Judge Rejects Huge Landfill By California National Park

Emphasizing the potential harm to wildlife and wilderness, a San Diego Superior Court judge has rejected a controversial plan to locate the nation’s largest garbage dump next to Joshua Tree National Park in California.

It is the second time in three years that Judge Judith McConnell has ruled against the proposed Eagle Mountain landfill.

McConnell said the company hoping to operate the dump, Mine Reclamation Corp., has failed to show how the park would be shielded from the impact of a sprawling industrial facility that would dispose of at least 10,000 tons of trash a day for decades.

“There isn’t sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that the impacts to Joshua Tree will be less than significant,” the judge wrote in her analysis, released late Wednesday, of the proposal to bury the trash in canyons next to the park.

McConnell singled out the endangered desert tortoise as a likely casualty of the dump but went on to say that the entire desert ecology could be in jeopardy.

“Of special concern to the court is the failure to analyze the impact to the biological resources of the park as a complex and interrelated system,” she said.

Joshua Tree Superintendent Ernest Quintana hailed the ruling as “an accurate assessment of the environmental hazards” and “a reminder that national parks are special areas that are to be maintained in a natural state forever.”

Kay Hazen, a vice president of Mine Reclamation, said the company is disappointed by the ruling and has not decided whether to appeal.

The judge’s action came in response to a lawsuit brought by the National Parks and Conservation Association, an environmental group that often litigates on behalf of the nation’s parks.

Created as a national monument in the 1930s and upgraded to park status in 1994, the 800,000-acre expanse of desert and mountains is best-known for its bizarre jumbles of twisted boulders and its forests of Joshua trees - tufted yuccalike plants that grow to heights of 40 feet.

The Riverside Board of Supervisors, in a 4-1 vote, approved the dump last August, expecting it to generate $21 million for the county during the first decade of operations.