County Joins L.A. in Elsmere Canyon Pact : Landfill: A proposed joint powers agreement calls for the creation of a 190-million-ton dump in the Santa Clarita Valley.

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 confront the region’s growing garbage problem together.

Under the agreement, the city and county, operating under a joint powers authority, 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. Under the agreement, the county’s sanitation districts would agree never to convert the three canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains into dumps.

Rustic and Sullivan canyons would be turned over to a public agency for recreational purposes. The agreement would permit the county to sell its Mission Canyon property, which at one time was a county landfill.

Other potential winners could be San Fernando Valley residents who have lobbied to close the Lopez Canyon landfill near Lake View Terrace. Under the agreement, the city-owned dump will close within a year after the Elsmere Canyon Landfill opens. The pact, however, leaves open the possibility of reactivating Lopez Canyon if Elsmere Canyon no longer can accept garbage. Some activists have alleged that the proposal to close Lopez Canyon is an attempt to deceive them into supporting the agreement.

The board approved the joint powers agreement on a 3 to 1 vote, with Supervisor Pete Schabarum opposing the proposal.

“I think today this board has the opportunity to take a major step toward laying the foundation for meeting the solid waste disposal 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 an 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 soonest that sanitation officials could open the 190-million-ton Elsmere Canyon Landfill is 1995. The dump would be operated by the new public agency, which would need approvals by various government agencies certifying that the dump would be environmentally safe.

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

In an effort to appease Santa Clarita officials, the agreement includes provisions that the dump authority 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 that he was 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.