Council Plans to Appeal After Losing Bid to Block Sunshine Canyon Landfill

The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to appeal a recent court ruling that delayed but failed to halt a plan to develop a huge dump in Sunshine Canyon above Granada Hills.

Ron Deaton, a top adviser to the council, confirmed that lawmakers agreed in executive session Tuesday to appeal a Superior Court judge’s ruling in the controversy that pits the city against Browning-Ferris Industries, which owns the dump, and the county of Los Angeles.

The council also voted unanimously to spend an additional $100,000 on the lawsuit, which challenges a February, 1991, decision by the County Board of Supervisors to allow Browning-Ferris to develop a 200-acre dump in unincorporated county territory just north of the city limits.

That brought the council’s spending on the lawsuit to $465,000.

The city’s case is being handled by the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips.

Councilman Hal Bernson, a longtime critic of Browning-Ferris, refused to comment on the council’s actions. Bernson represents Granada Hills, the residential area most affected by the landfill plans.

Superior Court Judge Ronald Sohigian ruled March 20 that the environmental impact report for the proposed 17-million-ton dump was deficient in two respects and ordered that all work on the project stop until these defects were corrected.

Most notably, the judge said the report failed to give enough weight to Bernson’s claim that Browning-Ferris has a poor track record of complying with environmental restrictions on a permit it had to operate a dump--now closed--in a portion of Sunshine Canyon located in the city of Los Angeles.

But the judge rejected the major points of the city’s legal challenge.

The city argued that the environmental report failed to adequately address the possibility of developing less environmentally damaging alternative dump sites; that the conditional-use permit granted by the supervisors illegally excludes the city from using the Sunshine Canyon dump unless the city allows Browning-Ferris to dump again in city territory; and that the report erred in depicting the county as facing an imminent crisis for lack of trash disposal space.

Browning-Ferris officials said Sohigian’s limited ruling would delay their project by only a few months, the time they estimated it would take to amend the environmental report and secure another approval from county supervisors.