KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
Update: corrects a statement about other landfills in the Los Angeles County and an incorrectly attributed quote about the demographics of Val Verde.
Some Val Verde residents expressed displeasure Thursday with Los Angeles County over a contentious landfill in the community, as about two dozen residents delivered a letter to Supervisor Michael Antonovich asking for the Chiquita Canyon Landfill to be closed immediately.
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“The (current contract) requires the landfill be closed. There was no closure plans, and this was not reported to the county supervisors,” said Lynn Plambeck, the president of Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and Environment, known as SCOPE, outside the supervisor’s office. “They obviously had no intention of closing the landfill on time as promised. The county either didn’t know, or worse, ignored this issue.”
Antonovich was not at his Santa Clarita office at the time, but a deputy for the supervisor accepted the letter on his behalf, promising that the 5th District’s elected official would see it.
“We would like the county to honor their promise,” said Val Verde resident Steve Lee as he delivered the letter. “They made a promise 19 years ago. Please keep it.”
The landfill had been operating for over 40 years, and the 1997 contract Lee referred to was a simple expansion for the landfill, according to one of Antonovich’s representatives.
“Their Conditional Use Permit (which allows the landfill to operate until certain conditions are met), expires when they hit a certain tonnage,” said Edel Vizcarra, the planning and public works deputy for Antonovich, before adding that the landfill hit the 23 million ton condition within the last few weeks.
This promise is one that Lee and others in the community believe the county has not kept.
“The landfill signed a contract with us 19 years ago, along with the county, along with Antonovich,” he said, “that at 23 million tons, no matter what, they would close the landfill and the suffering would be over for Val Verde.”
Get live news updates about Santa Clarita by following KHTS on Facebook and KHTS on TwitterHowever, landfill officials filed a “clean hands waiver” with the county, which Vizcarra said allows them to stay in operation while an expansion is being hammered out with county officials.
“For all projects, when there is some sort of violation it gives the business the ability to operate until a decision is processed,” said Vizcarra. “That’s what the clean hands waiver is.”
An expansion plan is expected to come before the L.A. County Board of Supervisors in early 2017. However, Vizcarra and Tony Bell, Antonovich’s communications deputy, both said there were some issues with the current version of the document, including a proposal to double the size of the landfill.
“There are some issues,” said Vizcarra.
Vizcarra added that several other landfills in the L.A. County fall in racially diverse areas, and there has not been this level of backlash.
“There are landfills in diverse communities all over the County, including Glendale, the San Fernando Valley, Calabasas, Puente Hills (which recently closed), and Lancaster,” he said.
But the proposal to expand the landfill appears to some residents as an effort by the opposition to bully a poorer, mainly Latino community.
“They lied to us. They know we’re poor and we have nowhere to turn,” Lee said. “What the county is banking on is that they are Latino and that they won’t speak up for themselves.”
Bell called the accusations unfair and unfounded.
“That’s not accurate or fair,” he said.
Vizcarra added that demographically, Val Verde has changed since 1972, when the landfill was constructed.
“If you look at the demographics (from when the landfill went into operation), they’re very different from today,” he said.
Representatives from Chiquita Canyon Landfill did not return requests for comment by the time of publication.
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Do a search of the Lancaster landfill and then look at it from satellite, the first major settlement is about 2.5 miles from the landfill. Then do a search of Chiquita Canyon Landfill and you will see Val Verde at 800 feet, post office at about he same, a business center about the same, a school at about 1200 square feet. Not the same thing at all. So when the representative uses a landfill far away from communities that is deliberate misrepresentation.
Misrepresentation is putting it lightly. Profit over people. Always.
So where is this wavier they say they got months ago. Steve CAssulo only found out they were over the limit when one of our residents crunched the numbers and Monday, July 25th it was brought to the attention of Steve Cassulo, who is the head honcho at Chiquita Canyon Landfill, that the dump was over the limit. He did not know that and said the dump has no plans to shut down. So who is covering for who? They are supposed to give running totals on their reports and they never have. They could have made phone calls to their customers (of which they won’t let Val Verde see) to tell them they have to shut down because they are over the limit, and given like oh I don’t know a two week notice. Whose safety are they really concerned with. Not Val Verde residents who live 800 feet from the landfill, unlike other landfills who are 1 or more miles away from homes. The supervisors must really want their cut of the fees paid by customers and they don’t care about the violations, just the money.
Today they sent me a document that basically says that on 4 of August they have decided to let the landfill run in full violation because to close them down would be dangerous because the trucks would have to turn around. The other reason is there are not enough landfills, but there are empty landfills that the tax payers have paid for, the last reason was that it would cost the consumers too much. Same excuses when they violated the contract 19 years ago. The promise was that they would look for a new landfill with the permit of 23 million. No search was done. In 2017 why have a Draft EIR, we already know the answer is to expand for the reasons they have stated. If you think contracts matter, you are wrong.