SAN DIEGO -- San Diego's sale of a 43-foot-tall cross and a half-acre piece of land inside a city park was constitutional, a federal appeals court has ruled.

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Both Sides Scored A Victory

The controversy arose more than a decade ago, when U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. ruled that the city was violating the Constitution by owning the land with the cross. He ordered the city to sell the religious symbol.

The cross sits inside the 170-acre Mount Soledad Natural Park on a hillside overlooking La Jolla. Opponents asserted that the city's sale of the cross and a tiny piece of the park was an illegal endorsement of religion -- supporters said the cross is now a memorial to war veterans.

In 1998, the city sold the cross and a half-acre of surrounding land for $106,000 to the nonprofit Mt. Soledad Memorial Association, the same agency that has maintained the cross since 1952. Resident Philip Paulson objected to using the Christian symbol as part of a war memorial and filed a lawsuit accusing the city of violating the constitutional separation of church and state.

Paulson claimed that the bidding process for the land was flawed, charging that the city's requirements for the purchase tended to favor the memorial association and that land sold with the cross was too small.

The appeals court disagreed.

"Because the land was legitimately sold to the private association, we must recognize and protect the association's rights of free exercise and free speech as the constitution demands no less," Judge Procter Hug Jr. wrote for the three-judge panel.

San Diego voters in 1992 passed Proposition F, which allowed the sale of the city property. The city initially sold the cross and 222 square feet of land to the memorial association. But Thompson ruled that the sale required a bidding process and that more land had to be sold.

The city then began accepting bids from nonprofit organizations for the cross and a half-acre parcel on the condition that any symbol could be used as long as it honored war veterans. The highest bid came from the memorial association.

"If the winning bid was somebody who wanted to construct Buddha or the Star of David, I have a feeling the City Council would have found some way not to approve of the sale," said James McElroy, Paulson's attorney.

The Wednesday decision came a month after San Francisco officials and a group of atheists battled in federal court over a similar issue in Mount Davidson Park involving a 103-foot cross. A decision in that case is expected soon and lawyers on both sides involved said Wednesday's decision could bolster San Francisco's sale.

In the San Francisco case, the city sold for $26,000 less than half an acre at Mount Davidson Park which contained a 103-foot cross. The Council of Armenian-American Organizations of Northern California purchased the site and plans to use the land as a memorial to Armenians killed in Ottoman Turkey in 1915.

Like San Diego, San Francisco sold the land after a judge ruled city ownership was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

"The San Diego case is good news for us," said Marc Slavin, a spokesman in the San Francisco city attorney's office.