Santa Monicas Landfill Ban Fails Key Vote of Committee

A bill that would prohibit trash landfills in the Santa Monica Mountains and in a large area of the San Fernando Valley failed a key committee vote Tuesday in the face of resistance from cities with mounting garbage-disposal problems.

The 11-6 vote for the measure fell one short of the required majority on the 23-member Assembly Ways and Means Committee. The action came despite last-minute amendments that sought to strike a balance between popular support for protecting scenic mountains and concern about where to dump the 45,000 tons of refuse generated every day in Los Angeles County.

Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Los Angeles), the author of the bill who lobbied desperately for one more favorable vote, said he would bring the measure back for another try next week.

“We’ll keep working, but obviously the outcome today wasn’t the step forward that we needed,” the freshman lawmaker said.

Friedman said resistance to his proposals stiffened at the beginning of the week after six members of the San Gabriel Valley delegation urged the committee to reject the measure. In a letter prepared by Assemblywoman Sally Tanner (D-El Monte), the group said garbage now trucked to the mountains would have to be diverted to San Gabriel Valley landfills and eventually to more remote areas if the mountains were closed to landfills.

The western part of Los Angeles County is a heavy exporter of trash to the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, Tanner wrote, and passage of Friedman’s bill “would severely limit any county efforts to spread the wealth more equitably”--a goal that Tanner is pushing in other pending legislation.

Assemblyman Charles M. Calderon (D-Alhambra), who did not sign the Tanner letter, said he reluctantly voted for the bill only after Friedman accepted amendments that would permit continued use of landfills in the Santa Monica Mountains if no “reasonable, new alternatives” could be found.

Among the “reasonable alternatives,” Friedman said, is the Santa Clarita Valley, a location suggested last month by Los Angeles City Councilmen Marvin Braude and Hal Bernson. They said the city’s garbage could be dumped there for the next 50 years, thus removing pressure to continue trucking it to Mission Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains and Sunshine Canyon in the San Fernando Valley.

Inland concerns about garbage disposal also were reflected by Assemblyman Bill Leonard (R-Redlands), who supported Friedman’s bill in earlier hearings but came out against it Tuesday.

Friedman’s bill would ban landfills in 155,000 acres of the mountains, including Mission, Rustic and Sullivan canyons, and in 140,000 acres in the Rim of the Valley Corridor. The rim, which encircles the Valley, includes two of the city’s largest landfills in Sunshine and Lopez canyons.

Under the bill, those landfills would be forced to close by 1990, effectively killing plans for a controversial, 1,000-acre expansion of the Sunshine landfill.