Sunshine Landfill Critics Want Trash Sent by Rail to Desert : Garbage: The activists call for transfer stations in Chatsworth, Sylmar, Van Nuys, Canoga Park and Burbank-Sun Valley.

Opponents of the proposed expansion of the Sunshine Canyon Landfill on Monday unveiled their own plan for disposing of the region’s trash: shipping it by rail to the desert.

The plan outlined by San Fernando Valley homeowners and activists called for closing city and county landfills, recycling as much trash as possible and sending the rest to an unspecified new dump in the desert. Transfer stations where trash would be loaded from trucks onto rail cars could be located in Chatsworth, Sylmar, Van Nuys, Canoga Park and Burbank-Sun Valley along existing rail lines, suggested Michael Ormsby, who led a press conference organized by the North Valley Coalition and Friends of Sunshine Canyon.

But a railroad company executive who attended the briefing at a Granada Hills restaurant said such a plan would not work unless the traditional “not in my back yard” fears of Valley homeowners can be overcome.

“Unless there’s public support for transfer stations, this is not going to be a reality,” said John Spisak, president of SP Environmental Systems Inc. in Sacramento, a sister company of the Southern Pacific Transportation Co.

Spisak added that his company and other private concerns were eager to develop remote, “rail-haul” dumps but feared precisely the kind of backlash that has stalled expansion of the Sunshine Canyon Landfill north of Granada Hills.

The landfill’s owner, Browning-Ferris Industries, wants to expand its 230 acres already in operation into an additional 542 acres of unincorporated county land. The proposal is scheduled for discussion Thursday by the Regional Planning Commission, which delayed voting on it at the July 25 meeting.

The expansion proposal, which has been pending for five years, needs several county approvals, including a permit to cut down an estimated 6,000 oak trees, said supervising regional planner Richard Frazier.

The site is classified as a significant ecological area in the county General Plan, which would have to be amended to allow the dump’s expansion, he said. Frazier said the county is already considering a rail-haul system of disposing trash, among other trash-disposal plans, but was not ready to entirely give up landfills.

Still, Ormsby and about 30 other homeowners and self-proclaimed environmentalists said they would resolutely oppose landfills in Sunshine Canyon and other ecologically sensitive canyons. “I see them falling like a deck of cards if we don’t do something fast,” said Ormsby.