ON THE AGENDA: Twentynine Palms City Council, July 22, 2025

Council faces decision on proposed 100-cabin Ofland Resort slated for Indian Cove

Jul 20, 2025

Projected Viewshed of the Ofland development according to Morongo Basin Conservation Association (p. 572). The Ofland developers dispute the accuracy of this viewshed.

This Tuesday, July 22, 2025, the Twentynine Palms City Council will hold their regularly scheduled meeting at 6 pm. Because this involves a hot-button agenda item, the location of this meeting has been changed from City Hall to the gymnasium at Freedom Plaza, located at 6547 Freedom Way, to accommodate an expected overflow crowd.

This marks the second in a series of City meetings on the proposed Ofland Hotel1 development project, a 152-acre resort proposed for the Indian Cove area of Twentynine Palms. It follows a contentious three-hour Planning Commission meeting held on June 25 (our report is here), where the proposed project earned a 4-0-1 approval2 to proceed to its next step — City Council consideration.

Grab your reading glasses and a cold beverage before you gulp this one down— the whopping 1,452-page agenda packet is linked here. When you go to the meeting (and you are going, aren’t you?), be prepared with patience, water, and perhaps a snack. This is the schedule for the Ofland item alone:

City Manager Keith Gardner will make a short presentation on the project
City Council will ask questions
Luke Searcy, Ofland’s Director of Development, will make a presentation
Public comment will open
Further Council discussion following public comment
Motions will made and discussed
A vote will be made

The staff report indicates that the meeting will be live-streamed (link here). If you wish to speak in support of the Ofland Resort, there are talking points here. Say No to Ofland, a local advocacy group, has talking points here.

AWARDS, PRESENTATIONS, CONSENT CALENDAR, FUTURE COUNCIL INITIATED ITEMS

At 5 pm Council will hold a closed session with legal counsel on anticipated litigation/significant exposure to anticipated litigation. Following a presentation to the Semper Fi Sports team for participation in the city’s Cash For Trash program, approval of last meeting’s minutes, a monthly warrant register, and a routine approval of an annual levying assessment for the City’s Landscaping and Lighting District #1, the real showdown begins in the form of a public hearing—the topic being the highly contentious Ofland development project. Should there be any energy left, that item will be followed by a discussion of Future Council Initiated Items, General Public Comment, and a City Manager’s Report.

PUBLIC COMMENTS

Typically, the City allows speakers three minutes to address agenda items at the podium. At the recent June Planning Commission meeting—due to the vast number of public comment slips submitted on the Ofland agenda item—the Chair opted to limit public comments to two minutes each, to the dismay of meeting attendees. This is allowed under California law, and the Mayor may impose a similar time adjustment on the Ofland item if deemed appropriate.

Open public comment on non-agenda items is scheduled at the end of the meeting, after the Ofland vote—a long wait that may be awarded with three minutes of time.

Public comments on agenda items will be requested when the item is discussed. Fill out a green comment sheet for open public or agenda item comments and hand it to the staff. You may also email comments to City Council members and request that comments be read at the meeting, however the Mayor has not been reading email comments into the record for some time now.

PUBLIC HEARINGS

Item 7: Ofland Resort Project

The proposed 100-unit Ofland Resort sits south of Highway 62, east of Lear Avenue, and north of Sullivan Road. The Ofland developers are based in Houston, Texas. They operate a location in Escalante, Utah, and are developing a resort in the Great Smoky Mountains in Townsend, Tennessee, but it has not yet broken ground—despite approval from the Blount County Planning Commission in 2024. Similar to other luxury hotel and boutique-style vacation companies such as Autocamp, Ofland’s proposed operating locations are close to national parks and national recreation sites.

The staff recommendation is for the City Council to adopt a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND) instead of requiring an in-depth and impartial Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and to:

approve a general plan amendment that creates Open Space Conservation zoning
consider rezoning the proposed resort parcel from Single Family Residential - Estate (RS-E) to Commercial Tourist (CT) and the new Open Space zoning
adopt a resolution approving the Conditional Use Permit (CUP) allowing the development of the resort

The Desert Trumpet took a look at Ofland Resort details in our preview of the June 25 Planning Commission meeting and did a dive into the MND in “29 Palms Planning provides key boost to proposed Ofland Hotel resort development near Indian Cove.”
We also published a Letter to the Editor asking that the project be returned to the Planning Commission for further review.

Options for Council to consider on Tuesday include to approve the staff recommendation as-is, to accept certain parts but not others or deny the project outright.3 While not mentioned in the staff report there is precedent for Council sending a seemingly final decision back to the Planning Commission, and that is a possibility in this hearing as well.

Attached to the proposal is a 1,416 page staff report. What does it include?

Background and description of the project
An overview of the Initial Study and MND dated May 12, 2025
The assumed fiscal impact of the project
The MND and its environmental checklist
Responses to the MND from state and county entities, the Marine base, tribal nations, conservation organizations, and residents of Twentynine Palms and the Morongo Basin with responses from the City
Texts of the emails and letters received by the City before and after the Planning Commission meeting on June 25
What appears to be a revision of the Initial Study and MND dated July 16, 2025
Technical attachments that support the initial study and that include a Biological Resources Assessment report published in March 2024, a historical/archaeological report, a geotechnical report, a noise study, a traffic screening, and a vehicle miles traveled study.
Proposed project site map with Highway 62 to the north, Sullivan Road to the south, Lear Avenue to the west, and Shoshone Valley Road to the east with a main entrance on Lear Avenue. Source: City staff report.

Projected City Revenue and the Local Job Market

Included in the staff report are Transient Occupancy Tax and Tourism Business Improvement District revenue figures the City is expecting from a project of this scope if the Ofland location maintains an annual occupancy rate of 50%. According to the staff report:

Hotel proprietors pay 9% in TOT and 1.5% in TBID fees.
With an assumption of 100 rooms charging $300/ night, and a yearly 50% occupancy rate; the amount of TOT that would be paid to the City annually would be: $492,750. (100 x $300 x .50 x 365 x .09).
With an assumption of 100 rooms charging $300/night, and a yearly 50% occupancy rate; the amount of TBID fees that would be paid to the TBID annually would be: $82,125. (100 x $300 x .50 x 365 x .015).

It is unclear where the figure of $300 a night per unit is derived. The Ofland Escalante website offers cabin rooms, campsites, and Airstreams at various rates, maxing out at $259 per night for a deluxe cabin, with an option of $200 per night for a tiny cabin of similar size and design as the ones proposed for Twentynine Palms. Although not currently proposed for the Twentynine Palms location, the Escalante location also rents out Airstreams at a rate of $169 per night and campsites for $100 per night— nothing in the $300 range, and this applies to both low- and high-season bookings.

Comparing Ofland with projects of similar scope and size, Reset Hotel, which opened this year on the south side of Twentynine Palms, offers a queen sized room starting at $175 in the down season (summer) or a king sized room with outdoor hot tub maxing out at $316 with prices increasing during high-demand tourist season and some weekends.4

The going rate for a cabin at Ofland Escalante is $200 for one night. Source: Ofland Direct Book webpage.

The Ofland Twentynine Palms website boasts more than 30-40 job positions and perks like employee housing. The Ofland Escalante website cites free employee housing that is pet friendly and couple-friendly. The staff report describes the proposed housing in Twentynine Palms as akin to dorms:

…a mix of manager suites and employee units, and will include a shared community room and kitchen. Employee workforce housing includes one general manager suite with private living space and restroom, six manager suites with private restrooms, and 18 split employee units with one shared restroom per two units.

A job description on the Ofland Escalante website seeks applicants that “Combine the work ethic and grittiness of an oil-rig worker with the service of a five-star hotel concierge and the warmth of a Southern grandmother inviting you over for dinner.”

“Leave the rbf at home,” the descriptor continues (alluding to the popular term resting-bitch-face for those not up on the latest millennial lingo) and implies workers can expect to walk the Ofland Escalante 20-acre property doing a variety of upkeep, maintenance, cleaning, and customer service activities in an often unforgiving desert environment.

Transforming Neighborhood Identity and City Precedent

Planning Commission Chair Jessica Cure raised concerns of a lack of community benefits package back at the June 25 meeting, in addition to listing items she felt needed further attention such as density and project access.

Readers can refer to our previous coverage for an overview of concerns raised in statements from the public, both written and spoken, which range from threats to endangered and threatened wildlife species such as the desert tortoise and burrowing owl, as well as increases in traffic, light, noise, the scale of the development and the impact a planned restaurant will have on downtown businesses.

There were also a few public comments in favor of the project, which highlighted the aesthetic appeal of the project, the difficulty of developing the parcel into homes, and, as expressed by Planning Commissioner Jim Krushat, tone-setting consequences—if the City rejects the project, other developers may be hesitant to do future business in Twentynine Palms. Residents pressed the opposite concern, that rezoning a residential parcel to tourist commercial will set a precedent that makes it difficult for the City to deny similar zoning change requests.

Additional Commentary Submitted In Response to the Planning Commission Decision

Since the June 25 Planning Commission meeting, a number of supplementary statements have been submitted to the City. Responses are included in the agenda packet.

A letter from the Law Offices of Jordan R. Sisson cites a lack of consistency between the Ofland’s vehicle mileage traveled (VMT) studies and VMT studies conducted for two other hotel proposals in the last five years—the Wander (now Reset) Hotel and a hotel at Project Phoenix:

Unlike the Wander Hotel, the Project’s VMT Screening Study provides no SBTAM [San Bernardino Transportation Analysis Model] modeling information or provides any explanation why such evidence based data could not be provided. Similarly, unlike Project Phoenix, the Project’s VMT Screening Study does not include any TAZ [traffic analysis zone] information or explain why such data could not be provided.5

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), in a letter dated June 24, 2025 and signed by three attorneys, lists a number of statutes and court precedents that they claim the Ofland MND violates, including an improper notification process and lack of a formal 30-day comment period from the City.

“The Project is inconsistent with the City’s General Plan,” the letter also argues, citing a pinpointed list of City land use element policies, general plan priorities, and general plan goals that the project seemingly disregards:

Most glaringly, the Project proposes resort development on land designated as Single-Family Residential-Estate, requiring rezoning to re-designate much of the Project site to Tourist Commercial. (IS/MND at 62.) Beyond this, the Project is inconsistent with numerous General Plan goals and policies, including but not limited to:
Policy: HS-2.7 Provide adequate sites for the development of new housing through appropriate land use and zoning designations to accommodate the City’s share of regional housing needs;
Policy: HS-2.9 Assist residential developers in identifying and preparing land suitable for residential development;
Policy: CO-1.2 Require focused surveys for the burrowing owl for development projects on vacant properties, to determine the occurrence of burrowing owl and prepare mitigation measures if necessary;
Policy CI-8.2 Seek opportunities to improve street or parkway design of scenic corridors that enhances the scenic resources;
Policy LU-4.1 Consider and address the potential impacts of new development on surrounding properties;
Goal LU-3 Promote a high quality of life by encouraging attractive high quality development that is compatible with existing uses and the City’s desert environment;
Goal LU-2 Protect existing neighborhoods and the area’s natural surroundings by encouraging development that is compatible with the City’s small-town character;
Policy LU-2.3 Require that new development be sensitive to neighborhood context and development scale;
and Policy LU-1.5 General Plan Amendments shall only be approved if they can demonstrate that the proposed amendment will not adversely impact the existing community and the amendment will help achieve the vision and goals established by the General Plan.

With regard to the general plan, the City submitted the following response to the CBD:

As allowed by both State law and the courts, it is not required that a project comply with all General Plan goals and policies when a City considers a General Plan Amendment. The policy decision is ultimately that of the City Council, which will consider the project’s consistency with the General Plan in their public hearing.

Rezoning—The Open Space Conservation Caveat

Arguments in favor of the project praise the new open space conservation zoning that this project proposes, which would surround the resort. Aside from the 100 square foot wastewater treatment plant, development would not be permitted in this OSC zoned portion of the parcel. And in fact, the designation of this open space is the primary offsetting mitigation cited in the MND, while opponents argue that the negative effects of increased human and vehicular traffic are the largest impacts, not the project’s footprint.

In Conclusion

Tuesday’s City Council meeting represents a turning point not only for the Ofland Resort proposal, but also for the future development trajectory of Twentynine Palms. What’s at stake is more than a single resort project: it’s a decision that could redefine zoning precedent, conservation strategy, the City’s image as a gateway to Joshua Tree National Park, and how Twentynine Palms balances tourism-driven growth with community values.

The Council faces multiple pathways—approve the project as recommended, send it back to the Planning Commission for revision, adopt parts and reject others, or deny it altogether. Each choice carries implications for land use, environmental stewardship, the local economy, and the political climate surrounding outside investment. With more than 1,400 pages of staff analysis, conflicting economic projections, and a public divided in both passion and purpose, this is not a decision that will be easily made—or quickly forgotten.

Whether you support, oppose, or simply want to understand the project better, your voice matters. Show up. Speak out in favor or against. This is your town and your future.

NOTE: Desert Trumpet staff members Cindy Bernard, Kat Talley-Jones, and Heidi Heard live in the Indian Cove neighborhood, adjacent to this proposed development project, and are on the executive committees of Indian Cove Neighbors and Say No to Ofland.

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