How ‘David’ Dumped ‘Goliath’

It was a “David and Goliath” battle for the future of a young city, if you ask Santa Clarita Valley politicians and residents who succeeded this week in upending plans to build the world’s largest trash dump just outside the city limits.

But if you ask waste management officials, it was an example of lawmaking at its worst--the adoption of “very bad public policy” that will cost Los Angeles residents hundreds of millions of dollars down the line.

But by either account, the political maneuver that dealt a death blow to plans to build a 720-acre landfill in Elsmere Canyon also delivered a stunning political victory to the fledgling city of Santa Clarita.

The U.S. Senate’s approval Thursday of a bill with a provision to block the dump is the “last nail in the coffin,” ending a nine-year battle over the controversial plan to develop a landfill inside the Angeles National Forest, said Armando Azarloza, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), who orchestrated the political blockade.

And it heralds Santa Clarita’s coming of age, which turned on an odd coalition, including the conservative Republican congressman, liberal Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, a cadre of environmental groups and a handful of local community activists.

“It’s a big, big moment for us,” said Gail Ortiz, spokeswoman for the Santa Clarita administration. Blocking the dump “has been one of the top priorities for the city . . . and the residents of this community have shown they’re willing to do whatever it takes to stop Elsmere.

“We’re going to celebrate our ninth birthday this December, and this is a wonderful birthday present.”

Ortiz said city officials are planning a communitywide celebration, honoring McKeon, Boxer and all the residents who “dragged their neighbors to meetings and carried out our protests over the years.”

“This community has shown that when the going gets tough, we can pull together,” she said. “It’s a community of 150,000 people that . . . still acts like a small town.”

The Senate vote struck at the heart of the landfill plan, which would have allowed Browning Ferris Industries to use a portion of federal parkland for the landfill in exchange for land of comparable value that the company would have donated to the federal government.

The project had long been championed by Torrance-based BKK Corp., which recently sold the site and project to BFI, which operates the Sunshine Canyon Landfill near Granada Hills.

Opponents have argued for years that the plan would spoil the area’s pristine wilderness. But attempts by McKeon to block the exchange legislatively failed until this week, when the Senate approved federal parks legislation. In what he dubbed the “stealth strategy” McKeon quietly inserted a provision into the bill prohibiting the transfer of any part of the Angeles National Forest to private concerns for landfill development.

For McKeon--a two-term congressman who formerly served as Santa Clarita’s first mayor--the victory was “especially sweet,” said Azarloza. “He’s been working on this for years. To be able to take the battle to Washington, then tell BKK that it’s not going to happen, is a very sweet victory.”

McKeon was traveling Friday and could not be reached for comment, but Azarloza recalled that when McKeon was elected to lead the new city in 1987, the proposal to build the dump “was one of the first issues on his desk.”

It generated community opposition right from the start, but the City Council did not take a formal stand until 1990, when the council--which by then included McKeon--voted unanimously to oppose the dump.

Since then, Santa Clarita has spent more than $1.5 million--no small change for a city with an annual budget of only $50 million--to hire lobbyists, organize protests and study alternatives to the Elsmere dump.

“There have been so many ups and downs, as we tried to fight the battle on every front,” said Ortiz. “The opposition to this [landfill] has just been so strong. We had 4,000 people show up at a community meeting last year . . . the biggest turnout on any issue in our history.”

Now, she said, the city can move on to tackle other pressing concerns, such as revitalizing its downtown and building a central park.

But waste management officials say that euphoria may be short-lived.

“To say that the project is dead and finished and completely over is a little premature,” said Arnie Berghoff, vice president of government affairs for BFI, which acquired the Elsmere Canyon land from BKK just 10 days ago. “We’re going to continue to review our options and make a business decision somewhere down the line.”

When BFI bought the property, officials thought political efforts to block the landfill were stalled. McKeon had introduced two pieces of legislation to block the land swap, but neither was able to clear both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

“We thought the Elsmere Canyon bill was dead,” Berghoff said. “We did not anticipate this being put in at the last minute and subverting the legislative process. It was legal, but that’s about as far as you go. It was very bad public policy.”

But Azarloza said the firm characterizes the move as a dirty political trick only because it was finally outsmarted.

BKK spent $30 million--much of it on high-powered lobbyists--to push the project forward over the years. “They had a lot of muscle,” said Azarloza. “We couldn’t match those resources, but we were able to outflank them.”

McKeon spent six weeks plotting secretly to attach the Elsmere provision to federal parks legislation “because we knew if BKK and BFI got wind of it, they would try to block our moves,” Azarloza said.

BFI can still build a dump on the land it owns, but officials say they have to decide whether a smaller dump would generate enough profit to make economic sense.

The company’s nearby Sunshine Canyon Landfill recently received county approval to expand. That could provide enough capacity to handle trash from the city of Los Angeles for the next several years, Berghoff said.

“But the reality is, while recycling is terrific, even if you were to recycle 50% of your trash, there’s still a lot of trash that has to be disposed of every single day,” he said.

“The bottom line is everyone, even the most strident environmentalist, wants us to pick up their trash . . . but nobody wants us to put it down. The people in Santa Clarita and Granada Hills say, ‘Rail haul it out to the desert,’ but you go talk to the people around those desert sites and they say, ‘No way, you’re not going to bring trash out to my pristine desert.’ ”

It costs the city about $19 per ton to dump its garbage at Sunshine Canyon, Berghoff said, but it would cost about $55 per ton to haul it out to the desert. And with the city producing more than 4,000 tons of garbage a day, “you’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years--money that could be spent on police and fire and hospitals and roads.

“So everything is a trade-off,” he said. “The local people win and the trash goes out to Utah or to the desert, and the cost is double or triple what we’re paying today. So who really wins?”