Hahn Steps Up Efforts to Block Landfill’s Expansion Into L.A.

It’s a typical afternoon at Sunshine Canyon Landfill, meaning tons of rotting food, mangled bicycles, old carpet and tattered beverage cartons emptied from Los Angeles trash bins are scattered on the ground awaiting burial.

With each truckload, the landfill on unincorporated Los Angeles County land is nearing its limit. To accommodate the seemingly endless stream of garbage, the operators plan to cross Los Angeles city limits in October and open an extension into Granada Hills big enough to handle 500 trucks a day.

With time running out, Mayor James K. Hahn is pushing to scuttle the expansion by blocking the few remaining permits the owner needs to operate in the city. Beyond that, Hahn wants to stop dumping city trash at Sunshine Canyon when the current contract expires in 2006, and find what he says are safer, if more expensive, ways to get rid of the nearly 1 million tons of waste that Los Angeles produces each year.

It is a strategy that carries risks. Legal experts say Hahn’s bid is a longshot, since the city approved the expansion in 1999. If the landfill prevails and Hahn cancels the contract, the operator, Browning-Ferris Industries, said it would simply find other sources of garbage. Residents could wind up with higher fees for remote disposal, coupled with a teeming landfill taking other peoples’ trash.

Some contend that Hahn is merely courting influential San Fernando Valley voters who will be important to his reelection, recognizing that Sunshine Canyon symbolizes the sort of tensions that fueled the secession movement.

But the mayor said his aim is straightforward: keeping landfills out of Los Angeles.

“I think there are alternatives to burying our garbage next to where we live and where our kids go to school and where our drinking water supplies are,” he said. “We need to get a good handle on what the costs are, but I don’t know how you put a cost on the threat to the city’s water supply and the health to people who live around landfills.”

On a separate front, Hahn is fighting to limit the lone dump now operating in the city, Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley. Bradley is set to close in 2007. Before that happens, Waste Management Inc. wants to raise the landfill’s height by 43 feet. Hahn recently sent a letter to the state board that oversees landfills recommending denial of a permit for Bradley.

For much of the last 50 years, the city has relied on local landfills for cheap, convenient dumping.

The practice was reaffirmed in 1999, when former Mayor Richard Riordan and the City Council approved BFI’s plan to nearly double the size of Sunshine Canyon Landfill by expanding it into Granada Hills. The new 55-million ton facility could give Los Angeles a place to put its trash for the next 25 years.

As city attorney, Hahn defended the city’s approval of the expansion against a suit filed by residents. He said he was obliged to do that as the city’s lawyer. But as a candidate for mayor in 2001, Hahn denounced the landfill.

By then, the Valley secession movement was gaining momentum and Sunshine Canyon’s own public relations consultant recognized that the landfill was a political liability.

“Support for Sunshine Canyon has eroded in every geographic area and among every demographic group in the city of Los Angeles,” BFI consultant Harvey Englander wrote in a confidential memo. One reason was that “all of the City Council and mayoral candidates” had used “Sunshine Canyon as a vehicle to gain support of Valley voters,” Englander wrote.

About 725,000 households fill up 80-gallon trash cans and push them onto the street, within easy reach of the city’s fleet of 10-ton trash trucks.

On a recent morning, Ray Cruz, a 42-year-old city trash collector, circled a dozen East Los Angeles streets emptying, he estimates, 1,100 cans.

Cruz maneuvers the truck toward the barrels and then hits a button. A hydraulic lift hoists the cans over the truck, turns them upside down and empties them. After an hour or so, a strong odor indicates that the truck is nearing capacity.

“This is nothing,” Cruz said. “Roll your window down.”

Trash trucks either dump their loads on the floor of a smoky, hangar-like transfer station, where the waste is piled into still bigger trucks for the trip up to Sunshine Canyon, or they are driven straight to the landfill. Traffic is so heavy that BFI sometimes closes its gates by 10 a.m., having reached its daily limit.

Inside the landfill, the loads are weighed, checked for radiation, dumped, compacted by 100,000-pound trucks with steel wheels and then covered. A special liner at the bottom of the landfill is designed to protect the soil from contamination.

“To have environmentally sound -- which we believe it is -- close, low-cost, effective disposal is, we believe, an asset to any city,” said Greg Loughnane, BFI district manager for Los Angeles.

Hahn isn’t convinced. He is pressing his strategy on two levels, taking small bureaucratic steps to foil Sunshine Canyon’s plans while rethinking the way the city dumps its trash.

In recent weeks, Hahn sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers urging rejection of a BFI permit. The mayor wrote that he had concerns about the landfill’s potential to contaminate groundwater.

The state agency that monitors water in Los Angeles said low levels of pollutants have been detected in water beneath Sunshine Canyon. Officials at the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board said they have asked the landfill to fix the problem.

Hahn also ordered a city board that enforces environmental laws to, in essence, sit on a BFI permit application rather than forward it to the state. He backed off, though, when City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo advised in a March memo that the city could jeopardize its regulatory power over landfills if it took that step.

Delgadillo added that the city’s best chance to defeat the expansion has come and gone.”As you know from your own experience defending Sunshine Canyon’s expansion, once a local government approves ... a landfill, the cards are effectively stacked against a community trying to stop the landfill from operating,” Delgadillo wrote.

More broadly, Hahn has created a task force to help the Sanitation Department come up with a plan when the city’s contract with Sunshine Canyon expires in three years. It isn’t clear what would be done with the 3,500 tons of Los Angeles trash that are trucked to the landfill every day.

One possibility is to convert the waste to energy. The city already does that on a modest scale, sending 100 tons of trash a day to a Long Beach plant that converts garbage into electricity. Another option is to transport the trash by train to a remote patch of the California desert.

Such alternatives could prove costly. The city currently pays about $23 a ton to drop its trash at the landfill -- adding up to an annual bill of $32 million. Sanitation chief Judith Wilson estimates that shipping trash to a distant location could cause disposal fees to more than triple.

“If they decide to ship it out to someone else’s backyard and they find someone else to take it, they’ll have to start raising fees,” Councilwoman Ruth Galanter said. “And people won’t like that either.”

Hahn already has proposed raising trash fees in his budget for the coming fiscal year, but not to pay for a new trash disposal system. The fee increase would pay for 320 new police officers.

For its part, BFI suggests another way to hire more police: Let the dump expand. Los Angeles is entitled to a franchise fee that could net the city $7 million once the city portion opens. That could pay for about 70 new police officers.

Meanwhile, as BFI presses ahead to collect the permits to expand Sunshine Canyon and Hahn works to thwart the plan, the trash mounts.

Awaiting his turn to dump his 10-ton load, Cruz peers through his windshield at the blanket of rubbish laid out on the face of the landfill. Even for a full-time trash hauler, it’s a daunting sight.

“That’s a lot of trash,” he said.