Foes of Trash-Burning Project Get Support of Legal Advocates

Low-income residents of South-Central Los Angeles opposed to the Lancer trash incinerator added an important legal ally this week when the Center for Law in the Public Interest agreed to fight the proposed project until safety questions are resolved.

Lawyers for the center have a record of winning major environmental concessions in noted cases, and their enlistment gives the mostly black opponents of Lancer--the Los Angeles City Energy Recovery project--significant Westside and environmentalist support.

City sanitation officials want to build a first $235-million waste-to-energy plant near 41st Street and Alameda Avenue to slow the rapid filling of landfill dumps in the mountains around Los Angeles. The City Council has given tentative approval and also directed officials to find sites for two more incinerators, which would burn household trash to create electricity, in the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

Last week the city released a report of health risks it commissioned from UC Berkeley professor Allen H. Smith that concluded the first Lancer plant would be by far the safest trash incinerator in the country. City officials agreed to take comments on the report from scientists and critics for 60 days before there is any further action, and the early reaction to the report has been widespread skepticism.

The Center for Law in the Public Interest jumped into the fray Tuesday with a letter to city officials asking that the comment period be extended to 120 days. “Sixty days is simply not enough time to permit meaningful public review and independent expert analysis of the highly technical six-volume study . . . that took over a year to prepare,� the letter said.

Basis for Challenge

Staff attorney Joel R. Reynolds added that the center feels that Lancer “would not only severely degrade the quality of life in the immediate neighborhoods surrounding the site, but it would aggravate� air pollution.

One of the city’s leading advocates for the poor, the center’s most celebrated victories include an injunction stopping work on the Century Freeway for seven years and the Sundance ruling that temporarily barred police from treating public drunks as criminals. Center attorneys have also used lawsuits to force the city to revise its outdated zoning, prod Los Angeles County to end the jailing of tuberculosis patients and help homeowners near the polluted Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside.

No litigation is currently planned on Lancer, Reynolds said Wednesday, but he raised the future prospect of a lawsuit if Lancer opponents do not believe they are treated fairly by the city.

The opponents are led by the Concerned Citizens of South-Central, which began in 1985 as a small group that met every Saturday in a Central Avenue branch library. As interest in the trash burning issue grew, Westside-based environmental groups such as Not Yet New York and the Coalition for Clean Air became involved.

Board’s Viewpoint

Maureen Kindel, president of the city Board of Public Works, said Wednesday she is “sympathetic� to requests for more time to analyze the health risk study. But she said first she wants to be certain that an extension would not throw the project off schedule and that the critics are not just trying a “delaying tactic.�

Critics of the city’s health risk study have already begun to question how the danger from cancer-causing dioxins was calculated. Tests of various incinerators in the world have shown that some emit more dioxins than others, but the city’s consultant chose to use among the lowest figures available and to discount the potency of the dioxins.