Planners Urge Conditional Expansion for 2 Dumps : Lopez Canyon: A city panel votes to allow the facility to remain open at least five more years but restrictions lead landfill opponents to claim at least a partial victory.

The Los Angeles Planning Commission voted Thursday to permit the expansion of the controversial Lopez Canyon Landfill and to allow the dump to remain open for at least five more years to handle the city’s household trash.

After a more than two-hour public hearing, during which dump opponents urged that the landfill be closed for good in 1995, commissioners voted 4 to 1 to allow the city’s Bureau of Sanitation to expand the facility in the northeastern San Fernando Valley. The dump’s current permit was to have expired this year.

But the commission refused to set a date for closing the landfill because Chairman William F. Luddy and other commissioners said that was not within their jurisdiction.

“That will be up to the commission to decide in five years” when the newly granted permit expires, Luddy said. “Some of us may not even be here then. We can’t make promises for future members.”

“I would like to limit it to five years but we can’t under the law,” added Commissioner Theodore Stein Jr.

The commission did set conditions on the permit that they said they hope will make the dump’s operations less objectionable to its neighbors, leading landfill opponents to claim at least a partial victory.

“Obviously, we wanted to hear it ordered closed in 1995,” said Kagel Canyon resident Rob Zapple, who has been a leader in the fight against the dump. “But the restrictions placed on the dump are positive things for the community.”

Zapple said landfill foes will have an opportunity to get other restrictions placed on dump operations when the commission’s actions go before the City Council for approval next month.

In addition to permission to expand dumping operations into unused portions of the landfill, the Bureau of Sanitation had sought to increase the number of trucks going to the landfill from the current 400 daily to 650, to raise the height of the landfill by 70 feet and to continue operating the dump until 2005.

But commissioners limited daily truck trips to 400 a day and allowed sanitation officials to raise the landfill’s height only in areas where, as Luddy put it, the dump would not “cast a shadow on Kagel Canyon.”

Under the permit granted by the commission, an impartial third party acceptable to sanitation officials and dump opponents will be hired to monitor the landfill’s operations. The sanitation bureau also will be required to submit a plan for final closure of already filled canyons in the landfill by Dec. 15.

“We’re pleased,” said Michael M. Miller, assistant director of the sanitation bureau, after the hearing. “We can live within the conditions.”

During the hearing, J. Malcolm Toy, the bureau’s chief sanitary engineer, said the bureau still plans to keep Lopez Canyon open beyond 1995 until other dump sites become available. Were the dump closed now, trash probably would “stay on the street,” he said.

Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) led a parade of speakers who urged that the commission order the landfill shut down. “Make the commitment to close Lopez in 1995,” he said. “Our community is bursting from the wastefulness of a disposable society. Our backs are breaking under the weight of the city’s broken promises.

“The failure of the city to plan ahead should not be borne by one neighborhood,” Katz added.

If Lopez Canyon Landfill were operated by a private company instead of by the city, “it would be closed now” because of violations in state air pollution laws, said Lewis Snow, president of the Lake View Terrace Home Owners Assn.

The dump is a continuing public nuisance because it has been cited 38 times in 17 months for various violations of state laws, Snow said. “Nobody is willing to hold the city accountable.”

“This is so frustrating to me,” said Commissioner Suzette Neiman, who voted against the expansion. “This is a city agency that’s not doing all the things it should be doing. The public’s getting the short end of the stick. If I had my way, we’d close it until it got its act together.”

The commission, in a separate action, asked its staff to initiate proceedings that would prohibit the building of any new houses within 2,000 feet of the dump.

In a related matter Thursday, South Coast Air Quality Management District attorneys presented an agreement with the city to the district’s hearing board that would set deadlines for the installation of a system to control methane gas emissions.