Dump Is Not the Answer

Wednesday’s City Council vote to approve a zone change allowing the Sunshine Canyon Landfill to expand into Granada Hills won’t be the last we hear about the controversial dump. If the close final tally (8 council members in favor, 7 against) and the number of protesters in the council chambers (more than 100) didn’t tell us that, what happens next will.

Landfill opponents, angered even more by the speed with which Mayor Richard Riordan signed the ordinance, are threatening to file lawsuits, force recall elections and step up the campaign for the San Fernando Valley to secede from the rest of Los Angeles. In other words, they will not let the rest of the city forget about the landfill in Granada Hills.

Nor should they.

If the entire city is going to dump its trash in the Sunshine Canyon Landfill, then the entire city needs to be responsible for making sure the more than 250 conditions the council imposed on landfill operator Browning-Ferris Industries are met.

The entire city needs to insist that buffer zones of open space are maintained between neighbors and the dump and that air quality at nearby Van Gogh Elementary School is closely monitored.

The entire city needs to press the council to make good on last-minute promises to speed the conversion of city dump trucks from diesel to cleaner fuels and to expand recycling efforts beyond single-family homes to apartments and businesses. Even people who support expanding the Granada Hills landfill--and there are some--support such measures. The mayor took the first step in ordering that a recycling plan be drafted.

Granted, the most successful recycling campaign will not take away the need for a city this size to put its garbage somewhere. The question remains: Where?

The City Council had plenty of time to try to answer that question in the years since it closed down the city portion of the Sunshine dump by allowing a zone variance to expire in 1991. With Wednesday’s zone change approval, BFI now plans to expand back into Granada Hills by mid-2001. In the months of postponements and delays leading up to Wednesday’s vote, months during which opposition began to spread beyond Granada Hills, the dwindling council majority never made a convincing case that reopening the city side of the landfill was the best solution, not just the most convenient one.

In another 10 years, the landfill operation will come up for review. What, besides citywide pressure, will force city leaders to come up with a better answer by then?