County Unveils List of Possible Landfill Sites

Although the Elsmere Canyon landfill was blocked by the U.S. Senate last year, the scenic Santa Clarita Valley area has been placed on a list of potential dump sites by Los Angeles County waste officials.

In its long-awaited Countywide Integrated Waste Management Summary Plan, the county Department of Public Works lists Elsmere, along with Blind Canyon near the Ventura County line, as potential sites for new dumps.

A third site, Towsley Canyon, also in the Santa Clarita Valley, was removed from the list by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Public works officials caution that the list--which includes the potential expansion of existing landfills--does not signify that the county will recommend landfills at those sites.

“They would still have to go through the permit process and get approval from the political bodies,” said Mike Mohajer, a division engineer with the Department of Public Works.

The department examined 150 potential sites for landfills, eliminating locations if the areas were too close to residential areas or lacked sufficient capacity.

But critics of the county’s management of solid waste say officials did not spend sufficient time investigating alternatives to creating additional trash dumps. “If we are going to move away from landfills, we are going to have to make some firm and aggressive action toward that goal,” said Lynne Plambeck, chairwoman of the Landfill Alternatives Save Environmental Resources. “We are discouraged that there was no pro-active commitment.”

The alternatives cited by LASER and other environmental groups include cleaner ways of converting garbage to fuel and shipping county trash by rail to planned or existing dump sites in the California desert and other states.

The county responded that most of the alternatives are too costly or would do little to cut into the 34,000 tons of trash deposited each day into county dumps.

The California Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989--also called AB939--requires counties to reduce the amount ot trash placed in landfills through recycling and other measures.

The same law requires counties to identify locations for the possible placement of new landfills if that county does not possess existing solid waste disposal facilities to last 15 years.

The report states Los Angeles County could exhaust its current landfill space by 2000.

In addition to pegging sites for potential new landfills, the county report suggested the possible expansion of several existing dumps over the next 15 years--most of them in the San Fernando, Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys.

Those listed by the county are: Antelope Valley landfill near Palmdale; Chiquita Canyon landfill in Val Verde; Lancaster landfill outside Lancaster; Puente Hills landfill near Puente Hills; Scholl Canyon landfill in Glendale, and Sunshine Canyon landfill above Granada Hills.

But it was the inclusion of Elsmere on the list that raised hackles at a recent Board of Supervisors meeting.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose 5th District is where each of the possible new landfills or expansions would be situated, failed to persuade other board members to remove Elsmere from the list.

Antonovich also failed to get other supervisors to agree to ban the importation of trash from outside Los Angeles County in an effort to save dump space. The county imported about 775,000 tons of waste from other counties in 1995.

“We wanted to see more emphasis placed on rail haul,” said Dave Vannatta, an Antonovich aide.

In 1995, the most recent year in which data is available, Los Angeles County residents disposed of 12 million tons of garbage--a reduction from the 1990 figure of 16.1 million tons. The reduction is attributed to the recession and aggressive waste diversion programs.

County waste planners estimate that within 10 years the current 102.3 million tons of waste space in landfills will be exhausted if new dumps are not approved or expanded.

The county’s waste management plan must be approved by the majority of the county’s 88 cities within the next 90 days before it goes to the Board of Supervisors. The final approval will be made by the state Integrated Waste Management Board.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

10 Los Angeles County Landfills

1. Antelope Valley

2. Burbank

3. Calabasas

4. Chiquita Canyon

5. Lancaster

6. Puente Hills

7. Scholl Canyon

8. Sunshine Canyon

9. Blind Canyon*

10. Elsmere Canyon*

Source: Los Angeles County Dept. of Public Works