EDITORIAL IGNORANCE ISN'T BLISS CITY HALL GETS SIX MORE MONTHS TO FIND OUT THE FACTS ABOUT ALTERNATIVES TO SUNSHINE CANYON.

FINALLY, sanity has prevailed in the battle over the Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Granada Hills.

For years, a succession of mayors, City Council members and sanitation bureaucrats hid behind the claim that they had to approve a massive expansion of the garbage dump because they didn't know what else to do with it.

Ignorance certainly wasn't bliss in this case because Sunshine Canyon became the battle cry for San Fernando Valley activists fed up with City Hall corruption and its failure to solve the city's problems.

On Monday, with the council finally ready to drop ignorance as an excuse for bad public policy, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the operator of Sunshine Canyon came to an agreement that will give the city six months to actually develop alternatives and start to carry out strategies that will make urban landfills obsolete. This should have happened a long time ago.

It's hard to understand how Villaraigosa got conned into breaking his promise to oppose the five-year extension of the Sunshine Canyon contract. He somehow bought the feeble argument that the contract, which doesn't expire until next June, had to be renewed now or BFI would jack up its dumping rates. He somehow felt helpless because city bureaucrats had not developed any alternatives to Sunshine Canyon.

What's shocking about all this is that ignorance of alternatives was used in 1999 to give long-term approval to BFI's creation of one of the nation's largest urban landfills. The continued trashing of the San Fernando Valley came even as city officials, posturing as environmentally sensitive, closed dumps elsewhere in the city.

The issue helped drive the Valley cityhood movement and Mayor James Hahn and later Villaraigosa promised to end this outrage. Most council members have said they too want a modern trash policy that gets rid of all urban dumps. Yet not a single substantive thing has been done in the last six years to gather the information and develop an alternative to Sunshine Canyon.

Will the officials of the Bureau of Sanitation be held accountable for this failure? Or were they in fact carrying out the politicians' orders?

It is hard to see how the debate can go forward with any credibility until public hearings are held and the matter is cleared up.

If heads must roll and political machinations are exposed it would be good for the soul of this city. Sunshine Canyon is a symbol of all that is wrong with Los Angeles. Now that the BFI bully boys have been shown to be paper tigers, city leaders have the chance to screw up their courage and start making this a better place to live for all the people.