Another Court Ruling against Famed Eagle Mountain Landfill

Date: November 10, 2009

Source: News Room

There has been another setback for the Eagle Mountain landfill southeast of Los Angeles. Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that project developers failed to evaluate alternative sites or consider how the project, located near Joshua Tree National Park, would affect the desert ecosystem. The decision sets the stage for more hearings in the 20-year battle over what would be the largest landfill in the country planned on 4,654 acres of public land and old iron-ore pits owned by Ontario-based Kaiser Ventures LLC. The landfill would accept waste by train and truck from Los Angeles and elsewhere in Southern California. At issue is a 1997 land swap between Kaiser and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. They were sued by desert residents Larry and Donna Charpied and the National Parks Conservation Association, which claimed the government violated land and environmental policies in the property exchange. While the Court agreed that alternative sites had not been adequately considered, it disagreed with a lower court's opinion that the BLM had failed to do extensive environmental analysis or consider noise and other pollution impacts on the national park.

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