FISHBACK MOUNTAIN
One man calls his project on the L.A./Ventura border the pursuit of a dream home, but others just see an illegal solid waste dump.
By Michael Collins
Los Angeles CityBeat/ValleyBeat – November 23, 2006
Chatsworth resident Todd Doherty began noticing a heavy flow of dump truck traffic heading up and down Woolsey Canyon in November 2004. The 10, “super-10,” and 18-wheelers were on the road to Rocketdyne, ascending over a thousand feet into the heights between the San Fernando and Simi valleys and crossing the county line into Ventura. Doherty counted 80 to 100 of the haulers a day, six days a week, headed for the Santa Susana Mountains, carrying all sorts of concrete and rubble up the super-steep and twisting incline. Doherty found this strange since he thought there was no dump up by the extraordinarily polluted Rocketdyne lab.
“I attributed the heavy flow of dump trucks to the well-publicized Rocketdyne cleanup,” says Doherty, a self-described stay-at-home dad with two young daughters whose wife is a psychiatrist. “But I was puzzled by why all this refuse was going uphill instead of downhill. And there was so much of it.”
By the spring of 2005, Doherty discovered that the trucks were passing the Rocketdyne entrance and using a road on state parkland and dumping their loads of concrete, rebar, tiles, rubble, and dirt on the ridge near the lab along the oldest road in that area, the North American Cutoff, which offers spectacular mountain views of both valleys. Doherty could see that the ridge’s gullies and culverts were being filled with massive amounts of debris. “My immediate response was ‘Who is in charge here?’ because of the sheer magnitude of this operation,” continues Doherty. “So I called [Ventura] county officials looking for an explanation, [but] none was provided because they didn’t know about any grading or dumping.”
In fact, just last May, the county ordered the property owner to “immediately cease the acceptance of any solid waste and fill material,” and that drama is now playing out in court. But since the trucks were first discovered, the neighbors have all come to know the property owner, Wayne Fishback.
Carol and Wayne Fishback began to buy land along the ridge in 2000 and now own 20 acres and control another 100 acres through a purchase agreement. Their thousand-foot-wide swath of picturesque boulder-strewn land runs about a mile along the dirt North American Cutoff. The retired architect from Chicago calls the place a “ranch” and says that he is developing an agricultural operation with some cattle “but primarily for horse ranching,” according to a lawsuit the Fishbacks filed June 6 against Doherty and others, including Fishback neighbor Robert Mionske. The lawsuit contends that the Fishbacks and have been defamed and slandered because Doherty and Mionske say that they’re operating a solid waste dump without a permit. The Fishbacks claim that they’ve ? suffered two million dollars in damage.
“My wife and I are trying to develop this ranch and our dream home,” says Fishback. “I originally didn’t think they knew what I was doing. They clearly know what I’m doing now from the legal standpoint, so I can’t really say they’re misled anymore. I think they know what I’m doing is perfectly within the law and actually what I’m doing is, to a certain extent, almost required by the law in terms of controlling runoff from your property. Ranchers and farmers have all kinds of regulations on them now in terms of sediment runoff and controlling erosion. It’s almost not even a choice anymore to be a good steward of the land.”
But many of his neighbors are still worried about this definition of stewardship. Doherty says he realized the extent of the dumping in the winter of 2004-2005 when hiking in adjacent Sage Ranch Park and saw the big dump trucks heading there. Shocked at the extensive bulldozing and earth-moving, and the growing expanses of rubble he could see across a canyon, he asked county officials if there were grading permits for the land and found there were none. One county official “told us that in all likelihood he wouldn’t be allowed onto the property in the near future and that if we wanted results we would need to get him pictures of the dumping ‘in progress,’” says Doherty.
Mionske, who used to grade roads on the property for Fishback, hired a helicopter in late June 2005 for $650 to fly over the property to record the effect of the dumping on the land. Photos show canyons filling with dirt and debris; other parts of the property are covered with gullies of broken blocks of concrete with rusting rebar sticking out. Some shots show multiple big rigs angling to dump their loads. Mionske also showed CityBeat three different topographic housing plans for the properties he said were created by Fishback.
