Bid to Expand Sunshine Canyon Dump Clears Hurdle

The proposal to expand Sunshine Canyon Landfill onto city property in Granada Hills chugged its way past another hurdle Tuesday.

The City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee gave its approval to send the proposal to the full council, but also agreed to consider changes that take into account the concerns of a vocal group of residents.

The committee voted 2 to 1 to accept the proposal, meaning the entire council will now have a chance to vote on it Sept. 14.

The landfill proposal, given the go-ahead by the city’s Planning Commission in February, would allow Sunshine Canyon’s operator, Browning-Ferris Industries, to operate a 494-acre facility within a half mile of residential neighborhoods in Granada Hills. The dump, which BFI says would operate for 25 years, would add to Sunshine Canyon’s 216-acre facility already being operated on the L.A. County side of the same swath of land.

In giving its approval, the committee made changes to the original proposal, adding amendments at the request of the city’s Bureau of Sanitation and Environmental Affairs Department.

Those amendments provide for additional air and water monitoring. They also ask that BFI use trucks with alternative fuels, call for the planting of hundreds of trees around the site to shield neighborhoods, call on the city to take the lead role in overseeing the site and ask that a study be done on converting landfill gases to fuel.

And the landfill proposal could face further changes next week when the committee meets again and hears detailed suggestions from the North Valley Coalition, a group of Granada Hills area residents that turned out in force at the meeting to show their strong opposition to expansion.

During the public comment segment, members of the coalition provided the committee with a 31-page loose-leaf folder filled with complaints and suggestions on how the site should look if it ends up being developed.

Owing to the detail of the coalition’s report, committee members agreed they needed more time to consider the issue and possibly make alterations.

The key change requested by the coalition is reduction of the dump’s size. BFI has requested a facility large enough to hold 55 million tons of garbage. The coalition members want to limit the approved size to allow 16.9 million tons initially.

The coalition also wants video cameras to closely monitor refuse as it is dumped into the landfill and to have the images posted directly on the Internet.

“Make no mistake, we are not giving up by providing these suggestions,” said Mary Edwards of the North Valley Coalition. “We are just being as pragmatic as possible and if this thing is built we’ve got to have controls on it. But we’re still going to fight to oppose the whole thing.”

Representatives for BFI said they were pleased with the committee’s actions. “We are feeling very optimistic that the full council is going to approve our plan,” said Arnie Berghoff, a spokesman for the company. “The amendments that were made today we can live with. Additional monitoring is not a problem and we don’t have a problem with using alternative fuels [for trucks on the dump].”

Operating under the stressful pall of the shooting at the Jewish Community Center in his own district, committee Chairman Hal Bernson repeatedly voiced stern opposition to the dump expansion during the meeting, interrupting speakers a number of times to express dissatisfaction. A long-standing opponent of the dump, Bernson put a time limit on public comment, citing his need to leave to get to the site of the Granada Hills shooting.

Having cast the committee’s dissenting vote, Bernson ended the day by saying the city was not doing enough to look at new ways to deal with its garbage.

“One thing that has not been addressed is, there are alternative methods for dealing with garbage. We ought to be looking at other methods that are not as archaic as dumping our waste in the ground, ways that would allow us to turn waste into energy.”

Sunshine Canyon, in the Santa Susana Mountains above Granada Hills, has been a waste-disposal site since 1958. In 1991, Los Angeles closed a dump on city property when its lease expired. County officials allowed the dump to reopen on county property in 1996.