L.A. Backs Limit on Sunshine Canyon Trash

The Los Angeles City Council is pressing ahead with efforts to reach an out-of-court settlement of its lawsuit challenging plans for a huge garbage dump in Sunshine Canyon, north of Granada Hills.

After a lengthy closed-door session Wednesday, a majority of the council insisted that a settlement of the city lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Browning-Ferris Industries Inc. include a limit on the amount of garbage dumped at Sunshine Canyon.

County supervisors granted Browning-Ferris permission in February, 1991, to develop a landfill on the disputed 200-acre Sunshine Canyon site, which is wholly located in territory under the county’s jurisdiction.

Subsequently, the city sued, contending the environmental effects of the dumping plan had not been adequately scrutinized. For several months, the city and county have been engaged in talks to settle the lawsuit, and, in the meantime, development of the landfill has been stymied.

Oral arguments in the lawsuit are scheduled to be heard by the state Court of Appeal on April 26. Both the city and the county have appealed a lower court ruling on environmental issues raised in the city’s lawsuit.

The dumping limit proposed by the council Wednesday is “very similar to, but not exactly the same as” the 17-million-ton maximum that Granada Hills homeowners have reluctantly accepted as their fall-back position if they can’t stop the landfill altogether, said Greig Smith, chief deputy to Councilman Hal Bernson.

Under the plan approved by county supervisors, BFI would have the express right to dump 17 million tons at the canyon and the opportunity to seek further county approval to dump 53 million tons more, Smith said.

Meanwhile, Bernson, who represents the affected North Valley neighborhoods, voted to oppose any compromise that accepts development of a dump on the site. “It’s the wrong location,” Bernson said after Wednesday’s council meeting.

But Bernson is fighting a rising tide of support for a compromise, a top city official familiar with the closed-door debate said Wednesday.

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, the prime advocate of a settlement, said the city lawsuit should be resolved because it has become overly expensive and is achieving little. “We’re already at a half-million dollars in legal costs,” Ridley-Thomas told a reporter.

Additionally, “it doesn’t make good public policy to foreclose the city being able to dump at this landfill,” Ridley-Thomas said.

As part of the city-county squabble over the landfill, the city has been barred from dumping refuse at the site. Securing the right to dump city trash at the landfill is one of the council’s top priorities in the unfolding negotiations.