"This is part of the problem," says Father Richard Zanotti, staring ahead at the infamous intersection of Tuxford Avenue and San Fernando Road in Sun Valley, a gritty community tucked away in the San Fernando Valley's northeast industrial corridor.

His is the only car here on a Thursday morning, seemingly boxed in by a convoy of crawling cement trucks, belching dump trucks and intimidating tractor-trailers. But when the light turns green, the 53-year-old pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church adroitly maneuvers the sedan around foot-deep potholes filled with black water.

Going by wide pits and piles of gravel, Father Zanotti points out the Vulcan Materials Company. A dusty cloud engulfs the entire plant, with sand drifting across San Fernando Road like fine snow. "All the trucks coming through kick up all the dirt," he says. "So you can't just look at the dump in isolation. You have to look at it in its accumulative effect in our area."

And there it is, a stone's throw down the street beyond the railroad tracks --- a 100-foot-high hill taking up some 200 acres running parallel to San Fernando Road. The biggest part is covered with brown dirt, with the center lined with tarps, and the other end made up of exposed garbage. On top, a lone bulldozer moves back and forth, spreading out and flattening down the pile of solid waste

"This is the Bradley Landfill," the Scalabrini priest points outs. "It's not a landfill anymore, it's a mountain. Bradley Mountain. But they call it other things." And he laughs.

The landfill, or mountain, has existed since 1959, with Waste Management, the largest network of landfills in North America, owning and operating it since 1986. For a long time, it was just one of 39 landfills up and running in Sun Valley. But today it's the only active mega-dump left, employing more than 240 workers with an annual payroll of $13 million. It serves more than 150,000 customers in Greater Los Angeles.

For years, a handful of community activists have protested that with such landfills, junkyards, gravel pits, concrete plants and recycling sites, Sun Valley --- the mostly Latino, immigrant, lower-income community between the Golden State and Hollywood freeways --- had become Los Angeles' dumping ground.

But then Waste Management, with the landfill nearly full, asked the state for permission to expand it, raising the height by 43 feet, which would equal a 15-story building of trash. This would increase its capacity by 4.7 cubic yards, or about 10 percent, before the dump by law must permanently shut down on April 14, 2007.

Moreover, the company wants permission to build a new garbage transfer station on the site, which would take in and process 7,500 tons of trash, recyclables and green waste a day. The proposed enclosed "Sun Valley Recycling Park," according to company officials, would not only increase recycling, but also transfer waste to landfills outside of Los Angeles.

Father Zanotti learned about the Bradley Landfill soon after he became pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary four years ago. After a year at the parish, he could see the negative effects the landfill and trucks were having on the mental and physical health of his parishioners.

Recent or undocumented immigrants, who make up a large part of the urban parish, didn't want to publicly complain. Privately, they would confide their concerns and fears about the impact the ever-present dust, odors and diesel truck pollution was taking on their families and themselves.

But in November 2003, almost 300 came forward, packing the parish hall to try to convince local politicians to fight the Bradley Landfill expansion.

The Daily News reported that this was the "first large public effort" by local churches and schools, along with a grassroots group called Los Angeles Metro Strategy-Industrial Areas Foundation, to organize the community against the mountain of trash in their midst. The campaign has continued ever since through walks and prayer vigils, press conferences, plus meetings with city council members.

Community members have pushed hard for an Environmental Impact Report on the proposed changes, with at least its executive summary being translated into Spanish. Air quality monitors have been installed at crucial locales, including a nearby school. And the whole area has been designated an "Environmental Justice Zone."

Still, concrete changes have been hard to come by.

"In my opinion, the expansion of the dump is irrelevant at this particular point, because in April of 2007, by law, they have to close the dump anyhow," Father Zanotti explains. "What Waste Management is really going after is a 'transfer station,' a MRF, Multiple Recovery Facility.

"They want to call it a 'recycling park,' you know, which is very appealing to people. But what it means is that all the trash comes into our area. So trucks will be coming and going constantly, and that's a big part of the problem because the trucks are highly pollutant with diesel fuel being burnt.

"We're requesting at the very least that the fuel should be clean-burning natural gas, which most city trucks already have," he adds. "But what we really want is for it to be shut down entirely. Right now about 2,000 tons of trash are being processed daily by Bradley Landfill, but the transfer station would handle up to 7,500 tons. We think that's way too much."

For the priest and his parishioners, the struggle between the multinational company, which grossed over $13 billion in 2004, and Sun Valley, population 48,407, is as much of a moral as environmental issue.

"It involves the health of people; it involves the human dignity of individuals," says Father Zanotti. "Why is the dignity of people who live in other parts of Los Angeles respected more than the dignity of the human beings who are living here? Where is the justice in regard to that?

"Trash is not just coming from our households here. It's coming from all over the city. Why is it that a certain part of the population can be dumped on and exposed to things that will affect their health, whereas other areas aren't? But none of us should be exposed. We need to find better ways to deal with the trash that we create."

Asthma and rodent infestation
Exiquio Ruiz agrees. He's lived in Sun Valley for 31 years and has been a member of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church the last 15. In March, he and a member of the East Valley Coalition, made a hurried trip to Sacramento to protest the permit application of nearby American Waste Industries, which also wants to expand its daily legal intake of solid waste.

Before the California Integrated Waste Management Board, the pair argued that the transfer station expansion was about to be approved by the state panel without a public hearing and without considering the real impacts of increased traffic and air pollution through an Environmental Impact Report. The board concurred, putting the application on hold, which is where it still stands.

"They were trying to backdoor us, sneaking behind us," Ruiz says. "So I argued, 'Hey, no way! You're not going to throw the trash on my backyard and I'm not going to say something about it.'"

The longtime resident also doesn't trust Waste Management's promises to make a recycle center and transfer station that is totally enclosed and environmentally friendly. He'd like the company to pick up and locate somewhere else. But he also knows that the community will probably have to compromise when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa comes to Sun Valley later this month for a tour and town meeting.

One reason Ruiz wants the landfills out is because of an ongoing rodent infestation. He's tired of chasing away rats, raccoons, possums and other critters who come to the trash heaps at sundown, crossing lawns and roads like they owned the place.

Another reason hits closer to home.

"My daughter Claudia has had asthma since she was six or seven," he reports. "She lived with this illness all through her years at Fernangeles School, two blocks from the Bradley Landfill, and wasn't able to play sports. But we never really knew why she was so sick until the last few years when we started turning stones and discovered all these other things. Then we found out there was a huge number of kids in school with that same illness.

"She's 25 now, and she still depends on her breathing equipment because of being so close to the landfill all those years," he says. "I'm more convinced of that now than ever."

Fernangeles School
As the outreach consultant at Fernangeles Elementary School in Sun Valley since 1997, Maria Sesma Sooy is a combination school counselor and social worker. Serving as a bridge between the school and community, she has a unique vantage point on both worlds.

"I truly believe being so close to the Bradley Landfill affects the health of our students," Sooy says, sitting at an oval table in a back bungalow of the sprawling campus. "It's really a known fact that the lung development of kids is very different from adults. Their capacity is much more limited. Pollution impacts their ability to grow and develop normally."

The veteran educator points out that 15 to 20 percent of the 1,200 kids who attend Fernangeles have been diagnosed as having asthma, with their medication being kept and given out at school. This is twice the national rate for children.

How many more have undiagnosed respiratory problems is another matter, she notes. But many students complain that they don't feel good or that the air smells bad, especially when a perfumed mist is used to try to cover the stench of the nearby rotting garbage.

Administrators are constantly concerned about the cumulative effects of air pollution on their students' ability to learn, according to Sooy. They know about studies by a University of California at Santa Cruz professor that have documented the health and learning consequences for student bodies of schools near landfills.

Both the outreach worker and Fernangeles' principal, Karen Jaye, have been outspoken critics of Bradley Landfill, with the latter declaring, "The obvious message is that a child who is home sick or is at school but unable to breathe cannot learn."

But Sooy also knows firsthand what the long-term health effects of breathing wind-blown air from a mountain of trash really are.

"My health has been immensely impacted," she reports. "I have asthma and allergies, and I didn't have either before I moved here. Now whether you can directly attribute it to living in this community or not, that's debatable. But it still impacts my quality of life as well as the lives of other staff and faculty here --- and, of course, our students."