Landfill Foes Say They’ve Been Dumped

Merry Farmer can’t take it anymore.

At her home just a mile from the Chiquita Canyon Landfill, she says she wakes up in the middle of the night to the sickeningly sweet scent of rotting fruit. Then there are the flies. And the trash trucks.

Now adding insult to injury is the relative silence of civic leaders over a proposal to more than double the size of the garbage dump. Consumed by debate over an even bigger, 190 million-ton, landfill proposed for scenic Elsmere Canyon, the city of Santa Clarita has all but shunned the cries of Farmer and her neighbors, leaving Chiquita Canyon an orphan in the local landfill war.

“Elsmere is more seductive,” said Pat Saletore, the Conservation Committee co-chairwoman for the Santa Clarita Valley chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s got waterfalls and it’s in the [Angeles] national forest. It’s a little harder to say that about Chiquita.”

Saletore and other activists scrambling to prevent the creation of an Elsmere dump also oppose extending Chiquita’s operating permit beyond 1997. But she says that while she sympathizes with those who live near the Chiquita landfill, “you can’t expect to throw yourself into two things like that and live.”

Fighting such a project takes money for consultants, studies, literature--support that the city of Santa Clarita has provided in the fight against Elsmere. So far, the city has spent $1.5 million in tax dollars for its anti-Elsmere campaign, assigning a top administrator to the task full time. Meanwhile, not a dollar of city funds has been spent on opposing the Chiquita landfill’s expansion, which would enable its operator, Laidlaw Waste Systems Inc., to accept 30 million new tons of refuse.

“We can’t fight the whole world here,” Santa Clarita Mayor Jo Anne Darcy said.

At issue is the vast, 592-acre Chiquita Canyon area, where the native hillsides are rugged and bare, supporting only tiny patches of shrubs and weeds. The bowl of the canyon is manicured, with smooth dirt mounds that look as if landscapers prepared the ground for the next generation of begonias.

But the hum of earthmovers pushing around garbage in one sliver of the canyon reveals that beneath those smooth mounds lie tons of compacted trash. Rodney Walter, the landfill’s general manager, personally takes visitors on a tour of the operation, looking on with pride as men in hard hats drive bulldozers with big steel treads over the trash again and again, smashing it down like bakers kneading bread.

Under Laidlaw’s expansion plan, the landfill would occupy 337 acres of the canyon instead of the 154 acres it currently consumes.

“Our commodity is space,” Walter said as the bulldozers sank and swayed in the rubbish heap.

Space itself and deciding which space to fight for is not as clear cut as it may seem for Santa Clarita, as neither Chiquita nor the proposed Elsmere dump are within the boundaries of the city.

Yet the city cringes at the thought of becoming the key community in a “Valley of the Dumps.” That’s why leaders have lobbied broadly and spent heavily fighting a landfill proposed by the Torrance-based BKK Corp. for Elsmere Canyon that would put a reservoir of trash nearly as tall as the Empire State Building about one-third of a mile southeast of the city limits.

Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) has tossed in his support for the city’s anti-Elsmere campaign, as have local business leaders concerned about property values and the city’s image.

Besides being bigger, the Elsmere dump would affect wildlife corridors in a thus-far-unspoiled canyon, city leaders say. They also cite threats to the city’s ground-water supply.

Chiquita, on the other hand, seems to be opposed primarily by environmentalists, who fear contamination of the Santa Clara River, and residents across the ridgeline in Val Verde.

The Santa Clarita City Council so far has voted to, in effect, to remain neutral on Chiquita. McKeon isn’t taking a position on it either, as no federal land is involved. Business leaders say Chiquita may not be perfect, but it is the best alternative among unfortunate choices for getting rid of trash.

The fact that natural allies in the environmental movement are expending their energy on the looming specter of Elsmere is small comfort to the residents of Val Verde, a community of 1,689 that once was called the “black Palm Springs.”

Founded in 1924 during an era in which African Americans were barred from swimming pools and other public recreational amenities in many cities, Val Verde today is predominantly Latino.

Yolanda Keymolent, a leader among the Latino residents opposing the expansion, says the proposal illustrates how unfavorable developments--like garbage dumps--are thrust upon minority areas.

“We have been put down for years and years. We’ve had it. I dare them to tell me I’m not going to get sick. That we’re not going to have traffic,” Keymolent said. “I’m the one who is going to get stuck here. I’m the one who comes home to Val Verde.”

Civic leaders vehemently deny race has played a role. Instead, they counter that many Val Verde residents knew about the landfill when they moved there.

Chiquita is also the place where much of the Santa Clarita Valley, the northern San Fernando Valley and other parts of Los Angeles County take trash. Alternatives, such as hauling trash by rail to dumps elsewhere, have proven expensive and impractical when analyzed, says Gary Johnson, president of the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce. Johnson said people often stop thinking about trash the moment they put it into the barrel.

But for now, Johnson said, “there are no other alternatives in the confines of the technology to make [trash] disappear.” The chamber has opposed Elsmere and is supporting continued use of Chiquita.

But Chiquita opponents charge there’s another difference between the two proposals: Elsmere, they say, is owned by an interloper, a company from outside the Santa Clarita Valley. The Chiquita site, on the other hand, is owned by the Newhall Land & Farming Co., Santa Clarita’s largest and most powerful developer, which leases the land to Laidlaw.

Newhall spokeswoman Marlee Lauffer said the developer supports Chiquita’s expansion, but dismisses the idea that the company has had an impact in the argument.

“We don’t have any particular influence or clout,” Lauffer says. “That’s ridiculous.”

BKK’s Ron Gastelum, though, compared the battle his company has faced in the Elsmere project to the opposition small-town businesses have waged to prevent retail giant Wal-Mart from moving into their communities.

“Laidlaw is there,” Gastelum said. “They are a part of that community and the community decided to pull in behind them and push us out.”

Chiquita’s expansion, first proposed in 1989, is still going through the approval process and is months away from a decision by the county Regional Planning Commission. Consideration for the Elsmere project has also slowed, after BKK announced recently that trash giant Browning Ferris Industries Inc. had acquired the property, pending certain conditions.

Santa Clarita City Councilman Carl Boyer said that theoretically the issue of Chiquita could be raised again before the council.

“We have to take a moral stand,” said Boyer, who opposes expansion there. “We owe it to the people of Val Verde to defend them. They are part of our valley. They looked to us for help and we didn’t give them enough.”

But Councilman George Pederson said he doesn’t feel he should “be the champion of every location that wants to get rid of a dump.”

“I don’t feel it’s an inconsistent policy,” he said. “Existing landfills have already done their damage. But the new ones would upset the ecosystem to a different degree.”

In the meantime, Chiquita manager Walter said he’s willing to continue meeting with residents opposed to the expansion. He says there is no proof of the foul smells the residents charge emanate from the landfill.

He further notes that Laidlaw has sweetened the expansion plan by adding recycling facilities.

“We have tried to be as open as we possibly can and build a win-win situation,” Walter said. “In Val Verde’s position, there are no conditions where they would be receptive to this situation.”

The residents of Val Verde say they’ll fight on, but will continue to wonder out loud why expanding their dump warrants less attention than a landfill on the other side of town.

“We’ve been betrayed,” Farmer said. “But we’re not surprised.”