Board Seeks to Nearly Double Lopez Canyon Dump’s Capacity

A Los Angeles city panel Friday recommended doubling the capacity of the controversial Lopez Canyon Landfill in Lake View Terrace and creating a $5-million fund to provide amenities such as new parks in the adjacent community.

On a 4-0 vote, the city’s Board of Public Works endorsed an expansion proposal aimed at reducing the noise and unsightliness caused by the dump’s operations by relocating the access road used by city garbage trucks. City sanitation officials said those revisions would cut into the landfill’s capacity and shorten its usable life span by several years.

The expansion of the city-owned landfill would allow for an increase in the number of trucks--from 400 to 650--using the dump each day and would extend the working life of the dump through the year 2005. The expansion would nearly double the dump’s capacity to 26 million tons.

Councilman Ernani Bernardi called the board’s recommendations an “encouraging first step” toward reducing the “level of misery” of residents living near the dump. “But we’re still not satisfied,” said Bernardi, who represents the area.

Bernardi said the city should cut the number of trucks hauling garbage to Lopez Canyon to 200 a day from 400.

Instrumental in producing the plan were board members Felicia Marcus, an environmental lawyer, and Percy Duran, a lawyer and former executive with a private solid waste management firm. The two are the most junior members of the board, which is run by appointees of Mayor Tom Bradley.

The modified plan also was endorsed earlier by the city’s Solid Waste Citizens Advisory Group, whose 15 members are appointed by the City Council.

The $5-million amenities fund was characterized by the Public Works Board as an effort to become a “good neighbor.” Board members said it could be used, for example, to create recreational facilities, plant trees or for other mitigations of the dump’s negative impacts.

Duran had earlier said he would consider using such a fund to make cash payments to people who live near the dump. But that idea was not among the suggested uses for the money.

The modified plan adopted by the Public Works Board allowed the increase in the number of trucks sought by the city Bureau of Sanitation, but the recommendation to relocate the so-called haul road to the landfill effectively trimed several years off the dump’s life span, bureau executives Mike Miller and Malcolm Toy said.

The bureau plan called for the road to wind up the outer face of a ridge that forms one side of the bowl-shaped dump. Under this plan, the road and the trucks on it would be visible to homeowners, and the noise from the trucks grinding up the hill would be annoying, according to environmental documents.

The environmental documents said these impacts were significant and could not be lessened.

The plan adopted by the board, however, called for the haul road to wind up the inner face of the same ridge. With the road and trucks inside the bowl, their impact would be reduced, the board said.

Bureau of Sanitation officials, after more than two hours of public hearings on the expansion, said they could accept the modified plan--even though it would reduce the dump’s capacity below what they had sought.

Another motion introduced Friday by Bernardi called on the city to guarantee that it would never use as a landfill 400 acres it is now seeking to buy around Lopez Canyon. The property is being purchased as a buffer zone to the landfill.

Last week the council agreed to enter into a partnership with the County Board of Supervisors to develop a landfill at Elsmere Canyon, situated north of Santa Clarita. That agreement includes a pledge to close Lopez Canyon as a landfill within one year of Elsmere Canyon being opened as a dump.