Secret Deal Taints Noble Effort
Fighting giants is tough work. Just ask the North Valley Coalition of Concerned Citizens, which has spent the past five years battling the expansion of a garbage dump in Sunshine Canyon between Granada Hills and Santa Clarita. Up against Browning-Ferris Industries, the nation’s second-largest waste hauler, the group of homeowners and environmentalists has waged the bureaucratic equivalent of a guerrilla war against the project.
Whether one agreed with the coalition’s assertions that the dump would hurt air quality or degrade the region’s water supply in nearby Van Norman Reservoir, it was hard not to admire the pluck and commitment of members who lost battle after battle but continued to fight. But when coalition leaders made a secret deal with a rival trash company to finance expensive environmental reports critical of the dump’s design, the group--and its cause--lost considerable credibility.
A subsidiary of WMX Technologies Inc., the nation’s largest trash company and BFI’s main competitor, gave the coalition $66,000 to pay for the report and various administrative costs. The study by a respected San Francisco engineering firm found that the landfill’s liner could fail in a major earthquake, allowing garbage to contaminate water supplies. A coalition attorney said the group was “desperate” when it approached WMX. The question of who paid for the study isn’t important, she said, it’s the findings that matter.
That may be. And had the financing of the report been disclosed from the start, the coalition and its claims could have remained credible. After all, Browning-Ferris expects to spend more than $100 million to develop the dump. It’s not easy to raise money to fight that kind of project; such causes rarely draw the attention of big-spending celebrities. Still, knowing who paid for the report, public officials deciding the issue could have weighed the fact that WMX is trying to develop two dumps of its own that would be in direct competition with Sunshine Canyon.
Instead, the coalition chose to keep the arrangement secret--until Browning-Ferris hired private investigators to figure out how a nonprofit group that reported less than $2,600 in contributions in 1995 could afford such a costly study. The revelation hit just a few days before the California Regional Water Quality Control Board approved the dump’s liner design--the dump’s final regulatory hurdle before restarting operations later this summer.
Fighting giants is tough work, but those who choose the battle must remember that they are held to the same standards as those they oppose. To keep the often complicated approval process honest, the critics themselves must remain honest beyond question. The North Valley Coalition, desperate as it was to keep its fight alive, apparently forgot that rule.
