Plan to Put Dump Next to National Park Gets Key OK

A plan to build one of the world’s largest garbage dumps next to a national park cleared a major hurdle Tuesday when the Riverside County Board of Supervisors approved putting the Eagle Mountain Landfill in an abandoned iron ore mine beside Joshua Tree National Park.

The dump would be a destination for up to 10,000 tons of Southern California trash every day for at least half a century, although the daily tonnage could double after seven years.

With the garbage will come sources of food and moisture foreign to the desert as well as pests and predators that, many experts warn, will change the balance of nature--imperiling certain animals, intruding on surrounding wilderness and contaminating air and water.

Joshua Tree National Park Supt. Ernest Quintana said the Board of Supervisors, which voted 4 to 1 in favor of the dump, has never appreciated the value of the park, which draws about 1 million people a year.

“The American public has seen fit to create national parks because they are rare, special places,” Quintana said, “not because they are suitable locations for rendering plants, asphalt factories or garbage dumps.

“The fact that this is a park of national significance is not, I don’t think, understood by the Board of Supervisors.”

Roy Wilson, the only county supervisor to speak on the issue, said he “remained uncomfortable” in voting for the project. He faulted the developer, Mine Reclamation Corp. of Palm Desert, for creating the impression that the trash would be deposited into a huge hole in the former iron mine, when, in fact, much of the trash will go into canyons alongside the park.

But Wilson described the project as a “state-of-the-art” alternative to older, obsolete, unlined landfills. “We must keep the entire, holistic picture in mind,” Wilson said.

Trash discarded in Los Angeles and Orange counties would be delivered by 75-car-long trains to the 2,000-acre dump at the southeast corner of the 800,000-acre park.

Before the dump can be built, it must secure permits from the state’s air and water quality boards and the Integrated Waste Management Board.

However, the likely battleground over the dump now shifts to the courts, where it was rejected once before. San Diego County Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell, who still has jurisdiction over the case, ruled in 1994 that Mine Reclamation Corp. had ignored the impact that the dump would have on the “natural peace and solitude, the clean air and the pristine desert” of Joshua Tree National Park, which borders the dump site on three sides.

The developers submitted a revised environmental impact report a year ago.

The plan approved by the county Tuesday is expected to generate $21 million a year for the first 10 years of operations, $10 million of which is to fund an endowed chair at UC Riverside for studying, among various subjects, the impact of landfills on the environment.

As part of the deal, the developers also agreed to pay the National Park Service 10 cents per ton of trash--which could add up to $365,000 per year.

“That money is available to them to conduct monitoring, do wildlife enhancement in the park, acquire private holdings within the park, make further efforts to protect the desert tortoise and the like,” said Rick Daniels, president of Mine Reclamation Corp.

But critics, including the park’s superintendent, said the company has failed to deal adequately with long-held concerns that the dump would become a magnet for predators, such as ravens and kit foxes, that prey on the endangered desert tortoise, that it would disturb two small herds of threatened bighorn sheep, blow trash and air pollutants into the park, and create enough noise and artificial light to be noticed across one-third of the park.

Yet, Joshua Tree, a national monument elevated to park status in 1994, has never acquired the sort of nationwide constituency that rallied to the defense of Yellowstone National Park when it faced the prospect of a gold mine next door or Manassas Battlefield National Park when the Walt Disney Co. briefly proposed building a Civil War theme park nearby.

Even the National Park Service struck an ambivalent chord late last year when it agreed not to contest the dump’s revised environmental impact report in an agreement with the developer.

Park Service officials in Washington argued that the agreement strengthened their ability to minimize the impacts of the dump if it is built. But in California, Park Service officials, including Quintana, have strenuously opposed the dump and said the Washington agreement undercut their authority.

Although prominent environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Parks and Conservation Assn. have come out against the dump, officials of those groups have acknowledged difficulties mounting an effective campaign.

Established as a national monument in 1936, Joshua Tree, with its forests of cactus and bizarre jumbles of twisted boulders, lies at the juncture of the Mojave and Colorado deserts.

Cousin to the yucca, the park’s emblematic Joshua tree grows up to 40 feet tall in dense clusters. Its tufted, upward-reaching branches, reminded 19th century immigrants of the Old Testament prophet who succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelites.