Planning Staff Favors Expansion of Landfill : Lopez Canyon: Officials recommend that a 5-year limit be placed on the operating permit for the controversial dump.

Los Angeles city planning officials recommended Friday that the controversial Lopez Canyon landfill near Lake View Terrace be expanded and allowed to remain open for at least five more years to handle the city’s growing trash output.

Both pro- and anti-dump factions interpreted the recommendation as at least a partial victory.

Los Angeles City Councilmen Ernani Bernardi and Joel Wachs and homeowners living near the dump have been fighting for years to close the facility, saying it is poisoning the neighborhood’s air and clogging local streets with trash trucks.

Although dump opponents did not succeed in getting the city Planning Department staff to recommend the dump be closed, as they wanted, some were heartened by the five-year limit on the dump’s operating permit that the staff recommended.

“At least they will have to come back in 1995,” said David Mays, chief deputy to Bernardi, who represents the area and has sought to either close the dump or reopen other city dumps to relieve pressure on the Lake View Terrace facility.

The city’s Bureau of Sanitation is seeking a permit to expand dumping operations into unused parts of the landfill, to increase the number of trucks per day from 400 at present to 650, to raise the height of the dump by 70 feet, to 1,840 feet above sea level, and to continue operating the landfill until 2005.

The planning staff’s recommendation goes to the City Planning Commission, which will consider the sanitation bureau’s request for the conditional use permit on Aug. 21 at a 9 a.m. hearing at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys. The commission decision is expected to be appealed to the council by whichever side is unhappy with the result.

In the staff report released Friday, planners recommended that the bureau be allowed to expand the areas in which it dumps and increase the number of trucks to 650 a day, but that the height of the dump not be allowed to rise and that the permit be only for five years.

Planning official Bob Rogers suggested that the permit be only for five years so that the case can be reviewed in 1995 “in the context of the projected opening of Elsmere Canyon,” a proposed dump in the Santa Clarita Valley that city and county officials say could handle most Los Angeles County trash for decades to come.

The city and county, which would jointly operate the Elsmere landfill, are preparing to obtain state and local permits needed to open the huge dump, possibly as early as 1995.

Rogers also said he saw no justification for increasing the height of the Lopez dump--a source of complaints from some homeowners who contend that the mountain of waste blocks light from their yards.

Michael M. Miller, assistant director of the Bureau of Sanitation, said the agency “can live with a five-year permit. We are hoping, of course, that if all goes well, Elsmere will be ready in 1995.”

Under the city-county agreement on development of Elsmere, Lopez--the sole remaining city-owned dump--is to be closed within one year after Elsmere is opened.

Miller also said that keeping the height of the mounded trash at 1,770 feet “is no problem because we did not plan to go above that height during the next five years.”

Miller also said that the bureau envisioned sending no more than 500 trucks per day to Lopez Canyon during the next five years, “but we welcome the flexibility the higher number would give us.”

Mays, Bernardi’s deputy, said that “more than 600 trucks a day will be far too much because even the 400 at present are a significant burden on the neighborhood.”

On the other hand, Mays said he was “somewhat encouraged by the staff report, because the pattern seems to be that every time a different agency takes a look at this issue, they recognize more of the problems we have been talking about.”

Anson Burlingame of Sunland, a longtime opponent of the Lopez landfill, said Friday he will ask that the Aug. 21 commission hearing be postponed until the South Coast Air Quality Management District acts on complaints that methane gas emissions from the dump are a threat to neighbors.

An air quality district hearing board took testimony again Friday in El Monte in a continuing investigation into emissions at the dump. The hearing began in April and is not expected to be completed until September.

“Evidence has been presented at these hearings that contradicts” statements made by bureau officials, Burlingame said. “How can the city try to make a decision on the conditional use permit until these hearings are over?”

At Friday’s hearing by the air quality district, several sanitation bureau officials heatedly accused the hearing board of holding the Lopez landfill to higher standards than other dumps, and said they would gather data to prove their point.

However, Ed Ostrowski, the city’s chief sanitary engineer, acknowledged in his testimony that some areas of Lopez emitted more gas than allowed by state standards, that more gas wells needed to be drilled and that the existing gas control system “needs to be fine-tuned.”

Staff writer Mayerene Barker also contributed to this story.