Angry Neighbors Plan to Fight Landfill Expansion

From Currie’s Coffee Shop to Van Gogh Elementary School, residents of the upscale bedroom community of Granada Hills are talking with dismay, anger and determination about the decisions of the mayor and City Council last week to allow Sunshine Canyon Landfill to expand nearby.

Tucked into a northern corner of the San Fernando Valley, Granada Hills has become ground zero for discontent with City Hall. At holiday parties, church events and over backyard fences, residents are commiserating about what many feel is a betrayal.

“I feel violated,” Jim Mims said Friday as he dropped his daughter off at the elementary school a mile from the dump. “You’ve got a dump right next to homes, to this school. What about the investment we all have in this community?”

Su Wong, who has a son in first grade at Van Gogh, worries about the health of students downwind from the huge landfill, although the dump operator, Browning-Ferris Industries, says measures will be taken to make the landfill safe.

“We’re threatened,” Wong said. “We felt very helpless going up against a private corporation.”

Last Wednesday, the City Council voted 8-7 to approve a zoning change allowing Browning-Ferris to expand its landfill into 194 acres in Granada Hills. On Friday, Mayor Richard Riordan signed the ordinance, which allows the dump operator to accept 55 million tons of trash on the city portion of the landfill during the next 26 years.

At the coffee shop, diners say there is also a feeling of unfairness--that with its several freeways, water plants, police firing ranges and gas pipelines, the community is shouldering more than its share of the city’s burdens.

“The real crime is having other cities dumping here,” Dave Dean said. “That’s what makes this so in your face.”

Others worry about the negative impact on property values and the tarnishing of the area’s image.

Marti McInnis fears her beloved Granada Hills will be forever known as the home of the dump, and not as she knows it: a great place for families to raise their kids.

“Nobody wants it. It’s terrible,” McInnis said.

But amid the anger and betrayal, few residents say they are thinking of moving away.

“I don’t think that is the solution,” Wong said. “We’re going to fight.”

Like Wong, Meg Volk said she and her husband plan to join what is expected to be a heated court battle to block the expansion.

Volk, a physical therapist, and her husband, an editor with the television series “Frasier,” live on Canyon Ridge Lane, just over a hill from the landfill.

She said the couple would write a check for $1,000 to the North Valley Coalition, which is hiring attorneys to challenge the expansion in court.

“We’ve been talking about moving, selling our home, but we’d rather not. We love the area,” Volk said.

Residents said they are prepared to dig in their heels.

“What I’m hoping is we will stall it long enough for them to back off,” Mims said.

But Browning-Ferris officials said they have no intention of abandoning the expansion, which they say will be environmentally sound and will provide a critical place for Los Angeles and surrounding communities to dispose of their trash for the next 26 years.

Company officials say the opposition voiced by Mims, Volk and Wong is not shared by everyone in the San Fernando Valley.

They cited a poll conducted for Browning-Ferris by Arnold Steinberg and Associates, which interviewed 2,000 likely voters in the city, including 675 in the Valley, from Nov. 29 to Dec. 5.

The poll found that 32% of likely Valley voters opposed the landfill expansion, 27% favored it and 41% were unsure of their position. Citywide, 34% of likely voters supported the expansion, 22% opposed it and 45% were unsure.

Company officials acknowledged that opposition in Granada Hills would be much greater than in the Valley or the city as a whole, but said the pollster did not break out results by community.

When pollsters told likely Valley voters that it would cost the city $16 million more per year to truck the trash to distant landfills, 38% said the city should expand Sunshine Canyon, 36% said the city should not expand the dump, and 26% were unsure.