Loophole Lets Landowners Build on Native Grounds

John Valenzuela was winding his RV through a lush, quiet pocket of the Leona Valley when he saw that 15 feet had been sheared off the top of the yellow hill.

He stopped by the side of the road, and made sure he was in the right place. Was that really the same hill? Then he felt sick.

The hill is a state-registered archeological site. And Valenzuela, chairman of the San Fernando Band of Mission Indians, says the landowner destroyed priceless artifacts--and possibly the graves--of his ancestors when he graded the hill to build a home.

“How do we feel?” asked Valenzuela, 63. “What if I took a bulldozer and tore up all the stones in a public cemetery? That’s how we feel.”

The 500-member San Fernando Band and other Native American groups say that exemptions in local ordinances allow builders of individual homes to tear up sacred grounds that often would be protected from large construction projects.

The California Historical Resources Information System holds records used to help determine whether Native American remains and artifacts should be removed or preserved during construction. State law gives cities and counties discretion on whether to check permits for small builders against those archeological records.

Los Angeles County is among the agencies that waive the requirement for people like Gary Shafer, who graded the Leona Valley hill last May. County officials say it is impractical to scrutinize every building permit for archeological reasons.

Valenzuela became familiar with the Leona Valley property in 1997, while he was consulting for the city of Palmdale on a road-widening project. In and around the area, archeologists found stone tools, marked graves and evidence of villages and seasonal camps that date back 500 to 1,500 years, said Beth Padon, a Long Beach archeologist who worked on the road project.

Elizabeth Lake Road was originally planned to cross what is now Shafer’s hill. But after archeologists dug up bone fragments, the San Fernando Band persuaded the city to change the route. The Indians blessed and reinterred the remains.

Shafer, who bought the land two years ago, said no one informed him about its archeological history before he graded the hill for his dream house. He also plowed up a nearby field to plant a cherry orchard.

While Shafer says he sympathizes with the Indians, he became suspicious when Padon and the tribe offered to survey the site at a cost of $5,000 to $7,000--out of Shafer’s pocket.

“I said, ‘You can come up and study whatever you want. But now I’ve got to pay?’ That just pretty well frosted me.”

Padon said the offer was a reasonable one. And Valenzuela maintains it was simply an attempt to find out how much of the tribe’s history can be salvaged.

“What are we going to gain from that money?” he asked. “It’s not enough to buy the land back.”

Requiring an archeological check doesn’t mean a site will be protected from development, only that it should be considered for study. To comply with state law, large developers often pay archeologists and Native Americans to survey their land, reinter remains and take representative samples of artifacts before construction begins.

State officials are unsure how many local governments exempt small builders. In Los Angeles County, hundreds of permits per week are issued for exempt properties, officials said.

In San Luis Obispo County, an area rich in Native American history, builders must pay for surveys if their land contains an archeological site, said planner Steven McMasters. “And we deal with a lot of single-family residences,” he added.

The city of San Luis Obispo would have required an archeological check for a grading project like Shafer’s, planner Michael Codron said. But he noted that it’s easier to be strict in a city of about 40,000 people.

A complicating factor is that state archeological maps are shared only with scientists and developers on a need-to-know basis, said Margaret Lopez, coordinator of the South Central Coastal Information Center in Fullerton, which keeps regional archeological records. Lopez said the rule protects properties from artifact looters.