Horse Owners Bridle at L.A. Waste Proposal : Council: The plan would bar dumping of equine manure with weekly garbage pickups.

The Los Angeles City Council is accustomed to having citizens call some of their proposals horse manure. But a new one under consideration contains the real stuff.

The council’s Budget and Finance Committee this week proposed a ban on the dumping of manure in the city’s weekly garbage pickups. City Bureau of Sanitation officials support the regulation, saying it would lighten the load at garbage dumps, which are filling up with refuse at an alarming rate.

“Our position is that it isn’t typical household refuse,” explained Brent Lorscheider, the sanitation bureau’s recycling division program manager.

Formal public hearings will allow the city’s 1,500 registered horse owners to have their say. But some owners are already galloping mad out in horse country, in the Shadow Hills and Sunland area of the city--where streets are named Mustang, equine figures are stenciled on mailboxes and the real things go about their business in back yards.

“It’s a really crappy idea,” fumed singer Delaney Bramlett, whose place is called the Rock-n-Roll Ranch. Looking over his two cutting horses, Bramlett--who once sang in the rock duo Delaney and Bonnie--came up with what someday could be Los Angeles’ version of the odoriferous danger faced by pedestrians strolling on New York City sidewalks:

“If they don’t let us put it in the trash cans, then I’ll have to ride them out in the street every day,” Bramlett warned. “Won’t that be pretty?”

Stormy Knight, owner of three horses who fill up two garbage cans every three days, predicted that “there’s going to be a lot of screaming over this one.”

Knight’s garbage cans, however, are picked up by a private disposal company that turns the manure over to a fertilizer processor. “We didn’t think it would be fair to have that much garbage,” she said, noting her family is ecology-minded.

City sanitation officials explained that horses are being singled out--while dogs and cats are exempted--because of simple arithmetic: The amount and weight of horse manure, they said, is daunting.

“It adds up in a big hurry,” Lorscheider said.

Alice Coyer of Shadow Hills said the city proposal “just doesn’t make sense. It’s a lot more biodegradable than plastic products.” She puts very little of the manure from her three horses into the city trash; most is taken by friends for gardening and lawn fertilizer.

But Suzy Cronin, who has three horses and lives next to neighbors who don’t, says she doesn’t think it’s neighborly to spread it in the yard. “Wouldn’t they love it?” she said.

If anyone should know what to do with horse manure, it’s the four Los Angeles area race tracks, where the best bet may be on the regularity of the horses. None of the four--Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, Los Alamitos and Pomona--dump their manure in city trash, but all have trouble giving it away.

The 7,000 horses stabled at the four tracks generate more than 350 tons of refuse each day combining manure, straw and sometimes wood chips, said Kenneth Palmer, Santa Anita’s physical plant director. A single race horse can create 30 pounds of manure a day, and Santa Anita alone produces more than 100 tons of manure-based refuse each day, Palmer said.

Twenty years ago, when there was more local agriculture, manure was more salable in the area. Now, racetracks sell some manure to mushroom farms. Most, however, is shipped out of state for agricultural use or to power plants for fuel.

Horse manure is not the only waste that might be prohibited in garbage cans: The Sanitation Bureau is also suggesting a ban on the dumping of grass cuttings.

Suzy Cronin wonders if the grass glut could be solved by feeding horses with the cuttings--as long as the grass has not turned toxic with heat or age. “So you get rid of your grass clipping problem,” she reasoned. “But then, you know what happens when horses eat the grass.”