Let’s make a bad deal

IN A STROKE OF POLITICAL GENIUS, the Los Angeles City Council on Friday voted to pay the operators of the Sunshine Canyon landfill several million dollars more for the privilege of sending them less of the city’s garbage. Instead, the city will send it -- for more money still -- out of the county to two other dumps.

This is a marvelous idea. The council can now apply this principle to other city contracts and services. The new runway at LAX, for example. The city could pay the contractor a little extra to quit after the work is three-fourths done, then pay more to someone else to finish up. Is Fleishman-Hillard still around? You remember them -- the PR firm that slunk out of City Hall after all but admitting that some of its people ripped off the Department of Water and Power. Let’s get them back and pay them more to do even less. Maybe the city can lengthen police response time -- may have to pay more for the privilege, but what the heck. Someone call over to the MTA and ask them to raise bus fares and cut routes. What? They already do that? Good work.

After months of hand-wringing and political posturing over the 50-year-old dump in the San Fernando Valley, plus additional frantic last-minute deal-making between the city and Browning Ferris Industries, which operates Sunshine Canyon, you can be forgiven if you assume the city is getting something good for the extra money it will be paying to make less use of the dump. It loses BFI’s bulk discount because now it will be sending less than 3,600 tons daily to Sunshine Canyon.

But doesn’t the City Council action mean L.A. can close the landfill sooner? No. But the extra money buys the city more recycling programs, right? Wrong. But at least Sunshine won’t be getting as much garbage trucked in? Nice try.

What the city gets, according to some of the deal’s strongest backers, is the chance to fire a shot across BFI’s bow. See, Sunshine Canyon, we don’t need you. We have options. And we’re willing to pay you millions of dollars to prove it. That’ll teach you. It also metes out a lesson to the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, which kept lecturing the City Council that trucking garbage anywhere but Sunshine Canyon would cost the city more money. Now look here, the council can say to those bureaucrats: We did it. And all it cost us is, uh, more money.

And, most important, it allows the council and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a way out of the political waste bin that has been growing smellier every day since the mayor, while still a candidate, promised the dump’s Granada Hills neighbors that he would get the city out of Sunshine Canyon.

Of course, the city is still there. Villaraigosa’s people, meanwhile, are putting the finishing touches on a city budget that would eliminate a deficit of close to $300 million. The mayor has warned of possible service cuts and other austerity measures. Better not cut more from any contracts, though. The city doesn’t have enough money.