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Mount Soledad
 MOUNT SOLEDAD
Mount Soledad is a prominent landmark in the city of San Diego, California. The 822-foot-tall hill lies between interestate 5 to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is mostly within the community of La Jolla where the northern and eastern slopes form a sharp escarpment along the Rose Canyon Fault.
The community of Pacific Beach is on the gentler southern slope. There are several radio and television transmitters located on the summit including television channels 8 and 10, the CBS and ABC affiliates respectively. Commercial aircraft approaching San Diego from the direction of Los Angeles often use Mt. Soledad as their point to start the downwind leg of their approach to San Diego International Airport.
 THE CROSS CONTROVERSY
Just east of the summit of Mt. Soledad is a Korean War Memorial with a 43-foot-tall cross was erected in 1952 as its centerpiece. The City of San Diego was the target of a lawsuit in 1989 charging that the presence of the cross violated the California Constitution. In 1991, a Federal court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, Philip Paulson, an atheist.
The City attempted to sell the land to a private group, the nonprofit Mount Soledad Memorial Association, in 1994 and again in 1998. These sales were later voided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as unconstitutional on grounds of religious preference. The city also accepted, and then later reneged on, an agreement to move the cross to the grounds of a nearby church. While the cross and land were apparently owned by the group (after the 1998 sale), the group added some memorial plaques (donated by supporters) to bolster the claim that the site was a war memorial.
In November 2004, voters rejected a ballot measure to authorize a third sale of the land. On March 8, 2005 the San Diego City Council voted against a proposal to transfer the land to the National Park Service, a move which proponents believed might avoid the court-ordered removal of the cross. Opponents have claimed this would merely shift the church-state issue to Federal jurisdiction and would only delay the eventual removal of the cross.
On December 8, 2004, Public Law 108-447 authorized the United States Department of the Interior to accept the land as a national memorial honoring American veterans.
On May 16, 2005, the Council reconsidered its decision to transfer the land at the request of 70,000 petitioners, and, after rejecting a proposal to directly donate the land to the Federal government in a 5-4 vote, the Council approved 6-3 a special Mayoral election to be held July 26, which would include a ballot item (PDF) to approve the donation.
On July 26, 2005, the ballot measure to transfer the property to the Interior Department as a veterans memorial easily exceeded the two-thirds threshold it needed to pass. However, the measure's constitutionality remained in question.
On September 3, Superior Court Judge Patricia Yin Cowett issued a temporary restraining order barring the transfer until the issue was settled. Lawyers on each side presented their arguments on October 3, 2005. A key issue was the status of the area as a secular war memorial, given the fact that it was not developed as a memorial until ten years after the first lawsuit. Prior to the law suit, no plaque or marker designated or explained the site's status as a war memorial, and during the fifty years prior to the law suit, there were no ceremonies or recognitions of the Korean War or to war veterans at the site, only Easter Sunday services. A 1985 AAA map of the "San Diego Area" identifies the cross as the Mt. Soledad Easter Cross.
On October 7, 2005, Judge Cowett ruled the transfer unconstitutional, and again ruled that the cross must be removed. Her ruling stated: "Maintenance of this Latin Cross as it is on the property in question, is found to be an unconstitutional preference of religion in violation of Article I, Section 4, of the California Constitution, and the transfer of the memorial with the cross as its centerpiece to the federal government to save the cross as it is, where it is, is an unconstitutional aid to religion in violation of Article XVI, Section 5, of the California Constitution."
In December, 2005 Philip Paulson's lawyer James McElroy asked a San Diego Superior Court judge to order the city of San Diego to pay his legal fees for the October victory. On January 13, 2006, Judge Cowett ruled that the City must pay for McElroy's fees, but exactly how much is yet to be determined. The City plans to appeal.
From Wikipedia.org, the Free Encyclopedia
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