Santa Clarita Man’s Lonely Task Is Promoting a Dump

Few jobs are harder than the one Santa Clarita resident Thomas Rogers Jr. has. Selling rusty nails to castaways in life rafts comes close.

Rogers stands alone in a city of 113,000 in open support of a dump that will hold 190 million tons of garbage.

All of it in Rogers’ neighborhood.

In a town with a rich history of opposing landfills, Rogers’ role as consultant to the project’s backers, the Elsmere Corp. and the BKK Corp., has many shaking their heads.

After all, they say, Rogers has been an active member of both local chambers of commerce, has made significant contributions to local charities, and in the early 1980s helped defeat a proposed hazardous waste landfill near Sand Canyon, about five miles from the Elsmere Canyon site.

“I do feel betrayed and I do feel that he is somewhat of a turncoat,” said Santa Clarita Mayor Jan Heidt, a neighbor of Rogers in Sand Canyon. “Given his record of community service, and opposition to the other project, I find this hard to understand.”

Other opponents of the landfill are even less kind.

“Everybody has their price; they just met his,” said Pat Saletore, a leader in the opposition. “He sold out the community.”

But the easygoing, gentlemanly Irish-American, his cowboy boots clashing with a button-down dress shirt, gives quite the opposite story.

“I’m not going to do anything to hurt this city,” said Rogers, a 58-year-old retired sheriff’s lieutenant. “I have investments in this community that I don’t want to jeopardize. Both of my children live in this valley.

“If there is any chance that the water would be threatened by this dump, it just will not happen.”

Friends of Rogers, and he still has them, said they were surprised when he took the job, but not really.

“Anyone who knows him knows that you never know what to expect from him,” said Bob Kellar, president of the Canyon Country Chamber of Commerce and a friend of 14 years.

Even landfill critics say they respect Rogers for taking on the job, which includes representing BKK in Santa Clarita and relaying concerns of the community back to BKK.

Rogers, who has worked for BKK since 1989, is still welcomed in most circles, and he gets “friendly ribbing” from friends, including at chamber of commerce mixers, like the St. Patrick’s Day event where he wore a kilt.

And Rogers has his sympathizers, particularly among the business community, which is used to facing cumbersome regulatory proceedings and neighborhood opposition to development. “We have a measure of mutual Angst, “ said Connie Worden, vice president of the Valencia Industrial Assn.

But if some local residents haven’t come out against the landfill, Rogers said, neither has anyone openly supported it, even though he claims to have convinced many people of its benefits.

“For the most part, it’s very politically motivated, a political hot potato,” Rogers said. “And people who are doing business don’t want to come out for it because they would get singled out.”

Rogers has learned to stay away from other circles. “They told me to leave, so I did,” said Rogers, recalling the day the Elsmere Canyon Preservation Committee asked him to leave its meeting. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

Rogers turns grim and speaks through tightened jaws when asked if he feels the attacks against the dump have turned into assaults on him.

“They are making personal attacks on me,” including accusations of his being a spy against the community, Rogers said. “I don’t need that for me and the rest of my family.”

After taking a few moments to compose himself, Rogers added, “I don’t get much hostility except from that small group of people . . . they go for the personal attack, and that’s their prerogative.”

The sole exception to what has been a violence-free campaign was the evening when someone took a key to his car’s paint in the City Hall parking lot during a City Council meeting.

Rogers’ role, he said, is to keep his eyes and ears open to Santa Clarita’s anxieties over having a landfill just outside the city’s southeast border, across the Antelope Valley Freeway. He attends public meetings and community functions where Elsmere Canyon might be discussed and relays those concerns to BKK.

“I make sure that Santa Clarita gets taken care of,” said Rogers, his wavy red hair nestled on thin-rimmed bifocals.

Some people beg to differ.

During a recent City Council meeting, Heidt singled out Rogers, who was taking notes in the back of the room as the council discussed anti-dump strategies: “It’s real hard having you in the room, Mr. Rogers.”

Heidt and others feel BKK has an unfair advantage because it can listen to its opponents’ strategy sessions, while similar BKK meetings are closed to the public.

Heidt challenged Rogers to defend the BKK proposal, to which he responded, “That’s not my job.”

“What is your job?” Heidt asked.

Rogers did not respond. But he stayed through the rest of the meeting.

“I try to input as much as I can to BKK from the community,” he said in an interview last week.

Part of that input, he said, led BKK to redesign the entrance to the landfill to preserve highly valued oak trees in the canyon. Now, instead of using the existing San Fernando Road exit off the Antelope Valley Freeway, he said, BKK plans to build its own off-ramp to be used exclusively as a landfill entrance.

The Los Angeles native came to the Santa Clarita Valley from Northridge in 1977 “looking for horse property,” which he found in then-rural Sand Canyon. “I just fell in love with the area. There wasn’t anything in Sand Canyon then. Now look at it. That’s progress. You can’t avoid progress.

“Well, I guess you could, but progress is not all bad,” he said, hinting at the landfill.

Opponents of the dump have grown in strength after an initially anemic campaign. Last week, more than 400 people turned out for a sneak movie preview held to raise money for the anti-dump campaign.

Santa Clarita’s already crowded freeways will not be able to handle the estimated 2,400 trucks that would lumber through each day, opponents argue, and the dump would threaten the valley’s underground water supply. Fumes from rotting garbage and truck exhaust will foul the air, they say.

Rogers, though he leaves official pronouncements to other BKK representatives, quietly defends the landfill when asked. He points out that 2,400 trucks are in the absolute worst-case scenario and that most would be traveling at off-peak hours or against traffic. The underground water supply, he says, does not sit below the landfill site, but several miles away.

But Rogers was skeptical himself when a friend introduced him a few years ago to Ken Kazarian, president of BKK Corp.

“My comment to him was, ‘I don’t want your dump out here either,’ ” Rogers said.

But in time, Rogers said, he became convinced that the project was “a completely different animal” from the hazardous waste site he opposed years earlier. He signed on with BKK.

“Basically, we were looking to have someone who was part of the mainstream community and who could continually sensitize us to community issues,” Kazarian said. “As well as someone who could be approached by the people in the community to answer questions.”

Few dispute his professionalism. “Personally, I think he’s a very friendly, gentlemanly kind of guy with good manners,” said City Councilwoman Jill Klajic, an ardent opponent of the dump.

Klajic tells how earlier this year she had been hiking in Elsmere Canyon, clearly on BKK property, when Rogers rode up on his quarter horse, a gun on his hip.

Rogers informed Klajic that she was on private property and asked her to leave, which she did, although not immediately.

“The gun was meant to intimidate me,” said Klajic, who, along with other dump opponents, admits to frequently taking hikes on BKK territory.

Rogers said he carries the weapon as a precaution, since there are snakes in the canyon and riding alone can be dangerous. Besides, he said, Klajic was on private property and BKK does not want to be held liable for injuries if a trespasser takes a tumble.

But even if he meant to intimidate her in asking her to leave, Klajic said, he was polite in doing so.