ANOTHER SLAP FOR THE VALLEY.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I looked it up. It was Phillip Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, who wrote, ``An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.'' Perhaps those words should be written across the Hollywood Hills in 20-foot-tall letters so certain basin politicians could read them every time they bothered to look up.

More than a decade ago, the city of Los Angeles closed the city side of Sunshine Canyon Landfill after years of complaints from Granada Hills residents and repeated code violations by the dump's operators, Browning Ferris Industries. (Their adjoining larger county-side landfill remained in operation.)

But then in 1999, City Hall double-crossed the San Fernando Valley. After extensive lobbying and some apocalyptic spin by the Department of Sanitation, the City Council granted BFI a 50-year operating permit for an expanded 55 million ton dump in the old location.

In the years since, BFI has slogged its way through state committees and review boards and defeated neighborhood-sponsored challenge after challenge. There was never much drama to any of this. It was all just paperwork; check the box, sign the form and file the study.

Once that city permit had been issued there was almost no way to legally stop BFI from reopening and operating Sunshine Canyon, not without paying hundreds of millions of dollars to compensate for the loss of the now ``legal'' use of its property.

Now we are down to the last ditch in what has been a last-ditch fight from the beginning.

The only permit that BFI still needs to start bringing in the trucks will come from the Los Angeles Regional Water Control Board. That board has studied the landfill from top to bottom.

In its staff report, we find that Sunshine Canyon can receive as much as 55.8 inches of rain in a single year, that the groundwater under the facility flows southward toward the mouth of the canyon at up to 4.4 feet per day, that local waters also seep through fractures in local rocks, that the Los Angeles Reservoir (which holds some of your drinking water) is located ``approximately 1.5 miles to the southwest of the facility'' and that the San Fernando Groundwater Basin, ``an important groundwater resource'' is just one mile south of the landfill.

Still, the RWCB staff recommends that the permit be granted.

And it will be granted, probably at the next board meeting in early December. Legally the board doesn't have much choice.

Mayor James Hahn and Councilmen Tony Cardenas and Greig Smith have called for the closure of all city landfills by the year 2006, and the County Health Department has decided to do a door-to-door survey of residential areas near Valley landfills to check on rates of childhood asthma and reduced lung function.

But that's all in the future. For now the landfill is a done deal, yet another injury to the Valley.

But leave it to that tower of babble on and on - City Hall - to add an unnecessary insult as well. This one originates where the 10 and the 110 freeways come together. That's where Ed Reye's 1st City Council district, Bernard Parks' 8th and Jan Perry's 9th district all touch.

These three council members - and one other - were the authors of a recent letter sent to the RWCB Board urging it to approve the re-opening of Sunshine Canyon. Their letter calls the dump ``a much-needed public resource,'' a definition the long-suffering residents of Granada Hills can only take as an insult.

In a way I can understand Parks' name on the letter. He never paid much attention to the Valley even when he was chief of police. And Perry and Reyes have no history with the Valley. But the fourth name on that missive is a puzzle to me - Cindy Miscikowski, the queen of Council District 11.

Cindy should know better. She once represented a portion of Sherman Oaks. Surely she would not be so arrogant as to imply that a dump is a more valuable city resource than the residents of Granada Hills.

Cindy would be outraged if a landfill should attempt to operate near a public school in Brentwood. Why, then, is she so unconcerned when it's Valley children whose health is at risk? Aren't they a city resource, too? Los Angeles needs landfills, but why is Cindy so determined to keep dumping on the Valley?

I would have asked Cindy these questions but she's vacationing in Cuba and unavailable for comment.