Palm Springs confronts new role as casino destination

Ben Fox

Tuesday, March 14, 2000 | 4:16 a.m.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. - It's a fast-growing desert getaway from the sprawl of Southern California. Frank Sinatra lived there, and the rest of the Rat Pack used it as a stomping ground. It even draws the lounge acts of Wayne Newton and Tom Jones.

Palm Springs is looking a little like Las Vegas, and locals are testy about the idea that their sleepy desert city of 43,000 might potentially turn into a California version of the Mecca of sin.

"We don't want to be compared to Las Vegas," said Howard Jacobs, acting general manager of the Palm Springs tourism bureau. "We have a very different atmosphere."

But the comparison is hard to avoid these days. Voters last week legalized Nevada-style gaming on California Indian tribal lands and the Palm Springs area, just a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, is expected to be ground zero for a major expansion in casino gambling.

The Agua Caliente tribe said Monday it would spend at least $150 million to overhaul and expand its casino in downtown Palm Springs and an additional $80 million to build a new casino 20 minutes up the road in Rancho Mirage that is expected to open in spring 2001.

Last week, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts Inc. and the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians announced plans for a $60 million casino expansion near Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley.

Their announcement came a day after voters approved by a 2-to-1 margin Proposition 1A, which amended the state Constitution to allow a dramatic expansion of Indian gambling across California.

Analysts expect more deals and expansions in a region that already lures 3 million tourists a year for its golf, natural spas, weather and more limited gambling at five casinos. It also helps that the valley is right in the path of Southern California motorists headed toward Nevada.

"This place will be California's closest thing to Las Vegas," said Vincent Battaglia, who sells commercial real estate in the Coachella Valley and sees a boon in the making.

It would be hard for the valley to meet the dense glitz of Vegas. But at the very least it will siphon gamblers from the less showy Nevada casino towns like Reno and Laughlin that will no longer offer the kind of wagering Californians can't get at home.

Proposition 1A allows the tribes to replace their video-game-like machines that spit out paper instead of money into the standard, and more popular, coin-dispensing slots, whose numbers could jump more than five-fold across the state. For card games, the casinos will be allowed to eliminate fees charged per hand and to run house-banked games.

With 2,000 slot machines, 70 table games and off-track betting at its two Coachella Valley casinos, the 350-member Agua Caliente tribe will be able to offer about the same as a Las Vegas mega-casino like The Paris, which is licensed for 2,100 slots and up to 90 table games.

Richard Milanovich, the Agua Caliente tribal chairman, said he expects to divert Nevada-bound gamblers, but stressed that his architects and landscape designers - both with Vegas casino experience - will make sure their Rancho Mirage projects blends in with the desert.

"It won't be another Las Vegas, nor will it become Atlantic City," Milanovich said.

Bob Thomas, a 68-year-old retiree, doesn't see it that way. He spends eight hours and $300 day in the Agua Caliente's Palm Springs casino.

"I don't go to Vegas anymore," Thomas, who lives in nearby Cathedral City, said as he followed the action on a video Keno machine Monday.

The increase in gambling could bring rising crime, indebtedness and addiction, says Assemblyman Bruce Thompson, R-Fallbrook.

"Nevada is not exactly something we should aspire to here in the Golden State," he says.

Palm Springs officials and residents are ambivalent.

City Manager Dallas Flicek welcomes the tourist dollars and notes that the crime and social ills predicted five years ago, when the downtown Agua Caliente casino opened, never materialized. Councilman Jim Jones grumbles that the city has no power to control or tax the activities of the tribe, a sovereign nation that saw a city grow up around its reservation.

The downtown casino's brightly lit marquee seems to be a particular source of contention. "It would be OK in Las Vegas, but not in Palm Springs," says Frank Tyson, owner of a nearby bed and breakfast.

Added to the casinos, the Coachella Valley is expected to grow fast as more baby boomers retire. Officials expect the valley's population to jump from 235,000 to 300,000 in five years.

The combination may be too much for some residents, said Mimi Aiken, a business owner playing video slots at the tribe's downtown casino.

"If it got as big as Vegas, the locals would move out," said Aiken, who moved from Orange County a decade ago.

"The reason we live here is because it's peaceful and quiet," she said. "If it changes, I think you'll see people move out to Arizona."