Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Ex-Planner to Head Panel Reviewing Dump Study : Waste: Rita Garasi is appointed to lead a seven-member committee that will examine the Elsmere Canyon environmental report.

SANTA CLARITA —  Mayor Jan Heidt has named Rita Garasi, a former planning commissioner and experienced landfill opponent, as the head of a seven-member citizens committee to review the environmental documents for a proposed dump in Elsmere Canyon.

“It’s a quasi-legislative role,” Garasi said. “You lay out a factual situation and out flows a conclusion. I think the project will rise or fall on its own merits.”

BKK Corp. has proposed a 190-million-ton landfill in Elsmere Canyon southeast of Santa Clarita beyond the intersection of San Fernando Road and the Antelope Valley Freeway.

The U.S. Forest Service is preparing the environmental impact report for the project. That document is projected to be finished before the end of the year, possibly by November.

“We expect this to be a large volume of material that will have to be analyzed, reviewed and addressed in a very short period of time,” said Lynn Harris, Santa Clarita community development director.

Garasi was an active participant in local efforts during the early 1980’s to battle a toxic waste treatment plant and dumping area suggested by IT Corp. for a 720-acre site in the Sand Canyon community, half a mile from the Antelope Valley Freeway. She co-wrote the response to the environmental impact report on behalf of Santa Clarita, which was still years away from becoming a city.

Opponents of that earlier facility and the current landfill plan each said the projects would harm air quality, contaminate the underground water supply and cause local property values to drop.

A second resident named to the panel, engineering geologist Allen Seward, also was involved in the earlier fight.

This is the first time Santa Clarita, which is working to defeat the dump proposal, has created a panel to review a project’s environmental impact report. Heidt obtained City Council approval of the idea in February and interviewed 18 residents in June for the committee.

The group does not include any of Santa Clarita’s activists who are working to oppose the landfill.

“What I’m hoping for is a credible, professional and objective review of the environmental impact study,” Heidt said.

“If this simply were a rubber stamp group that already had an opinion, this would be a silly exercise,” Garasi said.

Other members of the committee include lighting salesman Jeffrey Augustine, real estate paralegal Marianne Douglas, urban wildlands fire management consultant Scott Franklin, retiree Bill Woodson and ecologist and biologist Alan Zada.

Garasi said the committee will examine the environmental documents using the group’s technical knowledge while keeping in mind the community’s perspective.

“I see it as bringing together some professional expertise in a non-professional way,” Garasi said.

The committee’s first meeting is scheduled for Sept. 8.