Judge to Rule on Review of New Dump Report : Sunshine Canyon: Landfill opponents play for time by seeking public display of the revised document.

The long-running dispute over the Sunshine Canyon Landfill entered a new legal thicket Tuesday, when a Superior Court judge began considering whether a revised environmental report must be circulated to the public and government agencies before the dump is allowed to reopen.

Attorneys for Browning-Ferris Industries, which owns the landfill, and Los Angeles County, which has approved expansion of the dump above Granada Hills, told Judge Ronald M. Sohigian that new hearings are unneeded because changes to the environmental impact report were minor.

Opponents, however, said the report must go back to the public for review before the dump can reopen--a process that could delay the project by at least six months.

After slogging through a six-hour session Tuesday, Sohigian said the hearing would continue today and Thursday.

The proceedings are the latest hurdle for the landfill expansion, which has been approved twice by Los Angeles County supervisors but is ensnared in litigation.

The dump, which straddles the city-county boundary, has been closed since September, when its permits to operate in city territory expired. Plans call for resuming dumping on about 200 acres of thickly wooded canyon in the unincorporated county area.

County supervisors approved that expansion in January, but lawyers for the city of Los Angeles and the North Valley Coalition--an alliance of residents and environmentalists--sued to overturn the decision, contending that the project’s environmental impact report was deficient.

In a ruling that gave neither side all it wanted, Sohigian declared in March that certain parts of the report were flawed and must be repaired. Among other things, he said the county should have included details of past health and zoning violations at the dump, and should have used a county panel of natural resource experts--the Significant Ecological Areas Technical Advisory Committee--to review the project.

County officials made additions to the report, and the supervisors again last month approved the dump expansion--setting the stage for Sohigian to decide if all his concerns had been addressed.

But in Tuesday’s debate, opponents said the revised report must automatically be recirculated to the public because Sohigian had found the original version flawed.

The fact that the original report was inadequate “meant that, as a minimum to cure that, the public had to have another shot,” Antonio Robbins, a lawyer for the coalition, told Sohigian.

Steven W. Weston, a lawyer for Browning-Ferris, argued that the county was not required to recirculate the report because “it was determined that the document did not contain significant new information.”

As is often the case in environmental lawsuits, the environmental report is a stand-in for opponents’ real objections to the project, which they consider destructive and unnecessary or best put someplace else.

Unable to shoot at the real target, they instead have fired at the environmental report, required for all major projects by the California Environmental Quality Act. Such reports are supposed to fully disclose significant effects of projects and alternatives to them.