Agencies in Turf Battle Over Open Spaces : Environment: County sanitation officials want canyons for landfills. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy would preserve them as parkland.

To some people, deep canyons are refuges for wildlife, buffers against sprawl, places to take a hike. To others, they are ideally suited to provide a basic service as receptacles for trash.

This conflict of needs and values has spurred a land rush between two aggressive public agencies with vastly different goals. One is the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, which disposes of waste water and trash for 78 cities in the county, and now is prospecting in the Santa Clarita and northern San Fernando valleys for remote canyons to use as landfill sites.

The other is the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state parks agency that covets some of the same real estate for parks and trails.

“It’s a lot like a race and frankly, I hope the conservancy wins,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

“It seems like everywhere we go, they show up,” said Joe Haworth Jr., a Sanitation Districts spokesman. Because parks and landfills both “involve open space, we’re bound to bump into each other sooner or later,” he said.

Lately they’ve been bumping into each other with regularity, which could prove a political problem for the smaller and less potent conservancy.

The conservancy’s collision with the districts could affect an ambitious proposal to raise money for improving county parks, beaches and museums. A proposed $816-million bond issue includes about $90 million for the conservancy, and county supervisors must decide by early next month whether to put it on the November ballot.

Angered by the turf battle, Supervisor Deane Dana has insisted that there be language in the measure barring the conservancy from spending bond funds for land wanted by the districts. Even if that restriction is included, Dana has not said whether he will support putting the proposal before voters.

The fallout has spread to Sacramento, where the conservancy and its legislative allies recently were forced to scale back trail-building plans under pressure from the districts.

At issue was a proposed expansion of the Rim of the Valley Corridor, including lands surrounding Elsmere and Towsley canyons, both potential landfill sites in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The corridor is a zone in the local mountains where the conservancy has authority to create horse and hiking trails. It has no power to restrict landfills or other projects. Still, the districts feared the corridor designation could be ammunition for anti-dump forces in future landfill siting battles. Areas around Towsley and Elsmere were dropped to avoid risking a legislative committee veto of the expansion.

Despite their skirmishing, sanitation and conservancy officials speak of each other with a measure of respect.

“I don’t have any desire to try to characterize what they’re doing,” said Donald S. Nellor, chief of planning and engineering for the districts’ Solid Waste Management Department. “They’re a public agency attempting to fulfill their mandate . . . and so are we.”

“Rare in government, they have long-term objectives,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the conservancy, referring to the Sanitation Districts. “Unfortunately, their goals were pretty much decided in the late ‘50s,” he said.

The districts plan to create at least two big landfills from among four prospective sites: Elsmere, Towsley and Blind canyons in the Santa Susana Mountains above Chatsworth, and Mission-Rustic-Sullivan, a network of three canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Due to objections by conservationists and influential Westside residents, the canyons in the Santa Monicas are almost untouchable, which has increased pressure in favor of Elsmere, Towsley and Blind.

An environmental impact report on the suitability of the four sites will not appear in draft form until at least next month. But the districts have wasted no time in trying to lock up all of the land they can.

For their part, conservancy officials say they are out to preserve parks, not block landfills. However, their pursuit of that goal appears to have knocked the Blind Canyon site out of contention.

In April, the conservancy stunned the Sanitation Districts by reaching a tentative agreement with entertainer Bob Hope to purchase his 4,369-acre Runkle Ranch, of which Blind Canyon is a part. Conservancy officials said the acquisition preserves a vital wildlife corridor linking animal populations in the Santa Susanas, Simi Hills and Santa Monica Mountains.

Officials of the Sanitation Districts had been negotiating with Hope for years and are thought to have offered substantially more than the below-market $10 million that the conservancy would pay. The deal is contingent on approval of a big golf and residential project on Hope’s Jordan Ranch property in eastern Ventura County. But for now at least, Blind Canyon is beyond the Sanitation Districts’ reach.

However, the districts have the upper hand at Towsley on the other side of the Santa Susanas. They have optioned about 900 acres in Towsley, and the conservancy--which wants Towsley for the proposed Santa Clarita Woodlands State Park--has been unable to obtain land in the canyon proper.

However, the conservancy has acquired 145 acres near the mouth of the canyon, in effect blocking the best access road for trash trucks.

“They are in the way of what we believe to be probably the most suitable access,” said Nellor, adding that an alternative access route is possible.

The competition between the agencies began last year over the other two sites, Elsmere and the Santa Monica Mountains canyons. Los Angeles city and county officials were negotiating creation of a landfill at Elsmere to be run by the Sanitation Districts. The conservancy did not try to snap up the Elsmere site, but insisted that the destruction of Elsmere be mitigated by the transfer to conservancy ownership of the three canyons in the Santa Monicas, which are owned by the county and the districts.

The conservancy joined forces with BKK Corp., a private waste disposal firm that held land and options at Elsmere, in an effort to enhance each party’s bargaining strength. BKK ultimately accepted a lucrative buyout offer from the city and county. The city and county, however, also agreed to preserve at least two of the canyons in the Santa Monicas if Elsmere becomes a landfill.

Larry Berg, director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, said the conflict suggests the need for regional government to resolve land-use conflicts. “You’ve got to have landfills and . . . you need parks as well,” he said. Following their legal mandates, both agencies are “looking to solve one of these problems and not all of them,” Berg said.

At the same time, according to Berg, area sanitation officials have been slow to inaugurate recycling and waste-reduction programs, thus aggravating the problem.