3 Groups Sue Over Proposed Elsmere Dump : Landfills: Environmentalists seek to invalidate portions of a city-county agreement, claiming it discourages recycling and waste-reduction efforts.

Three environmental groups filed suit Friday to void portions of a Los Angeles city and county agreement to develop a huge public trash dump in Elsmere Canyon north of Sylmar.

The suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court contends that the city-county pact violates the California Environmental Quality Act and a new state law requiring more recycling and less landfill dumping.

The 19-page complaint seeks a court order to strike down provisions of the agreement, signed last May, that purportedly discourages recycling and waste-reduction efforts. The agreement created a Los Angeles Solid Waste Authority to run the proposed landfill east of the city of Santa Clarita. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are hoping to exact stronger commitments from the city and county to keep landfill development to a minimum.

A spokesman in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office declined comment on the suit, saying no one there had seen it. Attorney Richard J. Riordan, who represented the county in negotiating the agreement with the city, said the agreement complied with state laws and would not undermine recycling efforts.

The suit was filed by Californians Against Waste and the Californians Against Waste Foundation, sister pro-recycling groups based in Sacramento, and by Citizens for a Better Environment.

Rod Miller, legislative director of Californians Against Waste, called the Elsmere agreement “fatally flawed because it does not embrace conservation in any manner.” The county and city “need to more aggressively pursue the alternatives to urban landfills,” he said.

The groups were unable to persuade the city of Santa Clarita to serve as a co-plaintiff--but did secure a pledge of financial support.

“We did say no to joining the suit,” but “agreed to support the suit financially, to some extent,” Santa Clarita City Atty. Carl Newton said late Friday. He said the level of support was uncertain.

Santa Clarita contends that the Elsmere landfill could pollute ground water and make the community a dumping ground, as a second big dump has been proposed for nearby Towsley Canyon.

The Elsmere plan calls for the new solid waste authority to open a 190 million-ton landfill in 1995 in Elsmere Canyon, which is about a mile east of the Antelope Valley Freeway and San Fernando Road interchange. Most of the 2,200-acre site is U.S. Forest Service land, and the project would require an exchange of federal holdings for private lands in Angeles National Forest.

BKK Corp., the waste disposal firm, also owns land and land options at the site, where it sought to build a private landfill. The city-county agreement provides for BKK to secure permits and develop the site, then sell the dump to the solid waste authority.

The lawsuit argues that the city and county pact violated the state environmental quality act by reaching the agreement without completing the environmental studies which are now being conducted.

As a result, the environmental review will not be “the open-minded, problem-solving exercise that it should be,” but rather an “exercise to be endured for the sake of appearances and technical legal compliance,” the complaint states.

The suit further claims that key provisions of the deal are in conflict with the California Integrated Waste Management Act, which requires that recycling, waste reduction and composting be favored over putting waste in landfills. The law, which took effect last January, requires cities and counties to divert from landfills at least 25% of the waste produced within their borders by 1995, and at least 50% of the waste by the year 2000.

The agreement calls for dump fees at Elsmere to be a relatively low $18 to $20 per ton, and requires the city to pay financial penalties if it fails to deliver minimum amounts of trash to the dump. Both provisions are disincentives to reducing the flow of waste, the suit maintains.

The suit asks the court to void these provisions of the deal, or to declare them to be “nonbinding, tentative policy preferences” that may be scrapped to comply with environmental laws.

Miller said the suit’s intent is not to kill the Elsmere project, but to encourage “state-of-the-art conservation” so new landfills are kept to a minimum.

Besides Elsmere, county sanitation officials recently identified three other canyons as feasible sites for future trash dumps: Blind Canyon above Chatsworth, Towsley Canyon in the Santa Clarita Valley, and Mission-Rustic-Sullivan canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains, considered a single landfill site.

Sanitation officials contend that dwindling landfill space has created an impending waste crisis that could bring disruptions in trash collection as early as next year.

“You cannot reduce waste disposal to zero,” Riordan said. Recycling is a major part of the solution, he said, and “another major part . . . is finding places to place the garbage.”