but not surprised, he promised that the city of Santa Clarita “would regroup and will come out with a strategy.”

The site of the proposed dump is owned by the U.S. Forest Service, but BKK Inc., a solid waste management company, is negotiating to buy it. The joint powers agency would eventually buy the land from BKK after the company had obtained environmental approvals for the project.