The Chiquita Canyon Landfill, a 639-acre disposal site about an hour north of downtown Los Angeles, has been shut to refuse since New Year’s Day 2025. Its operator, Waste Connections, says the closure is costing the company as much as $9 million a week in unrealized revenue — and that a tangle of a dozen overlapping regulators, not the underlying environmental problem, is what keeps the gates closed.
That account comes from a Breitbart News investigation published Monday, which reviewed federal and county documents and interviewed company officials about the two-year standoff. The figures cited by the outlet are stark: nearly $1 billion in lost income, plus more than $1 billion spent on attempted fixes that company insiders say regulators rejected or second-guessed at nearly every turn.
“Just when we satisfy the requirements of one regulatory agency, one of the others comes along and says, ‘Oh no, you didn’t do it the way we want,’ and we’re back to square one,” Kevin Green, district manager of the landfill, told Breitbart.
How a Smell Complaint Became a Shutdown
The site has operated since 1972 in the I-5 corridor, roughly two miles from Castaic and about eight miles north of Santa Clarita. Waste Connections bought it in 2009. According to Breitbart’s reporting, engineers had already flagged elevated subsurface temperatures in an older section of the landfill before the company took over — a condition known as an Elevated Temperature Landfill, which, combined with record rainfall in 2023, produced rising volumes of contaminated water known as leachate.
The public fight began in May 2023, when the South Coast Air Quality Management District started fielding hundreds of odor complaints traced to the site, many from the unincorporated community of Val Verde just to the north. The district issued its first air quality violation that month and more than 140 afterward, as complaints climbed past 1,200 and some residents told the county they had gone without sleep and had to stay away from their homes for extended periods.
Waste Connections moved quickly on mitigation, according to a September 2023 county chief executive office report quoted by Breitbart: expanded gas collection, temporary flares, deodorizing misters and towers, industrial blowers, additional extraction wells and pumps, and free air purifiers for residents who asked. The company later installed a dozen air quality monitoring stations in nearby communities at more than $1 million apiece.
It wasn’t enough. By February 2024, with odor complaints reportedly topping 6,800, the EPA issued an order and a subsequent violation aimed at mitigating off-site odors and hazardous leachate. Then came the broader regulatory swarm: the California Environmental Protection Agency, the Air Resources Board, CalRecycle, the Department of Toxic Substances Control, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, the air quality district, and county public works, public health and planning departments, among others — all folded by the EPA into a Multi-Agency Task Force the landfill had to satisfy.
A $9 Million Hole Every Week
Unable to reconcile the overlapping orders, the company stopped accepting refuse in January 2025. The site had been handling roughly 25 percent of the trash generated in Los Angeles County, averaging some 60,000 tons a week. At a typical $150 a ton, Breitbart calculates the forgone revenue at up to $9 million weekly.
The county’s garbage has shifted to Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Sylmar, operated by Republic Services. That facility has its own history of trouble — an abatement order and nearly 9,000 odor complaints since the 2023 rains — but it remains open, and Green said its disposal rates have gone up since Chiquita closed.
Company lawyers and officials told Breitbart that landfills in other states typically answer to one or two regulators, not the dozen they face in California.
The Cancer Claims
The political pressure around the site has been intense. Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo, a Democrat whose district includes the area, told California Insider last fall that “the fire” had tripled in size by April 2025 and that cancer clusters were appearing in nearby neighborhoods. She cited detections of benzene, a known carcinogen, and acrolein, which is suspected of causing cancer only after long-term exposure. Schiavo also led a delegation of Democratic lawmakers to tour the landfill and observe efforts to shrink what was described as the fire.
Company officials say “fire” is simply the wrong word — and that federal documents show the EPA avoids the term entirely, referring instead to the elevated-temperature reaction underground. Breitbart reports that two health studies conducted at the height of the odor problem did not support claims of serious illness among people living miles away.
The controversy drew in a wider cast. Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) pushed for relief funds for residents, and a local water board candidate campaigned on opposing the landfill and standing up to “corporate polluters.” Personal injury lawyers filed suits in all directions, including a class action alleging fumes caused headaches, dizziness, eye, nose and throat irritation and mental health problems. Breitbart reports that one Los Angeles firm allegedly hired an actor dressed as a cowboy to go door to door signing up plaintiffs — conduct that is illegal in California.
One company insider described the landfill to Breitbart as Southern California’s favorite environmental “punching bag.”
What happens next is unclear. The landfill remains closed, the Multi-Agency Task Force remains in place, and the company’s more than $1 billion in attempted remedies has yet to produce a green light from any single authority able to reopen the site. For now, Los Angeles County’s waste keeps rolling south to Sylmar — at a higher price.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2026/10/19/exclusive-bureaucratic-nightmare-l-a-landfill-losing-millions-each-week-due-to-a-dozen-green-agencies-and-dubious-cancer-claims/