County Waste Solutions Amount to Same Old Rubbish : It’s time for the political leadership of Greater L.A. to once and for all stop dumping trash in one another’s canyons and bring an end to urban landfills.

In two actions recently, the County Board of Supervisors, on a 4-1 vote, has begun the long slide down the slippery slope of fixing 1990s problems with 1950s solutions.

At the same meeting, the board:

* Approved an agreement that would allow the city of Los Angeles to begin dumping its trash in the recently expanded area of Sunshine Canyon.

* Authorized the design of a freeway interchange for what would be the world’s largest dump at Elsmere Canyon, virtually across the street from the Sunshine dump.

The first action relieved Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and the City Council of the responsibility to use the city’s last remaining landfill. It can now export virtually all of the city rubbish to neighboring communities. The action also presumably hastened the county’s so-called trash crisis by absorbing the city’s self-imposed landfill capacity shortfall.

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The second action all but obligates the supervisors to approve the destruction of pristine Elsmere Canyon as a dump site because the applicant will have already spent so much money on access plans. What’s the rush to design an interchange for a project when the environmental impact report is years behind schedule and still months from public release? Is this massive project a fait accompli?

Isn’t it time for a new vision in waste disposal that doesn’t call for just swapping trash among localities? It was both ironic and sad to watch one neighborhood pitted against another. The North Valley Coalition, which has vigorously opposed the Sunshine expansion, eagerly supported the Elsmere interchange, just because it’s around the corner and out of their sight. That kind of thinking is what created our waste crises in the first place. As long as the advocates for disposal alternatives remain divided, the prevailing attitude will be, “Toss it in any other canyon.”

Santa Clarita is already ringed by three dumps--Sunshine and Chiquita canyons and the one at the Wayside Honor Rancho. We’ve decided to draw the line at adding Elsmere Canyon as a fourth. We are spending $500,000 a year in the fight and have supported Rep. Howard (Buck) McKeon’s carrying our case to Washington.

Santa Clarita would make money from Elsmere in the form of fees. Why are we fighting it?

First, the destruction of Elsmere Canyon would sever the only wildlife corridor linkage between the vast Angeles National Forest and the much smaller habitats of the Santa Monica Mountains, Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains. It would render virtually useless the spending of hundreds of millions of public tax dollars to preserve large mammal habitat and open space. In these areas, the gene pool for mountain lions, badgers and deer would wither away in just one human lifetime.

Second, the potential to pollute the ground water basin and the Santa Clara River, which flows to the ocean by way of Piru, Fillmore and Santa Paula, should be a concern to all those along its course. It’s not a matter of whether landfills leak--only when. The world’s largest could leak for a very long time.

Third, Santa Clarita has already had two devastating earthquakes that severed our freeway links to the rest of Southern California. You will have a hard time convincing us that a one-sixteenth-inch plastic liner with tens of millions of tons of trash resting on it will survive a quake when steel-reinforced concrete bridges are falling down all around us. If this miracle fiber is so strong, why isn’t Caltrans building freeways out of it?

Finally, we need to look only as far as our neighbors in West Covina to be concerned about the track record of the BKK Corp. in the operation of its toxic waste dump in that community.

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It’s time we recognize that our “back yard” stretches from Lancaster to Long Beach, from Malibu to Banning. To continue to stockpile our urban waste within this overworked environment is no longer sound public policy. Until we plant our feet and say “no more urban landfills,” the Board of Supervisors and the L.A. City Council will maintain their 1950s attitude that dumping in every nearby canyon will somehow solve the problem.

We’ve made great strides in reducing the waste stream through reuse and recycling. The immediate landfill capacity crisis seems to have abated. We’ve essentially bought ourselves more time to seek alternatives to urban landfills. Even the economics of rail-hauling to remote locations have moved within reasonable range, especially when you consider the possible economic consequences of having to clean up local drinking-water aquifers.

It’s time for the political leadership of the Greater Los Angeles community to join hands and agree once and for all to stop dumping trash in one another’s canyons and bring an end to urban landfills. Collectively we can solve the problem without constructing the world’s largest dump in Elsmere Canyon. That’s not the legacy I want for my grandchildren, and it’s not the landmark I want decorating the northern gateway to the Los Angeles Basin.