Waste Firms Courting Politicians With Lobbyists : City Hall: Companies try to get lucrative contracts for landfills and waste bins. Almost $1 million has been spent in the last three years for high-powered lobbying campaigns.

With lucrative landfill permits, multimillion-dollar garbage bin contracts and sewage sludge treatment licenses up for grabs at City Hall, private waste management companies have launched expensive lobbying campaigns to help them win a share of the action.

Waste management firms have shelled out $922,000 in the last three years for the services of blue-chip lobbyists, according to legislative advocate reports filed quarterly at City Hall.

In the three previous years, 1985-1987, the firms spent less than $60,000 on such efforts.

“It’s natural that we’re seeing more lobbyists,” said Mike Miller, a deputy chief in the city’s Bureau of Sanitation. “This is going to be the decade of trash. Trash is now a commodity. It’s valuable now to have a place to put it.”

Lobbying became so rambunctious last fall over the first of $73 million in contracts to supply garbage bins, the Los Angeles City Council passed a measure to have subsequent jobs awarded under a sealed bidding process to minimize the arm-twisting.

In using lobbyists to gain access to political decision-makers, the waste companies are following the lead of developers, who have been known to spend $500,000 trying to win support for projects such as the 1,300-acre Porter Ranch development.

“For me to go to City Hall alone and knock on a councilman’s door, and say, ‘Hi, I’m Dean Wise’--I’d get nowhere,” said Dean Wise, district manager of the Sunshine Canyon landfill, north of Granada Hills.

To help it fight city efforts to limit dumping there, Wise’s employer, Browning-Ferris Industries, hired $136,000-worth of lobbying talent. Recruited were attorney Randall Stoke and Maureen Kindel, who, as former president of the Board of Public Works, used to oversee the Bureau of Sanitation, which is responsible for the city’s garbage collection and sewage disposal.

The company won some delays, but the lobbyists were unable to get approval for expansion of the landfill or head off an order to shut down by September the portion within Los Angeles city limits.

The amount of money at stake justifies spending large amounts on lobbying, waste industry officials say.

* In the last 2 1/2 years, Los Angeles has paid BKK Corp., a locally owned landfill operator, $25.9 million to dispose of trash and sewage sludge. BKK also has an agreement to develop a joint city-county landfill in Elsmere Canyon, near Santa Clarita, that could be worth $125 million to the company. BKK spent $86,717 on lobbyists during the last three years.

* Waste Management of North America, owner of the Bradley West landfill in Sun Valley, was paid $14.3 million under city dumping contracts during the same period. It paid lobbyists $322,000.

* Chemfix Technologies Inc., which paid $13,900 to lobbyist Fran Savitch, a former top aide to Mayor Tom Bradley, got $9.4 million in work to treat the city’s sewage sludge so it could be buried safely in landfills.

The stakes are particularly high now because the city is developing a long-range solid waste management program that will include tens of millions of dollars in jobs such as operating citywide recycling centers and garbage transfer stations.

One company bidding for part of the vast program, Mine Reclamation Corp., has paid Kindel’s firm, Rose & Kindel, $77,715 to lobby for its proposal to haul city garbage by railroad to Eagle Mountain, an old iron mine in the desert of Riverside County.

“My job is to educate the city staff and city elected officials about the possibilities of long-distance rail hauling,” Kindel said.

Waste Management is pushing a competing rail-hauling idea, with a San Bernardino County destination, and is counting on Fitch/Davis Associates to be “our eyes and ears at City Hall,” according to David Kelly, the firm’s legal counsel.

Fitch/Davis was founded by Alma Fitch, who took up lobbying after stints as an aide to former state Treasurer Jesse M. Unruh and Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman.

Last summer, Fitch/Davis persuaded Waste Management officials to contribute $2,000 to a fund-raising event for the Hollenbeck Youth Center, a cause boosted by Bradley. Kelly said he got to meet the mayor and to exchange pleasantries with him.

“It was strictly social, no business. Hopefully, the next time I meet the mayor, he’ll remember,” Kelly said.

Last November, several companies fought fiercely for portions of $73 million being spent to buy tens of thousands of garbage cans for the city’s recycling program. Because bids were being judged not just on price but a variety of factors--such as how much of the cans would be made of recycled material--city officials had great discretion picking among them.

This competition attracted a who’s who of lobbyists, including Kindel, two former city councilmen, Art Snyder and David Cunningham, and Ken Spiker, the former chief legislative analyst for the City Council.

One company’s share rose and fell during a months-long selection process culminating in a vote by the council. The company, Otto Industries Inc., which spent $27,700 to be represented by Kindel, Cunningham and Spiker, at various times had 55%, 80%, 20% and 50% of the business of supplying 90-gallon containers.

The episode prompted City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky to author the successful motion to have only the price at issue in future garbage can contracts and the winner picked by sealed bids.

“I wanted to minimize the extraneous influences . . . the lobbying,” Yaroslavsky said.

As dumping has decreased at the city’s Lopez Canyon landfill in Lake View Terrace--in large part because of nearby homeowners’ complaints about odor and noise--demand has increased for private sites to accommodate Los Angeles’ mountains of trash.

But landfills are not popular neighbors. So the Los Angeles By-Products Co. spent $209,920 on a lobbyist the last three years not just to help obtain a city permit to operate a dump at a former gravel quarry in Sun Valley, but to guide it in a public relations campaign.

Under Fitch/Davis’ tutelage, the waste firm proposed building a golf course on the landfill and its president, C.D. VanGorden, went door-to-door in Sun Valley to sell the project to residents. He also talked to chambers of commerce and business groups.

“We had everybody’s support but Councilman (Ernani) Bernardi’s and Assemblyman (Richard) Katz,” VanGorden said.

But that opposition was enough to quash the landfill plan late last year, another reminder that expensive lobbying does not guarantee success.

In another case, Councilman Hal Bernson charged that one of the waste companies was trying, in effect, to peddle garbage--in a negative public relations campaign directed at him.

Bernson said Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI) prepared a dossier on him, including his campaign financing and city expense account records, because he endorsed shutting down its Sunshine Canyon landfill. He said the records were circulated among news media in an attempt to discredit him.

“We’re absolutely sure that BFI was behind it,” said Greig Smith, Bernson’s chief deputy.

Stoke and Wise--the lobbyist and manager for the company--denied any knowledge of the dossier.

COST OF THE LANDFILL LOBBY Expenditures from January, 1988, to September, 1990:

COMPANY/ORGANIZATION AMOUNT NUMBER of LOBBYISTS Waste Management of North America $322,000 2 Los Angeles By-Products Co. $209,920 3 Browning-Ferris Industries $136,112 5 Mine Reclamation Corp. $77,715 3 BKK Corp. $86,717 4 Society of Plastics Industries $32,000 4 Otto Industries $27,700 5 Chemfix Technologies $13,900 1 Greater L.A. Solid Waste Mgmt. Council $10,000 1 Council for Solid Waste Solutions $3,000 1 Toter Inc. $3,000 1 TOTAL $922,064

Source: Los Angeles City Council lobbying reports