Sunshine Dump to Cut Daily Use 77% : Landfills: Many garbage trucks will be turned away Monday. The facility operator blames the City Council for its denial of expansion plans.

Dumping at Sunshine Canyon Landfill will be cut to just 23% of current levels beginning Monday, owners of the landfill say.

Officials with Browning-Ferris Industries said the landfill above Granada Hills is filling rapidly and daily dumping must be cut from the current 3,000 tons to 700 tons. They said they are not sure where their customers will haul the other 2,300 tons usually dumped in the canyon each day--enough to fill 230 garbage trucks.

“If I kept it at the same volume, the landfill would be closed real fast,” said Dean Wise, district manager for Browning-Ferris.

Citing the reductions, Browning-Ferris is asking its customers to apply political pressure on local officials to allow expansion of the landfill.

Wise blamed the reduction on Los Angeles City Council members, and Councilman Hal Bernson in particular, saying the city has unreasonably refused to allow the dump to expand. In August, the Board of Referred Powers, a city panel headed by Bernson, killed the company’s request to more than double the capacity of northern sections of the dump located in Los Angeles.

In a separate but related project, Browning-Ferris still hopes to expand the dump into Los Angeles County territory and on Thursday won preliminary approval from county planning commissioners to carry out the expansion. The proposal will now go before the Board of Supervisors.

The company’s permits to operate in the city expire next September. By reducing the dump’s daily capacity, the company can keep the landfill open a year, perhaps long enough for Browning-Ferris to win the approval of the supervisors and begin dumping in the county, Wise said.

Wise wrote a letter dated Sept. 13 notifying his 170 customers, ranging from city sanitation departments to small private haulers, of the reductions.

In his letter, Wise charged that Los Angeles officials had agreed a year ago to let Browning-Ferris expand the northern section of the landfill. In return, the company would cease operations in another portion of the dump. The decision by the Board of Referred Powers to kill the expansion plan violated that agreement, he charged.

“We have abided by this compromise, but the city has not,” he wrote.

“That’s a lie,” said Greig Smith, an aide to Bernson.

Browning-Ferris was never guaranteed the right to expand a year ago, Smith said. “They are trying to make a political game out of this,” Smith said of the letter. “It’s a lobbying technique. It’s a cheap shot.”

In an interview, Wise said that although the city never guaranteed that Browning-Ferris could expand, company officials had thought expansion was virtually assured because of the remarks and actions of city zoning officials.

In his letter Wise urged his customers to lobby the City Council so that “your right to use Sunshine will not be sacrificed for the selfish interests of a small minority in one limited area.”

Asked if he was trying to force the city to approve the expansion, Wise said: “No, not by any means. I’m just trying to let my customers know what I’m doing. It’s simply the truth of my situation.”

As for the company’s plans to operate the dump in the county, an aide to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, Rosa Kortizija, said she doubted the troubles affecting the city portion of the dump would prompt the supervisor to quicken his deliberations on the county proposal.

Wise said he cannot predict what his customers will do Monday. Some may dump their loads at landfills in Calabasas or Chiquita Canyon or try to arrive at Sunshine Canyon early to beat their competitors.

The company’s own trucks will be sent to another Browning-Ferris facility, the Azusa-Western Landfill in Azusa, to make way for customers, he said.

A spokeswoman for the city of Santa Monica, which hauls more than 300 tons of garbage to Sunshine Canyon each day, said the city will send some of its trucks to the Azusa-Western Landfill. Some Santa Monica trucks will still drive to Sunshine Canyon, but the first driver unable to enter will notify other trucks by cellular telephone to head for Azusa, said spokeswoman Frances Gonzales.