Officials Lead Criticism of Proposals for 4 Landfills

About 200 boisterous anti-dump activists from the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Simi valleys strongly denounced plans Tuesday night to open landfills in mountain canyons ringing the valleys.

The first of several dozen speakers, Santa Clarita Mayor Jo Anne Darcy, summed up the feelings of many at the public hearing at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills. A proposed integrated waste management plan, she said, “won’t manage solid waste, it will only bury it. . . . It is a thinly disguised program to put landfills away from the centers of political power.”

The hearing was held to collect public comments on the environmental impact report prepared on four proposed canyon dump sites.

The report said landfills could be operated safely in Blind Canyon above Chatsworth, Towsley Canyon a few miles south of Six Flags Magic Mountain, Elsmere Canyon north of Sylmar and east of Santa Clarita, and Mission, Rustic and Sullivan, a series of canyons forming a single dump site south of Mulholland Drive and west of the San Diego Freeway.

Seventy-five people asked to testify, including representatives for Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), Simi Valley City Councilwoman Ann Rock and members of the North Valley Coalition, Mothers and Others Against Dumps, and the Santa Clarita Valley Canyons Preservation Committee.

In a prepared statement, Wright said: “I find it difficult to believe that the only environmentally sound locations in which to locate landfills in Los Angeles and Ventura counties occur along a 20-mile corridor roughly paralleling the 118 Freeway.”

One after another, speakers said the report failed to address the hazards of landfills in depth and ignored alternatives to urban trash dumps.

The capacity of the four sites ranges from 125 million tons to 225 million tons of trash. The landfills could remain open from 20 to 50 years, depending on the rate of disposal.

The report acknowledged that the dumps would wipe out rustic wildlife habitat but said advanced waste-management techniques and careful planning could eliminate or reduce most of the noise, odor and truck traffic associated with landfills.

The report, released in August, was sponsored by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, which dispose of trash for 78 cities, and the county Department of Public Works.

The report did not rank the canyons in order of preference but suggested that at least three sites would have to become landfills to meet the county’s growing demand for dump space.

But political forces have already singled out Elsmere Canyon as a probable site if it passes strict environmental reviews.