Landfill Bill Is Silenced in Assembly : Calabasas: Legislators break into song as a bid to protect the Santa Monica Mountains area from a new garbage dump heads to defeat.

It’s not often that the staid Assembly loosens up enough to break into song. But a bill to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains moved state legislators to lyrics Thursday as it went down to defeat.

Dramatizing her argument that the Calabasas flank of the mountains ought to be protected from landfill expansion, Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl crooned words from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” into her microphone:

“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”

But the Santa Monica Democrat’s a cappella performance failed to shake loose enough votes to send the bill to the Senate. The measure needed 41 yes votes but only received 27.

Kuehl’s bill would have protected the Santa Monica Mountains area from new garbage dump development. A proposed expansion of the Calabasas Landfill sparked the legislation, which was brought to Kuehl by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

To drum up support, Kuehl had to battle colleagues’ fears that garbage blocked in her district could wind up being rerouted to their districts. On top of that, lobbyists for waste haulers were telling members that Kuehl’s bill would actually shut down dumps.

Not true, Kuehl said. She said bill or no bill, canyon landfills in the Los Angeles area are destined to receive 100 million more tons of trash before reaching their capacity.

“I think it’s very short-sighted for a Legislature to be more interested in protecting places to put its garbage than in protecting wilderness and recreational area for future generations,” Kuehl said. “These are canyons of oak and pine where eagles have their hunting grounds.”

Contributing to the defeat of the bill was opposition by conservative Republicans who have never warmed to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy because they perceive it as a slick, big-city guzzler of scarce state funds.

In the end, the opponents won.

But not before inspiring a few lines of “Taps” sung in a mock, mournful tone by Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

In a rare moment of levity during a week in which the Assembly rushed through hundreds of bills to meet a legislative deadline, Brown told Kuehl he was running out of songs trying to stall so she could lobby more votes out of her colleagues.

Then Brown sang a quick “Amazing Grace,” banged the gavel and pronounced the bill dead, with “ayes, 27; non-music appreciators, 42.”