Canyons Seen as Dumps--or as Parkland : Environment: Competition is growing between the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, two aggressive agencies with conflicting purposes.

To some people, deep canyons are refuges for wildlife, buffers against sprawl, places to take a hike. To others, they are ideally suited to provide a basic service as receptacles for trash.

This conflict of needs and values has spurred a land rush between two aggressive public agencies with vastly different goals. One is the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, which disposes of waste water and trash for 78 cities in the county, and now is prospecting in the Santa Clarita and northern San Fernando valleys for remote canyons to use as landfill sites.

The other is the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state parks agency that covets some of the same real estate for parks and trails.

“It’s a lot like a race and frankly, I hope the conservancy wins,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

“It seems like everywhere we go, they show up,” said Joe Haworth Jr., a Sanitation Districts spokesman. Because parks and landfills both “involve open space, we’re bound to bump into each other sooner or later,” he said.

Lately they’ve been bumping into each other with regularity, which could prove a political problem for the smaller and less potent conservancy.

The conservancy’s collision with the districts could affect an ambitious proposal to raise money for improving county parks, beaches and museums. The proposed $816-million bond issue includes about $90 million for the conservancy, and county supervisors must decide by early next month whether to put it on the November ballot.

Angered by the turf battle, Supervisor Deane Dana has insisted that there be language in the measure barring the conservancy from spending bond funds for land wanted by the districts. Even if that restriction is included, Dana has not said whether he will support putting the proposal before voters.

The fallout has spread to Sacramento, where the conservancy and its legislative allies recently were forced to scale back trail-building plans under pressure from the districts.

At issue was a proposed expansion of the Rim of the Valley Corridor, including lands surrounding Elsmere and Towsley canyons, both potential landfill sites in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The corridor is a zone in the local mountains where the conservancy has authority to create horse and hiking trails. It has no power to restrict landfills or other projects there. Still, the districts feared the corridor designation could be ammunition for anti-dump forces in future landfill siting battles. Areas around Towsley and Elsmere were dropped to avoid risking a legislative committee veto of the expansion.

But the conservancy’s efforts to acquire land sought by the districts have won kudos from many officials, particularly those facing the prospect of new landfills in their jurisdictions. “People . . . are going to be desperate for recreational land in this growing county,” said Carl Boyer III, a city councilman in Santa Clarita, where officials fear environmental damage if landfills are developed. “I think the conservancy has basically done their best under a very, very tough situation.”

The Sanitation Districts “have never seen a canyon that they didn’t want to fill up with trash,” said Hunt Braly, chief of staff for Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita). As for the conservancy, “they continue to do an exemplary job,” said Braly.

Despite their skirmishing, sanitation and conservancy officials speak of each other with a measure of respect.

“I don’t have any desire to try to characterize what they’re doing,” said Donald S. Nellor, chief of planning and engineering for the districts’ solid waste management department. “They’re a public agency attempting to fulfill their mandate . . . and so are we,” he said.

“Rare in government, they have long-term objectives,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the conservancy, referring to the Sanitation Districts. “Unfortunately, their goals were pretty much decided in the late ‘50s,” he said.

The districts plan to create at least two big landfills from among four candidate sites: Elsmere, Towsley and Blind canyons in the Santa Susana Mountains above Chatsworth, and Mission-Rustic-Sullivan, a network of three canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Due to objections by conservationists and influential Westside residents, the canyons in the Santa Monicas are almost untouchable, which has increased pressure on Elsmere, Towsley and Blind.

An environmental impact report on the suitability of the four sites will not appear in draft form until at least next month. But the districts have wasted no time in trying to lock up all of the land they can.

For their part, conservancy officials say they are out to preserve parks, not block landfills. However, their pursuit of that goal appears to have knocked the Blind Canyon site out of contention.

In April, the conservancy stunned the Sanitation Districts by reaching an agreement with entertainer Bob Hope to purchase his 4,369-acre Runkle Ranch, of which Blind Canyon is a part. Conservancy officials said the acquisition preserves a vital wildlife corridor linking animal populations in the Santa Susanas, Simi Hills and Santa Monica Mountains.

Sanitation Districts officials had been negotiating with Hope for years and are thought to have offered substantially more than the below-market $10 million the conservancy will pay. The deal is contingent on approval of a big golf and residential project on Hope’s Jordan Ranch property in eastern Ventura County. But for now at least, Blind Canyon is beyond the Sanitation Districts’ reach.

However, the districts have the upper hand at Towsley on the other side of the Santa Susanas. They have optioned about 900 acres in Towsley, while the conservancy--which wants Towsley for the proposed Santa Clarita Woodlands State Park--has been unable to obtain land in the canyon proper.

However, the conservancy has acquired 145 acres near the mouth of the canyon, in effect blocking the best access road for trash trucks.

“They are in the way of what we believe to be probably the most suitable access,” said Nellor, adding that an alternative access route is possible.

The competition between the agencies began last year over the other two sites, Elsmere and the Santa Monica Mountains canyons. Los Angeles city and county officials were negotiating creation of a landfill at Elsmere, to be run by the Sanitation Districts. The conservancy did not try to snap up the Elsmere site, but insisted that the destruction of Elsmere be mitigated by transferring to conservancy ownership the three canyons in the Santa Monicas, which are owned by the county and the districts.

The conservancy joined forces with BKK Corp., a private waste disposal firm that held land and options at Elsmere, in an effort to enhance each party’s bargaining strength. BKK ultimately accepted a lucrative buyout offer from the city and county. The city and county, however, also agreed to preserve at least two of the canyons in the Santa Monicas if Elsmere becomes a landfill.

Larry Berg, director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, said the conflict suggests the need for regional government to resolve land-use conflicts. “You’ve got to have landfills and . . . you need parks as well,” he said. Following their legal mandates, both agencies are “looking to solve one of these problems and not all of them,” Berg said.

At the same time, according to Berg, area sanitation officials have been slow to inaugurate recycling and waste-reduction programs, thus aggravating the problem. “They’ve got to get far more aggressive in trying . . . to cut this waste stream drastically,” Berg said. “They never really liked to do that, and I understand that it’s difficult, but come on, this is a new world.”

At the headquarters of the Sanitation Districts in Whittier, however, the word is that recycling is not a magic wand to make the problem vanish. There will always be stuff left over, Nellor says, and hence a need for landfills.

Through a window in his office looms a towering terrace of trash. It is the districts’ Puente Hills landfill--one of the two largest landfills in the country and a good backdrop for a gloomy scenario.

By late 1991, Nellor said, trash could be piling up on sidewalks. This could happen if expansion of existing public and private landfills, including Sunshine Canyon above Granada Hills, is not approved. Remaining dumps will still have years of capacity, but with fewer sites available, trash trucks could face long lines and collection could become less regular.

Over the long haul, Nellor said, a state law requiring at least 50% of waste to be diverted from landfills by the year 2000 should help out a lot. Even so, he said, population growth and shrinking dump capacity require at least one new landfill by the year 2000 and another by 2010.

It is not the most popular work, Nellor acknowledged. “I think it’s obvious that park development is an easier type of project to implement than the public service provided by a landfill,” he said.

“We need parks. We need places to dispose of our refuse,” he said, “and the same people that need the parks produce the refuse that needs to be disposed of.”

A lean, cautious engineer, Nellor’s personal style, along with his mission, contrasts with that of the more free-wheeling and passionate Edmiston.

On a recent sweltering afternoon, Edmiston four-wheeled into Towsley Canyon, bumping along a rutted road to a point where the high canyon walls narrow to a gorge.

“This is a breathing space, OK?” he said. “We’re giving future generations an option about what to do. If this canyon is filled in the next five years, there won’t be an option in 30 years to decide.”

Besides, it is not his job to back off “so that people can throw away as many McDonald’s . . . containers” as they want “and not worry about it,” Edmiston said. “That lifestyle has been pretty much discredited.”