Business Leaders Join Landfill Expansion Foes

Officials of three San Fernando Valley chambers of commerce toured the Sunshine Canyon landfill by helicopter Thursday, expressing worries that a proposed expansion of the Granada Hills dump might affect their communities.

A chamber official from Granada Hills was joined by counterparts from Chatsworth and Northridge because they fear that an enlarged landfill could make some areas less economically desirable to developers and investors.

The landfill, owned by Browning-Ferris Industries, operates on 238 acres in the city of Los Angeles near Balboa Boulevard and the Golden State Freeway. The company wants to expand the landfill to an additional 542 acres in unincorporated Los Angeles County.

A Granada Hills-based homeowners group, the North Valley Coalition, has opposed the proposed expansion, which is pending before county planners. The coalition has complained that dust and garbage frequently blow from the existing landfill into their neighborhoods and adjacent O’Melveny Park.

Opposition of the three chambers of commerce “adds considerably to the weight of the opposition to the landfill,” said City Councilman Hal Bernson, who organized the helicopter tour. Bernson and other dump opponents are awaiting the recommendation of a city zoning administrator on Bernson’s request for the landfill’s operating permit to be revoked.

‘Never Have Contacts’

“We’re absolutely delighted,” Mary Edwards, secretary of the North Valley Coalition, said of the business groups’ opposition to the landfill. “We’re just homeowners. We never have the contacts with the seats of power that some people do who represent business.”

The three chambers are concerned that expansion might bring the blowing dust and garbage farther west and make open space near the Santa Susana Mountains less desirable for development, said David R. Miller, the business coalition’s chairman.

“The Northridge people and the Chatsworth people were not that aware of it because it did not affect them,” added Jean Seratti, president of the Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce. “But if the expansion goes through, it will affect them.”

James T. Aidukas, an environmental specialist for Browning-Ferris, disagreed. The nearest existing home in Northridge would be more than 3 miles from the edge of the proposed dump, he said. The expansion area also is more than a mile from the Granada Hills neighborhood where most of the homeowner opposition is centered, he said. The dump is now about 1,600 feet away from the closest home, he said.

That part of the dump was among those surveyed by Bernson and the business leaders from a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter Thursday morning. Despite fog and low clouds, the group could see the expanse of fill dirt, the dump’s equipment for capturing and burning away methane gas, and the many trucks, some of them uncovered, that carry trash and rubble into the landfill.

Ellsmere Canyon Eyed

“I had no idea it was so mammoth,” Seratti said after the tour.

Bernson also directed the helicopter pilot to fly over Ellsmere Canyon to the north, which the councilman would like to see used as a dump instead of expanding the Sunshine Canyon landfill.

Use of Ellsmere Canyon as a landfill is widely opposed in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The group left the landfill with at least one less misconception. Bernson earlier had shown them the outskirts of the dump from the inside of a van, pointing out a house in front of a graded area that he described as the face of the landfill.

Later, after entering the landfill for a tour guided by Aidukas, Bernson and the group were told that the graded area actually was a construction site for a private home.