Not in Her Backyard : As City Lauds High-Profile Allies in Landfill Fight, McLean Is Not Forgotten

With the battle won and the enemy routed, Santa Clarita is throwing a party today for unlikely allies--a liberal Democratic senator and a conservative Republican congressman--who helped the city thwart a plan to put a 190-million-ton dump just outside town.

But Marsha McLean, who operates a small window-washing business out of her Santa Clarita Valley home, deserves much of the praise for preventing Elsmere Canyon from being turned into the nation’s largest dump site, according to many participants in the landfill dispute.

The guests of honor at the city’s gratitude party, scheduled for 4:30 p.m. at the Valencia Country Club, will be Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and U.S. Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita).

The party will also celebrate Santa Clarita’s ninth anniversary as a city and welcome Councilman Clyde Smyth as mayor pro tem.

But it’s not clear if McLean will be there. She says she’ll try to attend, but she may be too busy to show up.

Even McKeon, who wrote the bill that quietly torpedoed the dump plan, shared credit with McLean, who he said “should be very proud of her efforts.”

“A lot of people should take credit for blocking the dump, but Marsha was the spearhead,” said environmentalist Dinah Sargeant.

Seven years ago, McLean launched the Santa Clarita Valley Canyons Preservation Committee, the group that first spoke out in defense of the canyon.

“She never let up,” said Gail Ortiz, spokeswoman for the city of Santa Clarita. Ortiz credited McLean with persuading the City Council to abandon its neutrality in 1990 and spent $1.5 million to fight the dump plan.

“Marsha is a true heroine of this entire campaign. The community owes her a tremendous debt,” said Allan Cameron, a member of the Santa Clarita Organization to Protect the Environment.

In eight years of battle with huge trash-hauling companies and city governments, she transformed herself into a formidable environmentalist, say members of her committee.

She raised money and lobbied federal agencies in Washington. She has also made her share of enemies, including several county officials who say that she and her fellow activists symbolize the NIMBY mentality--”not in my back yard”--of many suburban neighborhoods.

Her fight over Elsmere Canyon, in an area partly owned by the U.S. Forest Service just southeast of city limits, began in 1989, when a neighbor told McLean that BKK Corp., a Torrance-based trash firm, was set to make a land-swap deal with the Forest Service that would allow a landfill to be built there.

McLean and Jill Klajic, now a City Council member, started the Santa Clarita Valley Canyons Preservation Committee. McLean was made president. For the next seven years, the committee warred with BKK, which sold the land to Browning-Ferris Industries.

Environmentalists said the dump would contaminate the water and air and be a general health hazard to Santa Clarita, which BKK denied.

Her opposition gave McLean points for diligence, though not for effectiveness.

“Marsha definitely worked very hard, but the project was not defeated by anything her group did, “ said BKK spokesman Ken Kazarian.

“The project was killed by cat-burglar tactics,” he said, referring to McKeon’s insertion into a federal parks bill of a provision--which went virtually unnoticed--forbidding the Forest Service to transfer any part of the Angeles National Forest to a private company for use as a dump. A land swap between BKK and the Forest Service was a key element of the landfill plan.

“I don’t think they would have been successful had they not lucked into that legislation,” said Kazarian.

Boxer supported the provision in the Senate.

Kazarian characterized McLean as a worthy adversary but said she was often misinformed and had made up her mind to oppose the dump no matter how safe BKK proved it was.

For her part, McLean vows to remain vigilant, noting that BFI still owns enough property in Elsmere Canyon to build a 70-million-ton landfill if the company finds it economically viable. “This fight isn’t over,” she said.

McKeon disagrees. “I really think we killed it,” he said. “The chances of them going in there and creating a smaller dump are very slim.”