The half-acre plot of land underneath the Mount Soledad cross, the focal point of a decades-long legal battle, was sold last week to a private group that maintains a veterans memorial on the property.

Title to the La Jolla property, where the 29-foot-tall cross sits on a memorial bearing more than 3,700 plaques honoring veterans from various wars, was transferred from the federal Department of Defense to the Mount Soledad Memorial Association.

The $1.4 million transaction was completed Friday.

“We are very, very thrilled and we are honored as an organization to be able to take this wonderful memorial and now be its caretakers,” Bruce Bailey, president and CEO of the associations Board of Trustees, said Monday afternoon.


He said the price was determined based on how the memorial was valued when Congress took the land from the city of San Diego through eminent domain in 2006 and put it in the possession of the federal government.

That move was engineered largely by former congressman Duncan Hunter.

His son Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, R-Alpine, who now holds that congressional seat, later wrote the measure that allowed the transfer of the land from the government to private ownership. It was part of the National Defense Authorization Bill, a massive $585 billion military spending bill that was signed into law last year.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein helped advocate for the bill.


The cross has been the subject of more than 25 years of litigation over whether a religious symbol could remain on government land. The nonprofit association, with American Foreign Legion Post 275 -- La Jolla, established the memorial and built the cross in 1954.

In 2011, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals deemed the cross an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion. Cross supporters hope that transferring ownership of the land beneath the memorial to a private owner will render that ruling moot.

Jim McElroy, a lawyer representing atheist and Vietnam veteran Steve Trunk who is suing the government, could not be reached immediately for his reaction. However, he has expressed support previously for a land transfer, saying his client’s point was that it was unconstitutional for the cross to be on government property.

Bailey, the memorial association president, said the land transfer now allows the association to guide the future of the property.


“Our destiny is now in our own hands,” he said. “We we can do things to improve (the memorial) and make changes.”

Among the groups plans is to install an electronic information center at the site, and light the flag atop a flagpole at night.