Permit Problem Delays Granada Hills Landfill

The operators of the controversial Sunshine Canyon Landfill withdrew their application to expand into Granada Hills shortly after the city of Los Angeles rejected the permit request as incomplete, officials said Wednesday.

Browning Ferris Industries said the delay is only temporary. But a company spokesman said the opening of the dump in the city has now been moved back from this spring to next year.

Taking advantage of the latest delay, Mayor James K. Hahn and Councilman Hal Bernson called for the city to reexamine options.

“It does give us a window of opportunity to take another look at this whole subject,” Hahn said. “It’s an opportunity to look at other alternatives.”

Hahn, who called for closure of the dump when he ran for office last year, said he supports a move by Bernson, City Council President Alex Padilla and others to seek competitive proposals from waste disposal operators.

“It’s good news,” said Bernson, whose district includes the landfill, about the delay. “We need to see if there are other means of disposing of our trash.”

Arnie Berghoff, a spokesman for Browning Ferris, said previous studies requested by Bernson found that alternatives such as sending trash by rail to remote landfills would cost at least twice as much. “Anything that is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars more is not going to be viable,” he said.

The city already has approved building the facility with a capacity of 11,000 tons of trash a day. The city of Los Angeles now generates about 3,400 tons daily.

The landfill, which straddles the city-Los Angeles County border in the north San Fernando Valley, operated for decades in the city before its permit expired in 1991. The county in 1996 gave Browning Ferris permission to operate on its side of the border.

Any delay in opening the dump would help Los Angeles, because the dump will be a major campaign topic for advocates of San Fernando Valley secession, said Kim Thompson of the North Valley Coalition, an anti-landfill group.

“I told the mayor’s office they better pay attention to this because it will be a secession issue,” Thompson said.

Thompson, a mayoral appointee to the city Environmental Affairs Commission, released a copy of an e-mail from Sanitation Bureau chief Judith Wilson to Wayne Tsuda, the city official considering the Sunshine Canyon permit application.

“I know we are interested in getting the city side opened, but I wonder about the timing,” it reads. “You will have a red hot Valley issue erupting in the months prior to the November 2002 ballot measure on secession. The timing is terrible. We should talk about this with the mayor before moving forward on this schedule.”

Sanitation Bureau spokesman Mike Qualls said the e-mail “simply illustrates the bureau’s sensitivity over Valley issues.” Tsuda confirmed that he received the e-mail but said it did not influence his decision to reject the permit as incomplete.