Gambling on a Small Desert Town
John Brown looks out at acres of barren California desert and sees a gambling, shopping, dining and dancing mecca.
He dreams of building 10 or as many as 15 hotels with glitzy casinos. They would encircle a promenade of 150 shops and seven “Celebrity Theme Restaurants,” according to his printed business plan.
When completed, his gambling oasis with easy highway access would attract 20 million tourists each year, the plan declares.
And if you call now, you can get in on the action. Brown’s plan projects that for every dollar invested in his gambling center dream there will be a return of $25. Within five years.
It’s a big dream. To try and make it come true, Brown went to the place of big dreams.
“I went to the map,” said Brown, 71, who lives and practices law in Oxnard, “and I found California City.”
He chose the city for its location. “It’s 150 miles from Los Angeles, 150 miles from the Nevada border,” Brown said. “It’s ideal.”
He wanted somewhere that was within a couple of hours drive from Los Angeles, but not in a metropolitan area.
“Nobody wants gaming in our urban areas,” Brown said. “The reason is that Joe Friday may lose his check on the way home.”
California City, located just north of the Los Angeles-Kern County border, is assuredly not urban, even though it’s huge. Geographically, California City is the third-largest city in the entire state, with only Los Angeles and San Diego taking up more land mass.
But California City has a population of only about 8,000.
In September, Brown filed a proposed statewide referendum to legalize gambling in California City. He is now trying to obtain the 700,000 signatures to get his measure on the ballot next November.
The City Council has agreed to allow him exclusive rights to its gambling licenses for the first three years if the measure passes. He will have the corner on the California City market.
“I should be a multimillionaire if it passes, and I know how to spend that money,” Brown said.
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Although Brown didn’t know it when he chose California City off a map, several big dreamers have already come this way, trying to bring forth riches from this desert land.
But California City is a place where big dreams come to die.
“This town gets a lot of people who come in and tell a lot of stories,” said Michael Hurles, a firefighter who lives in California City and commutes daily to Edwards Air Force Base.
His wife, Tammy Hurles, has a simple bit of advice for anyone who thinks that the stories and dreams might be true. “Believe it the day you see it,” she said.
The first dreamer was Czechoslovakian-born sociologist Nathan K. Mendelsohn, who came to the area more than 40 years ago to try out his theories concerning urban development. He bought 82,000 acres--a combination of alfalfa farms and desert--in the late 1950s and created a master plan with seven different communities. He got the city incorporated in 1965, and then set aside areas for light industry, a university, a medical center and an 80-acre public park to feature a 20-acre lake, an outdoor swimming pool, baseball fields, a golf course, tennis courts and a community building.
Attracted by his dream of a new metropolis, thousands of people bought lots, most hoping to sell for high profits when the city reached its expected greatness.
But California City’s real estate market never boomed. It bombed.
Almost everyone bought purely on speculation, waiting for their neighbors to build up the neighborhood so they could sell and make a killing. The few people who settled in California City saw numerous plans for job-attracting industries in the city evaporate, one by one. Shops opened and closed, lots marked off for buildings stayed vacant.
There was at one time a movie theater, bowling alley and Holiday Inn, but all shut down.
After Mendelsohn pulled out, several developers followed. At one point, the famed Hunt brothers of Texas owned a stake in the city, and a Colorado mining company also took a turn. National searches were made for industries that would come to the town and generate jobs, but nothing happened.
Residents were so desperate for any source of revenue that they were thrilled eight years ago when city leaders said a state prison would be built here. That plan also died.
Gambling has been previously mentioned as the city’s savior. But the only organized gambling that residents have seen, aside from church bingo, was one card room and that shut down in the 1980s.
Most of California City’s 205 square miles of land is the same as Mendelsohn left it in 1969--dry and brush-filled, with the occasional Joshua tree.
Squat, single-family houses and strip malls are clustered around the main street, California City Boulevard, a four-lane road that is much too wide for the traffic it carries. Side streets in this part of town sometimes end suddenly, in the middle of nowhere.
There are neither fast-food restaurants nor supermarkets. There are, however, 22 churches, although some meet in storefronts or homes.
There are two schools--one for elementary and the other for upper grades.
“We have a master plan for a very nice community,” said City Manager Steve West. “We just need the money to build the stuff.”
Robert and Lupe Morrell bought a house on Irene Street because they wanted to retire far from the gang killings and drug sales that had become common in the Los Angeles neighborhood where they raised three children. And homes seemed so cheap in California City.
“I paid $95,000 for this house, and I can’t get $65,000 on it now,” said Robert Morrell, 73. “I have to die here.”
In the last two years, only one new residential building permit has been pulled, city officials said.
Lilian “Bootsie” Evans said she’s all for gambling--or anything else that would drum up business in her tiny restaurant. “We’re hanging on by our nails, month to month,” said Evans, 64, who bought the Aspen Grill restaurant on California City Boulevard this spring. “We keep hoping something big’s going to come, like a grocery store.”
David Romero, the director of religious education at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church in California City, also backs casinos coming to town. Romero, 30, commutes from Bakersfield because he said California City offers so little to a single guy.
“I think that would be great,” he said of the proposed gambling. “But at the same time I think to myself: ‘That’s a pipe dream. Who’s going to put 14,000 hotel rooms in this city?’ ”
Brown and his business partner, Studio City retiree Robert Wilson, have been trying to legalize gambling somewhere since 1964, when they worked on a failed lottery initiative.
They went on to file nearly two dozen more lottery and gambling referendums in California and other states, none of which passed.
In 1982, Wilson was arrested and sent to jail for a few days for operating illegal bingo games in an effort to fund a gambling initiative he was pushing in Adelanto in San Bernardino County.
Brown is now 71. Wilson won’t tell his age, saying that he doesn’t remember.
“We’ll do it this time,” Wilson said of their effort to bring gambling to California City. “We have to. It’s the last time.”
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But it won’t be easy. Mounting the campaign to get the 700,000 signatures will cost $1 million, said Robert Fill, Brown’s longtime friend and chief operating officer of Brown’s new corporation, California City Gaming Inc.
Fill, a Washington-based consultant for start-up businesses, said he hopes to put together the needed funds from 20 or so investors, or possibly through selling stock.
So far, he has had no luck.
“We’ve got a lot of bites, but it’s not easy,” Fill said. “The key is to be able to convince people that [the proposition] will pass.”
Even if the group gets the needed signatures, Las Vegas casino owners would probably work to defeat the ballot proposition, said Bill Thompson, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor who studies the gambling industry.
Not only would Brown have to battle Nevada money, he would have to change the minds of California voters, who have historically been cold to the idea of casinos.
Many may subscribe to Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren’s way of thinking.
“He’d just as soon see gambling in Nevada and not here,” said Matt Ross, a spokesman in Lungren’s office. “It’s fun once in a while, but it’s not necessarily something you want in your own backyard.”
If the referendum gets on the ballot, a campaign would take tens of millions of dollars more.
And the cost of building the casinos? Don’t even ask.
But dreaming costs nothing at all.
“He’s just going through the desert,” Thompson said of Brown, “trying to kick that bucket over and find a nugget.
“And gambling is his nugget.”
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California City Facts
* Started: 1965, with 617 residents
* Location: 150 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles
* Size: 205 square miles, third largest city in the state
* Development: 10 square miles
* Population: 8,000
