EDITORIAL BETRAYED AGAIN SAME OLD POLITICS FROM L.A.'S ``NEW'' CITY COUNCIL.

WITH each passing day, it gets harder to tell the ``new'' Los Angeles City Council apart from the old one.

The old City Council decided to make the San Fernando Valley L.A.'s dump by reopening and expanding the Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Granada Hills.

And on a 10-3 vote, the new City Council has refused to order a health study of the dump or pass restrictions that would make it less of a hazard to the surrounding community.

Old council, new council, it doesn't much matter.

At issue is the North Valley Coalition's lawsuit against the dump's planned expansion. The coalition offered to drop its suit if the council would agree to a few modest concessions: conduct a health study of expansion's effects, examine the alternatives and limit the height of the portion of the dump that falls within the city limits to 50 feet below the ridgeline instead of well above it.

But the council would have none of it.

The majority of its members seemingly don't want to know how mountains of trash and thousands of dump trucks affect residents of Granada Hills or students and faculty at nearby Van Gogh Street Elementary School. They're not interested in looking into the possibility of hauling the city's trash out to the desert and away from its neighborhoods. And they couldn't care less about how high the trash piles up.

After all, it's not their neighborhood.

While voting down the proposed settlement, the council heaped insult onto the Valley's injury by proposing a preposterous alternative: It would mediate negotiations to resolve difference between Sunshine Canyon's neighbors and the company's operator, Browning Ferris Industries.

Nice try.

The North Valley Coalition's lawsuit isn't against BFI, it's against City Hall. Its complaint isn't that BFI is acting like the selnterested corporation that it is, but that the L.A. city government is behaving like the company's stooge.

It's hard to imagine that the coalition, or anyone else in the Valley, would be willing to let the back-stabbing City Council ``mediate'' anything. The coalition's lawsuit, which lost in a lower court, will continue on appeal, feeding the discontent that so many in the Valley feel toward the cold indifference of City Hall.

The lone dissenters in this shameful, closed-door vote were council members Hal Bernson, Nate Holden and Dennis Zine.

That makes Zine the only new council member to stand up for the interests of communities and neighborhoods. Other relative newcomers Eric Garcetti, Janice Hahn, Tom LaBonge, Alex Padilla, Nick Pacheco, Jan Perry, Ed Reyes and Jack Weiss - Padilla and Weiss actually represent Valley residents - acted like members of the old guard.

The names have changed in City Hall, but the contempt for the Valley, its residents and their quality of life remains.