Santa Clarita’s Elsmere Canyon Closer to Protected Status

After many years of battling over the proposed Elsmere Canyon dump, the area approaches protected status with the passage of AB 110.

Photo courtesy of City of Santa Clarita

Santa Clarita’s Elsmere Canyon got one step closer to protected status with the Governor’s signature on AB 110 this week.

AB 110 calls for a revision of the boundaries by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy of the Rim of the Valley Trail Corridor, in the vicinity of Placerita Canyon and SR 14, including Whitney Canyon, to include these areas and their watersheds.

The Elsmere Canyon area has been an area of dispute for many years, with Allied Waste finally agreeing not to develop it into a landfill according to an agreement reached in 2007. Still, the City of Santa Clarita wanted to make sure that Elsmere Canyon would remain protected from future development, and thus supported AB 110.

The history of the proposed Elsmere Canyon dump site goes back many years, with a complicated saga involving the allocation of public and private land to create a 1,500 acre dump site capable of holding 190 million tons of waste. This would have created the world’s largest dump just outside the City of Santa Clarita.