City Breaks Promise to Close Landfill

When will the City of Los Angeles ever keep its word to its citizens?

The latest step by the members of the Board of Public Works instructing the Bureau of Sanitation to make plans to keep the Lopez Canyon Landfill open beyond the current closure date of February, 1996, is a violation of the conditional use permit granted in 1991 for a period of five years.

The people of Lake View Terrace and Kagel Canyon, who have borne out the brunt of this massive monster of garbage for 20 years, were promised in 1991 that this dump would shut down forever in 1996, and now the city is reneging on that promise.

The Bureau of Sanitation has consistently deceived residents of the affected areas and produced misleading and erroneous statistics regarding costs and operational failures at the dump site. It appears that the Los Angeles newspapers have accepted the bureau’s handouts as being true representations of the situation.

What is needed is determination to insist that the city recognize the closure date and actively pursue alternative measures such as rail haul before other cities get the benefits of cost negotiations and L.A. is left with little or no alternative in desperate circumstances in later years.

HILTON and EILEEN BARRY

Lake View Terrace