EDITORIAL LET THE SUN SHINE IN COUNCIL COMMITS TO FIXING L.A.'S FLAWED TRASH POLICY - MAYBE.

BELIEVE it or not, the City Council stood up for the residents of Los Angeles in general and the San Fernando Valley in particular last week by refusing to be bullied by the operator of Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Granada Hills.

By a single vote, the council on Friday rejected a five-year extension of the contract to drive hundreds of diesel trucks a day through residential areas to dump the city's garbage near the backyards of Valley residents.

The issue automatically comes back to the council Tuesday, and you can be sure Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and others will employ intense pressure to find an eighth vote to extend the contract. Given the shameful history of this deal, such a reversal would mark a betrayal of the public trust and the public interest of the first order.

But even if the council's action stands, it doesn't actually mean the city will stop carrying its trash to Sunshine in the foreseeable future. And it certainly doesn't mean the landfill will close, since it won long-term approval to operate one of the nation's largest urban landfills in 1999 and can hold trash from other cities and private contractors.

Villaraigosa broke his campaign commitment on the landfill and threw his weight behind extending the contract at the last minute, arguing that the failure to develop alternatives to urban landfills under Mayor James Kenneth Hahn left the city at the mercy of Sunshine's operator, Browning Ferris Industries. He took seriously the firm's threat that it would jack up its dumping fees by tens of millions of dollars next June unless the city locks in a lower rate now.

The council chose to gamble, and it was the right thing to do. The credit goes to Northwest Valley Councilman Greig Smith, who overcame the resistance of his fellow council members.

The important question now is what they are going to do with the city's thousands of tons of garbage every day. It's a question that should have been answered decades ago, should have been answered before Sunshine was approved six years ago.

The mayor and council now say they are committed to developing a modern trash policy and getting rid of urban landfills.

But the community is deeply skeptical, and properly so. Sunshine is a living symbol of City Hall's corruption.

To get a measure of credibility, the city's leadership is going to have to conduct a thorough inquiry into why the Bureau of Sanitation failed to develop trash alternatives, identify those responsible for this failure and put people in charge of developing future trash policy who have the trust of the community.

That's a tall order for a city government that is used to serving itself and the insiders who live off it rather than the public.