Council Panel Supports City-County Operation of Elsmere Canyon Dump : Landfill: The committee says a joint agency should run the operation. The endorsement includes a recycling requirement.

A Los Angeles City Council committee endorsed a plan by the city and county Tuesday to open a large dump in Elsmere Canyon and to set up a joint powers agency to oversee its operation.

The council’s Environmental Quality and Waste Management Committee voted 3 to 0 to recommend that the full council approve the plan later this month.

But the committee also included suggestions by Councilwoman Ruth Galanter to encourage recycling. Under the Galanter proposal, private trash haulers operating within the city would be required to remove “all feasibly recyclable materials” from trash before it could be dumped at the proposed Elsmere Canyon Landfill.

Elsmere Canyon is in unincorporated county territory north of Sylmar. Committee members emphasized Tuesday that final adoption of the plan would not constitute approval of the landfill. An environmental impact report on the landfill proposal is expected later this year. The county ultimately would have to approve the impact report and the landfill.

Committee Chairman Marvin Braude lauded the joint powers plan as something that he hoped would “open the door to future cooperation and great accomplishment” by the city and county.

But at a public hearing before the committee last Friday, the plan was broadly attacked for containing too few incentives to recycle. The opponents argued that the fees the joint powers agency--to be known as the Los Angeles Solid Waste Authority--would charge waste haulers for trash dumping were too low and thus would not encourage aggressive attempts to recycle.

The Galanter motion, however, had won some praise at last week’s hearing as an attempt to impose recycling limits on the private haulers.

Among other things, the joint powers plan calls for the county to drop landfill plans for Rustic, Sullivan and Mission canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains if a dump is opened in Elsmere Canyon. The agreement also calls for the city’s Lopez Canyon dump to close within a year from the opening of the proposed Elsmere dump.

County officials have said that the Elsmere Canyon Landfill would have a capacity of 190 million tons and would go a long way toward solving the region’s trash problems for 40 years or more.