Residents to Sue Over Dump Plan

The city of Los Angeles and a group of north San Fernando Valley residents are filing separate lawsuits arguing that expansion of Sunshine Canyon Landfill violates California environmental law.

The lawsuits to be filed today claim the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors did not adequately consider the environmental effects before voting 4 to 1 to allow Browning-Ferris Industries to enlarge the Granada Hills garbage dump by 200 acres so it can accept 8,000 tons of garbage daily.

At a news conference outside the dump Thursday morning, members of the North Valley Coalition and City Councilman Hal Bernson said the environmental impact report failed to analyze the full effect of the expansion on the community or to examine alternatives to expansion.

The lawsuit by the residents, who are represented by environmental attorney Antonio Rossmann, also contends that the supervisors’ decision is invalid because at the time of the vote the board did not fairly represent Latino residents.

U.S. District Judge David Kenyon ordered the county on June 4 to redraw supervisorial district boundaries to create a largely Latino district. The county complied, but eight months elapsed before an election was held to fill the new seat.

The lawsuit contends the Feb. 19 Sunshine Canyon vote should be thrown out because it occurred after June 4 and before the new supervisor, Gloria Molina, took office March 8.

“You had a board that was determined to be unlawful,” Rossmann said. “One remedy to that is to invalidate their actions.”

Deputy City Atty. Keith Pritsker said he may amend the city lawsuit to include the argument that the expansion vote violated voting rights of Latinos. “There is a certain appeal to the argument,” Pritsker said.

But legal experts said they were skeptical that courts would agree with that reasoning.

“By extension of their argument, you could get rid of all votes that have been taken since the redistricting in 1981,” said Jonathan Steinberg, a redistricting expert who said he has never heard of a court upholding such an argument in the wake of other court-ordered redistrictings.

UCLA law professor Daniel Lowenstein said he had never heard of such a suit before. But he speculated that “the chances of a case succeeding on that kind of a theory are extremely small. Every time you get a new constitutional ruling, you can’t go back and undo everything that the government has done. Where do you draw the line?”

Rossmann said he believed BFI officials rushed to bring the issue to the supervisors while Pete Schabarum--who favored the expansion--was still on the board, although Kenyon had already ruled that district boundaries in place at the time discriminated against Latino voters.

“They were rushing to get this thing through because they did not want to face a new board,” Rossmann said.

At the Thursday morning news conference called by the group to announce the filing of the two suits, City Councilman Bernson, who lives about half a mile from Sunshine Canyon and who opposes the expansion, said the redistricting issue is a “very, very valid reason for overturning” the expansion vote.

County lawyers contend, however, that the board was acting legally in the months between the Kenyon ruling and Molina’s swearing-in.

Roger Whitby, senior assistant county counsel, said both the state law and the county charter provide for a supervisor to remain in office until his or her successor is sworn in. He said Kenyon also held that the board would be functioning legally until a new supervisor could be sworn in.