EDITORIAL DUMP THEATRICS CITY COUNCIL DELAYS ITS INEVITABLE BETRAYAL OF THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY.

THERE'S a grand show going on at the Los Angeles City Council, where members keep postponing the inevitable - their contract extension with Sunshine Canyon Landfill - hoping that the act will convince the public that they care.

It won't, and they don't.

If council members gave a hoot about ending the practice of dumping a million tons of trash a year in a residential neighborhood, they would have come up with an alternative long ago. There's no shortage of possibilities: carting the trash out to the desert, increasing recycling and converting more waste into green energy, to name just a few.

But for all their hand-wringing and symbolic delaying of the Sunshine extension, they have devised no other plan. The one alternative that once seemed the most promising - shipping the trash out to a remote desert site - was dropped in June when Waste Management Inc., which had been trying to negotiate a deal, pulled out due to the city's lack of seriousness and good faith.

So now the council's members laughably carry on as though they might still do something else, postponing their vote to renew the Sunshine contract for as long as possible. On Wednesday, the council voted to put off the decision to Aug. 5.

That way, when the ink is dried, they can claim that they ``tried'' to do something else, however implausibly.

But it's hard to take them seriously.

After all, they have had years to come up with alternatives for Sunshine Canyon. Any plan with any integrity would have to go through serious environmental and economic analysis - not the sort of thing that's likely to be achieved in the next two weeks, least of all by this collection of dawdlers and layabouts.

Like Waste Management before it, Browning Ferris Industries, which operates Sunshine Canyon, is getting sick of City Hall's shenanigans. The company says it won't accept any delays past August 5.

That could be a bluff, but even if it is, the day of reckoning is surely close at hand. Eventually the council will have no choice but to do what it's fully intended to do all along - renew the deal with Sunshine Canyon.

And when that happens, the San Fernando Valley will be what it's unofficially been all along - L.A.'s dumping grounds.

Granada Hills residents will be stuck with the fumes, the leaks, the endless stream of exhaust-spewing diesel trucks running through their neighborhoods. Worse yet, they will have no real reason to believe that the situation will ever change.

Because for all their theatrics, council members can't conceal the fact that they've failed their constituents - yet again.