Judge Rejects Plan for Dump Near Joshua Tree

By TONY PERRY

Jan. 1, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN DIEGO — Citing environmental grounds, a judge issued a tentative ruling Wednesday rejecting a proposal to build one of the world’s largest garbage dumps next to Joshua Tree National Park in eastern Riverside County.

San Diego County Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell said the plan presents an unacceptable level of threat to the desert tortoise, to the desert floor and to the “wilderness experience” at the sprawling park.

In 1994, McConnell had delayed the project to allow the developer, Mine Reclamation Corp. of Palm Desert, to find ways to lessen the environmental impact of the huge landfill that it wants to put in the abandoned Eagle Mountain iron ore mine.

Environmentalists hailed McConnell’s tentative ruling, which will not become final until she has time to ponder rebuttal comments made in court Wednesday by lawyers representing Riverside County.

“If the judge sticks with her tentative ruling, this would be a tremendous day for the protection of Joshua Tree and protection of the desert,” said Brian Huse, Pacific regional director of the nonprofit National Parks and Conservation Assn. “The other side had three years to satisfy her concerns, and they came up empty.”

Larry Parrish, chief administrative officer for Riverside County, said that McConnell’s action surprised and discouraged him and that he was unsure whether the county would appeal if McConnell finalizes the ruling.

“I thought surely the second effort [at writing an environmental protection plan] would answer the concerns of the judge, but obviously it did not,” Parrish said. “Maybe she should come out here and run this place herself.”

The Riverside County Board of Supervisors, despite opposition from national parks officials, voted 4 to 1 in August to approve the proposal. The plan would have generated $21 million for the county in its first decade, including $10 million to endow a professorship at UC Riverside to study, among other things, the impact of landfills.

Kay Hazen, vice president of Mine Reclamation, held out hope that McConnell, after reviewing the oral arguments, would approve the project. She said it was premature to talk about appeals.

“We understand the ups and downs of this process,” Hazen said. “We still feel the facts justify the project and that ultimately it will happen.”

The project called for up to 10,000 tons of trash a day to be delivered by rail from Los Angeles and Orange counties to the 2,000-acre dump outside the southeast border of the park. Elevated from national monument status to national park in 1994, the 800,000-acre Joshua Tree receives 1 million visitors a year.

The National Parks and Conservation Assn. twice sued Riverside County to block the project. Huse said the group will continue the legal fight if Mine Reclamation appeals.

“We only have 54 national parks and each is as important as the next,” Huse said. “If this was Yosemite, Yellowstone or the Everglades, this project wouldn’t even be attempted. But because it was Joshua Tree, they were able to slip one over on the public, but not a court of law.”

McConnell said expansion of the now-abandoned town at Eagle Mountain to accommodate the landfill would damage the national park. In one victory for project proponents, she ruled that the company had prepared adequate plans to keep earthquakes from spilling the trash onto the desert.

Kaiser Steel operated the Eagle Mountain mine for 35 years until it was closed in 1982. Kaiser is the majority shareholder in Mine Reclamation.