who had represented Bernson in the Hollywood Bowl case. The law firm was also fined. In 2001 he agreed that he would pay fines of $18,500 for accepting campaign contributions that exceeded legal limits. "There is no evidence that the violations were committed intentionally or willfully," a written agreement stipulated. Travel expenses An investigative feature by the Times found in April 1990 that Bernson was the "top travel spender" in City Hall, having paid out $120,622 of his campaign funds in three years for trips to places like Louisiana, Hawaii, Israel and Italy, in the latter two of which he and his wife stayed in "luxury hotels." Other trips were made by the couple to Paris, Hong Kong, London, Beijing, British Columbia, New York, Seattle, Boston and Carmel, California. He said the trips were proper and enabled him to do a better job as a councilman. Sunshine Canyon In the 1980s and 1990s, Bernson was "the major foe" of a controversial proposed enlargement of a landfill project, or dump, in Sunshine Canyon in Granada Hills, at the eastern end of the Santa Susana Mountains. In 1992 he sued Browning-Ferris Industries, operator of the landfill, for libel, alleging that the company "leaked to news reporters a dossier containing false claims about Bernson's spending of public and private funds on travel" (above) in an attempt to discredit him. A Superior Court judge dismissed the action, but the State Supreme Court reinstated it in June 1994, ruling 4–2 that " the usual one-year time limit for filing libel lawsuits can be extended when defendants accused of disseminating allegedly defamatory material intentionally conceal their identities." Other Slum conditions. Bernson pushed a proposal through the City Council in 1985 that would have made it easier to evict some of the three thousand tenants in the crime-plagued, predominantly Latino Bryant Street-Vanalden Avenue neighborhood of Northridge, but backed off when Mayor Tom Bradley said he would veto it. The councilman said he "packed" a meeting in December 1985 with more than seven hundred Northridge residents, most of them Anglos who "repeatedly cheered" their approval of Bernson's controversial proposal to force out some of the tenants. He said he did so because Mayor Bradley had not invited him to the meeting even though the problem neighborhood was in Bernson's district. Four years later, he said his efforts had paid off in transforming "some of the worst slums in