Dump Operator Offers to Slash Fee if Sunshine Canyon Is Reopened : Landfills: Los Angeles city officials aren’t saying that they will go to bat for Browning-Ferris Industries.

Browning-Ferris Industries, which wants to reopen the southern end of Sunshine Canyon to garbage dumping, has offered to allow the city to dump nearly 20% of its daily trash at the site at $15 per ton, a heavily discounted fee.

The city’s Board of Public Works, which heard a report on the offer at its meeting Monday, noted that Browning-Ferris’ prices were very attractive. But officials refused to signal that the board would join forces with the firm to lobby for whatever planning permits are needed to reopen dumping on the so-called southern mesa area of Sunshine Canyon.

Browning-Ferris has previously offered to reserve space for city-collected garbage at Sunshine if the city would let dumping take place on the southern mesa. But the firm has never before said what it would charge the city.

“Sure is a nice tipping fee,” board member Dennis Nishikawa told his colleagues Monday. A tipping fee is a per-ton fee that landfill operators charge garbage collectors.

Del Biagi, chief of the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, called the proposed $15-per-ton fee “very cheap,” nearly $4 per ton less than what the city pays at other private landfills that it uses.

The offer stipulates that Sunshine would accept 1,000 tons of the city’s garbage a day out of the 5,500 to 6,000 tons that city crews collect daily.

But Biagi said later that he is still “not ready to go to the City Council with a private landfill operator and push for their project,” even though the city, like many other jurisdictions throughout Southern California, finds itself increasingly strapped to find sites to dispose of the household garbage it collects.

Biagi told the Board of Public Works on Monday that renewed dumping in the southern canyon area would require a zoning variance, according to an opinion reached in September by Jack Sedwick, a city planning official.

But as Browning-Ferris has given more details about its offer, Biagi was unanimously directed by the board to ask the city Planning Commission if Sedwick’s opinion was correct.

In an interview, Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents the northwest San Fernando Valley, said he remained adamantly opposed to renewed dumping on the southern mesa. Granada Hills homeowners have fought the entire landfill for years.

Browning-Ferris, which owns Sunshine Canyon, was barred from landfilling in the southern portion of the canyon by the Los Angeles City Council in July, 1989.

Earlier this year, the city’s Board of Referred Powers, chaired by Bernson, blocked a Browning-Ferris bid to expand its authorized landfill operations in the northern part of the canyon.

“They’re trying to get their foot in the door again,” Bernson said. “Browning-Ferris was turned down cold before. They’re just not giving up.”