Indian Leads Last Stand in Desert : Palm Springs Developers Face Increasing Opposition

Richard Milanovich walked quietly over the rock-studded desert land to the south of this city with the sure-footedness of a man who had been there before. And he had--many times as a boy hiking over the land settled by his ancestors, the Agua Caliente Band of the Cahuilla Indians, and later camping with his sons.

Until recently, Milanovich had been publicly silent about this land. It belongs to the Agua Caliente, some parcels of it to individual members of the band, others to the tribe as a whole.

Development Planned

But developers have leased 450 acres of the individually owned area in Andreas and Murray canyons not far from Palm Canyon, and plan to put in a country club and 900 homes, expensive condos and single-family dwellings.

As tribal chairman, Milanovich, 39, said he had been trying to ensure that everybody’s interests were protected, the rights of those individual Indians who had leased their land to developers, and those of the tribe who want to preserve their heritage.

In addition to the numerous hiking and riding trails and picnic grounds amid large groves of palms and gold-leafed cottonwoods beside rambling streams, there are more than 200 archeological sites important to the Agua Caliente.

But for nearly two years, Milanovich and other tribal council members said little about the proposed development, called Andreas Cove Country Club.

The Palm Springs City Council will vote on the project after hearing recommendations from its planning commission, but the Agua Caliente five-member council has the final jurisdiction over what happens to the land, whether it is singly or tribally owned.

Milanovich and the council members felt, he said, that it is the right of the nine individual Indian property owners to do what they wish with their land.

Speech Prepared

But in late December, Milanovich spoke out, telling the Palm Springs City Council that he could not read a speech the tribal council had prepared approving of the project.

“I could not in good conscience read a prepared speech I did not wholeheartedly believe in,” Milanovich said.

Milanovich has openly praised the developers for their cooperation in making previous modifications that the Indians had asked for and for working with the tribe on the archeological issues.

“But I don’t know where we go from here. I will still fight for individual rights to have their land developed,” he added softly, overlooking the land to be cleared near the San Jacinto Mountains, about three miles south of the Palm Springs city limits.

“But I just couldn’t agree to this. Once it’s developed, it’s gone forever. This may not look like much to people who don’t know. But it is. And to have a Number Four green or somebody’s house here and the land bulldozed. My God. This land is actually priceless. What would happen if you’d go into Yosemite or Yellowstone to do this?”

What does Milanovich really want to see here?

He turned to face two visitors. “A tribal park. There. I’ve said it.”

By early January, an all-out campaign against the Andreas Cove project was developing in other quarters of Palm Springs. Concerned residents, environmentalists, botanists, biologists, archeologists began a letter-writing campaign to city officials and the tribal council. Several spoke before the City Council.

The local chapter representatives of the Sierra Club and Audubon Society organized hikes and tours for the public through the Murray and Andreas canyons, “so the people can see what we’re talking about.”

“We just got lucky to learn about it,” said Jon Stewart, president of the Coachella Valley Audubon Society, who cited his concern about the canyons as the natural habitat for the Least Bell’s vireo, a threatened bird species, and other wildlife, as well as the threat of the proximity of the proposed golf course to the palm oasis in both Andreas and Murray canyons.

No Opposition

“This should have died a long time ago,” Stewart said. “But nobody said anything. There was nobody opposing it.”

On Jan. 15, the Agua Caliente tribal council decided on some opposition of its own. After a unanimous vote, the tribal council formally requested some major changes in the Andreas Cove project.

With a letter to Palm Springs mayor Frank Bogert, the tribal council sent Andreas Cove developers and Palm Springs city planners alike back to their drawing boards.

The tribal council asked that the number of home sites be scaled down, proposed a road be constructed as an access for the public to the entrance of Andreas and Murray canyons, asked for an increased buffer zone along the toe of the San Jacinto Mountains, and wanted another look taken at the golf course and the effect of herbicides and fertilizers on the existing land and ground water.

For their part, representatives of the developers said they simply had proceeded with their project and encountered no opposition until now.

“We started this in 1978,” said Jim Rothschild, vice president of the Andreas Cove Country Club and spokesman for the project. “We had no opposition until really after the technical and legal time. But the city opened it up again.

“Now we’re not sure what they (the tribal council members) are asking for. In a letter in October, they said the EIR (the environmental impact report) was OK.”

Scaling down the project and putting in roads for the public would change the character of the project and diminish its exclusivity, Rothschild said.

“It may not be the same character or same type of project, the golf course might disappear, I don’t know,” he added. “But we’re not going to give up. The leases run 65 years.”

All factions are currently gearing up for a public hearing of the Palm Springs Planning Commission about the issue on Feb. 27. Among those expected to play a key role is a new citizens’ coalition.

“This development has been in the planning stages for two years, but due to complete lack of public knowledge, opposition has only begun,” said Sheila Nehlsen, a resident of nearby Desert Hot Springs and a longtime hiker in the Indian canyons.

Nehlsen, Stewart, George Meyer, a professor of geology at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, Gary Gray, conservation chairman of the Tahquitz group of the Sierra Club, and Bill Havert, conservation coordinator for the San Gorgonio chapter of the Sierra Club, have organized Friends of the Indian Canyons, the citizens’ group that opposes the development.

“To me,” Nehlsen said, “the canyons and the tramway are the symbols of Palm Springs. But the developer has done an excellent job of keeping this very quiet until now.”

Actually, Senior City Planner Doug Evans tried to alert the Sierra Club about the project when he began studying it almost two years ago.

“At that time I called the local chapter of the Sierra Club and the person in charge said that they were mainly a hiking group,” Evans said. “She basically told me she wasn’t interested. Since then, though, the Sierra Club has changed and they’re very concerned.”

Credit for Trying

Evans also told the developers to expect opposition to the Indian canyon project, and gives Rothschild and project planners credit for attempting to work things out satisfactorily.

“They’ve done more research than any developer I ever worked with,” he said. “And they’ve done it well.”

Now, Evans is back looking at the plans again, according to what the tribal council now wishes. “Scaled down to 340 acres, they can still do a very nice country club on that,” Evans said. “But I would never argue it won’t hurt the development. What people are looking at now is if they want anything at all in the canyons. No development, period. It’s more preservation-oriented land use, as opposed to development-oriented.”

The only reason Evans and other Palm Springs city officials are involved with Andreas Cove at all is because the developers have planned all along to annex the area out of Riverside County into the city.

Long before Nehlsen and other environmentalists had learned of the proposed development, the individual Indians already had leased their land to Jim and Abe Simpkin, the Canadian firm that is developing the project. A couple of the tribal members sold their parcels outright.

When she heard about that, Nehlsen asked: “Don’t the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians feel the same urgency as other tribes in the southwest feel about preserving sacred lands?”

To that question, Milanovich later would answer: “We care. We definitely do care. But when you live in a white society and you live in a town like Palm Springs with all the opulence and people driving around in Rolls-Royces and you don’t have that, who is to say you shouldn’t be entitled to money from your land? Sometimes it overcomes the basics. It takes awhile to come back to it and realize you made a mistake. It is a duel within your mind.”

Milanovich, a tribal council member for eight years and chairman for almost two, said outsiders always think that the Palm Springs Indians are rich because of their land leases.

Problem Found in History

Of the 249 members of the Agua Caliente band, Milanovich said, “Several members of the band are exceptionally well off, but there are several who are on welfare. We have no mechanism to help them. We don’t have per capita payments (such as other Indian tribes do). We don’t have the financial resources to do so. We prefer to see the money that we have is invested and want to increase our land base.”

Milanovich blames much of the problem on the allotment of lands to Indians by the federal government in the Mission Indian Relief Act of 1891. It was 50 years before the allotment sections, 47 acres for every man, woman and child in the band at that time, were approved by the secretary of the interior, Milanovich explained.

“Each person got 40 acres for farming, five for home site and two in the downtown area,” he said. “But the generation before mine, my mother’s generation got that land when Palm Springs was just growing. They didn’t have diddle-dee dunk.”

Milanovich, whose father was Yugoslavian, believes that individual allotments divided the band. “If it had been common ownership, it would have been for the good of all. One of the biggest problems we, as Indians, have is when they allotted the land. When you have something, you don’t want anybody else to have it.”

In 1983-84, according to tribal records, 150,808 people visited the Indian Canyon area. The tribe charges adults $3 for admittance to the area, 75 cents for children, ages 6 to 11.

Revenues from the fees go to maintain the roads, trails and picnic areas of the park.

“The band as a whole is comfortable, not destitute,” Milanovich said. “But we have to be careful where tribal funds are spent.”

The Agua Calientes do have a tribal scholarship fund for tribal youngsters who cannot afford to attend college and trade schools. They also maintain tribal offices in Palm Springs, and an Indian cemetery in the city.

“Hopefully, it will all get rectified,” Rothschild said after the tribal council announced its intentions to have the project revised.

“We have to get clarification on the access road, whether it is to be private or public and then they want to scale down the acreage that we use. They want the palm oasis protected. That was to be part of our golf course. But we have our engineers and planners doing an evaluation and studying it.”

Rothschild said the developers already have spent about $4 million in preparing the project. “To make the land useable, it will cost about $50 million,” he added. “But we’ll have to let nature take its course. Time will tell what happens.”

The same developers also have several other current projects, and future plans to develop more Indian-owned land in the Coachella Valley, as well as in Arizona.

Milanovich and the environmentalists group also are concerned about a proposal to build a clubhouse next to a sacred hillock that juts out from a rolling desert area of the land between the mouths of Andreas and Murray canyons.

As Indian legend has it, Milanovich said, the Agua Caliente Band of the Cahuillas landed there on the hill when they, as bird people, flew over the San Jacinto Mountains to settle here beside the canyon streams several centuries ago.

Here, the Agua Calientes built homes of arrowweed and mud, fashioned corrals of boulders for their horses and irrigation ditches for their crops, created rock drawings and painted pottery, set aside cremation sites for their dead.

“My grandfather lived in Palm Canyon,” said Milanovich, whose mother and three brothers and three sisters still live in the Palm Springs area. “The Indians used the land to live on, they didn’t change it.”

Milanovich said the ideal solution would be for the tribe as a whole or some non-profit foundation to buy the land from the individual Indian owners and turn it into a tribal park.

“But as chairman I still have to make sure the allotees’ (individual owners’) rights are protected. We as a tribe couldn’t afford to take over the land, to compensate the individuals.”

“The Indians on the tribal council have great feeling for the individual Indians, but this, this project broke their heart,” Mayor Frank Bogert said, sitting in his office in Palm Springs City Hall on a recent chilly morning.

Bogert, who came to Palm Springs as a young man in 1927, knows the Indian canyons as well as almost anyone. He rides his horse there almost every day.

“The horse people are worried as hell, too, and we don’t like it,” he said.

“Murray and Andreas canyons are some of the prettiest canyons you’ve ever been into. It would be a crime to cut the mouth out of them (for the golf course). Up to the time that the tribal council objected, though, we (the City Council) would probably have gone along with it. But now, if the Indians don’t want it, we can’t go along.

“There is always a compromise you can do to mitigate the situation,” Bogert said. “So that they (the developers) can live with it and we can, too. They’re a good group.”

Bogert said the Palm Springs area already is overbuilt with condominiums, estimating that there are some 10,000 units available. “All over the valley there are a lot of condos for sale. We’re overbuilt on condos. But each guy who puts up condos thinks his will be the ones that sell. Frankly, I wouldn’t build condos here.”

Palm Springs’ permanent population has grown to 38,000, and balloons to 70,000 in the wintertime, Bogert said. “We might have about that number in the summer, too, with time-sharing and things like that.”

As for the Indian canyon development hassle, Bogert said: “Here’s what it all boils down to. We want them (the development) to come in, but we want to save as much of the canyons as possible. Everybody would like to see it an Indian park, but nobody has got any money to buy that.”

Both Bogert and Milanovich estimate it would cost from $4 million to $6 million to compensate the individual Agua Calientes who own the disputed canyon land and establish a tribal park.

“I don’t blame the Indians at all,” Bogert said. “The tribal council is trying to be fair to their own Indians, but they don’t want to lose the culture. If we could do what we did for the fringe-toed lizard in Thousand Palms canyon, we could have a tribal park. (The fringe-toed lizard is now a federally protected species and its designated living area is supported by a government funds and private foundation grants.)

“There are people who live in town who could do it. If we could get somebody interested in doing it, it could be done,” Bogert added. “Some day that land will be like Central Park in the middle of New York. We’ve got to start thinking about things like that.”