The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is described as a patchwork of federal, state, and local parkland. The pattern for this patchwork was envisioned long before the National Recreation Area was created in 1978, but some of the pieces have taken a long time to acquire. Now, an old landfill located in the “Big Wild,” a 20,000-acre section of the mountains that extends from Topanga to the 405, is finally set to become parkland.
Mission Canyon is located south of Mulholland Drive and west of Sepulveda Blvd. Anyone who takes the 405 to or from the Valley is familiar with it. From the 1950s until 1980, this was a major garbage dump for the city of Los Angeles. There was no recycling in those days, and no special handling for hazardous household waste. Waste was deposited into each canyon until it was filled. The sanitation district then moved on to the next.
Not everyone was thrilled to have pristine canyons filled with trash. In the 1960s, the county entered a joint powers agreement that stated that the Mission Canyon site would be left “in a condition usable for park and recreational purposes” when the site was no longer needed for trash disposal, but at the same time, the county purchased 1,900 acres adjacent to Mission Canyon in Rustic and Sullivan canyons to expand the landfill, suggesting that the goal was to expand the dump rather than decommission it and that the park proposal was only offered to assuage the ire of area residents.
In the 1970s and 80s, the county engaged in an ambitious drive to level large swaths of the Santa Monica Mountains and build entire cities connected with multiple freeways. This was the era of a proposed Mulholland Freeway in place of Mulholland Highway; a city of 40,000 atop the Top of Topanga; and marinas, freeways, high rise apartment buildings, and a population of 150,000 in neighboring Malibu.
The County Board of Supervisors discarded the promise of parkland and proposed instead a plan to lease or sell the Mission Canyon land to a third party for a golf course, housing project and luxury housing developers. The Mountaingate community next door (built atop the Canyon Eight Landfill) gives a good idea what the outcome could have been, but lawsuits ensued.
In 1987, Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernard proposed reopening the landfill and expanding it into the sanitation district’s Rustic and Sullivan canyon property, despite extensive environmental concerns. Residents and environmental activists once again pushed back and succeeded in getting 1,500 acres of Sanitation District land designated the Marvin Braude Nature Preserve in 1997, named for a former Los Angeles City Councilmember who advocated for preservation, and with the support of County Supervisor and District Director Zev Yaroslavsky. Mission Canyon, however, remained in limbo.
Three years later, in 1990, a court decision scuppered a new county plan to lease the land to developer Ray Watt for a luxury development. Things were finally looking up for a Mission Canyon Park instead of a Mission Canyon exclusive gated community, but environmental mitigation was required before the canyon could be opened to the public.
In 2004, the Sanitation District finally terminated its rights to the property.
A decade later, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA), now the lead agency for the Mission Canyon park project, finally received funding from the county to design a park.
In 2018, MRCA presented the Mission Canyon Park environmental and project design proposal to the public for input. Two years later, feasibility and traffic issues raised during the scoping period were resolved.
In 2020, feasibility and traffic findings were presented to the public at a scoping hearing. The new proposal included a traffic signal at the intersection of Sepulveda Blvd. and Mission Canyon Road and alignment at the Sepulveda Park entry. Traffic mitigation was estimated to add approximately $5-million to the cost of the project, plus 9-12 months for construction.
In 2021, the Mitigated Negative Declaration for those changes was circulated. In 2022, the MRCA Governing Board approved the Mission Canyon Park project and the Mitigated Negative Declaration that completed the CEQA—California Environmental Quality Act—process.
One of the last big hurdles to overcome was the license agreement between the county and MRCA that was on the November MRCA agenda.
A major part of that agreement is responsibility for the contents of the landfill. The MRCA has argued that building and maintaining the park, not any potential toxic mess placed there by the city or the county, is their responsibility. The county, not the MRCA, is responsible for identifying issues and the necessary monitoring and maintenance activities. The Sanitation Department will continue to maintain and monitor issues like methane gas, produced by the decomposition of waste.
Once the License Agreement is executed, the next step is design and permitting for the actual improvements, which include parking, trails, and other infrastructure. Although it has been designated a nature preserve, the Sanitation District has continued to own the Rustic and Sullivan Canyon site next to Mission Canyon. It is currently in the process of transferring that 1900-acre property to the MRCA, ensuring that, together with Mission Canyon, this 2400-acre section of the Santa Monica Mountains, part of the Big Wild, stays wild and undeveloped in perpetuity.
Open space acquisition is often a long, slow, complicated process, one that can require decades of work by government agencies and conservation advocates before the goal is reached, but the fight for Mission Canyon has been a marathon of unusual length and complexity, even for land in the Santa Monica Mountains. Now, the finish line may finally be in sight. Many of the original residents and activists who fought the landfill and subsequent development are no longer here to see the result of their efforts but more than sixty years later, the promised Mission Canyon Park may finally be Coming Soon (2028 is the current estimate), thanks to decades of hard work and persistence. Watch this space.
