Slowly selling the farm

Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005 | 10:12 a.m.

Bill Gilcrease has lived with his birds for so long that his voice has a distinct chirp to it.

A Las Vegas Valley farmer since his youth, the 86-year-old has poured the last three decades of his life into the Gilcrease Nature Sanctuary on Racel Street near Durango Drive.

"I'd like it to go on forever if possible," Gilcrease said during a recent tour of the sanctuary, the Gilcrease Orchard and the old Gilcrease Ranch.

His family once owned 1,500 acres in the northwest valley, but financial realities have cut into Gilcrease's dream. Now there are a little more than 150 acres left, and a pending sale will cut into that.

The foundation set up to sustain the orchard, a 100-acre parcel of the Gilcrease property, is selling 40 acres of that land to a homebuilder for $15 million, Gilcrease said.

The land being sold is a valley landmark -- the Gilcrease "pick-and-pay" orchard, which for 25 years has sold fresh fruit and vegetables to Southern Nevadans.

The sale will leave 60 acres of orchard. The remaining Gilcrease land in the valley includes the sanctuary's 12.6 acres a few miles northwest of the orchard and the homestead's 40.6 acres a few miles southeast of the orchard.

With losses averaging "$200,000 on a good year," the land sale is the only way to keep the orchard alive, says Gilcrease Orchard Foundation President Mary Ellen Racel, who calls the operation "land rich and cash poor." The foundation needs money to cover the rising costs of maintaining the orchard.

But the pending sale of the "pick-and-pay" side of the orchard has created an acrimonious battle between Racel, a fiery 70-year-old grandmother who has almost total control of the land, and several people who see themselves as the protectors of the orchard and Gilcrease.

Critics, including orchard workers, volunteers and neighbors, are questioning the sale of the land and want to know where money from previous land sales has gone.

They are also questioning Racel's control and the foundation's direction

"Some of the people working there are really tyrants and are using their power to force things to happen," said Lorraine DeBusk, a school teacher and bird lover who befriended Bill Gilcrease a decade ago.

"The things he has told me that he would like to see happen for the orchard and the bird sanctuary are just not happening," she said.

"Things are on a downward spiral right now."

Several people who talked to the Sun feared repercussions if they discussed the sale of the orchard.

Things have escalated to the point that the police were called. One person, whose name was blacked out by Metro Police, even filed a police report accusing Racel of harassment, stealing Gilcrease property and embezzling Gilcrease funds. The police found no evidence of financial or criminal wrongdoing.

During an interview, Gilcrease was quickly joined by a woman who said she was his nurse. Gilcrease said the woman was not a nurse, but one of Racel's friends who was sent to check up on him. He told her to go away.

Racel said the allegations against her are unfounded and are from people "who don't know what they are talking about."

"I'm doing the best I can," Racel said. "All these years I've taken him to the doctor and I've taken care of him when he was sick. I don't notice anyone else running over to do these things, all these people who are so suddenly concerned.

"And then people find out he's got money and they are all coming out of the woodwork. Doesn't that make you wonder? Where were all these people all these years?"

Racel and accountant Bob McKnight deny all allegations of mismanagement and say their critics are just trying to protect their own land values.

"All these people claim they are looking out for me, but they don't trust anyone else," Gilcrease said. "It's the darndest thing."

Growing money

Bill and his late brother John "Ted" Gilcrease poured their entire lives into the land and their own projects -- Bill the bird sanctuary, Ted the orchard. They set up foundations, infused with millions of dollars from the sale of land to sustain their legacy.

Ted Gilcrease's wish was to preserve a place for people to come pick their own fresh fruits and vegetables. He told his half-brother James in a 1999 letter that "thousands of people tell us it is very important to them."

"It's more than just the fruit and vegetables I sell, it is recreation for them to come here with their children and get away from the city," he told the Sun in 2001.

The Gilcrease brothers donated the entire 100 acres to the private orchard foundation they established in 1997, with the purpose of maintaining the orchard as a public park for charitable, scientific or educational purposes.

Ted Gilcrease died in 2003 at 87. He left behind a trust to support the orchard. It's unclear how much money was in the trust, but sources said it was at least $2 million.

In the last five years, there have been land sales worth $7.1 million benefiting the trusts and foundations, and yet somehow, the foundation itself is "cash poor," according to Racel and McKnight.

"It's just strange that all of a sudden the orchard is out of money," said Esther Abele, a frequent orchard customer, who collected nearly 2,000 signatures on a petition protesting the latest sale.

Racel's reply to critics has been consistent. How the orchard is run is "none of their business."

A longtime employee, Racel has consolidated control of the Gilcrease estate and the foundations. When Ted died, she inherited some land and was a co-executor, with Wells Fargo Bank, of his will. Her live-in partner, pain management physician Maureen Mackey, is Bill Gilcrease's doctor.

Racel, her son Frank Racel and her daughter Susan Racel Weber currently control both the orchard foundation and the nature sanctuary boards, according to documents filed with the Nevada secretary of state. Racel is one of three trustees of Ted Gilcrease's trust, along with the bank and Bill Gilcrease.

It was Racel's decision to sell the 40 acres of the orchard land to Royal Construction Co. for a 100-home housing development.

Builder of Spinnaker Homes, Royal plans to start moving the trees by December once the sale is final, lawyer Chris Kaempfer said.

Gilcrease said he learned of the sale after the deal was already in motion. He believes Racel when she says that she had no choice, but it has left him wondering about the future.

"It's a desperate situation that they are selling the pick-your-own side," he said.

James Gilcrease said Bill is being taken advantage of and he said the foundation is going against Ted's wishes.

"He'd probably jump out of his grave to come and fight about it," James Gilcrease said from his LeMoore, Calif., home.

"Houses were something he'd (Ted) never wanted. He set up that foundation to support it forever and ever. Somehow that money has been mishandled."

Cash poor?

Before Ted's death, the two brothers made three land deals worth $4.3 million.

Those sales alone should have been able to keep the orchard open for a decade, friends and neighbors say. But more land has been bought and sold in recent years through the Gilcrease brothers' trusts.

In 2004 three properties were sold for $2.7 million.

The two trusts also share ownership of 12 homes, but it's unclear what those homes are for and if they're generating rental income. Asked about it, Racel said it was Bill Gilcrease's "private business."

Gilcrease said he didn't know about the homes.

All of the sales or purchases are split between the two trusts. The land sales in 2004 were in part to pay off federal estate taxes after Ted's death, McKnight said.

The remaining land

After the sale of the "pick-and-pay" orchard goes through, the Gilcrease trusts and foundations will own about 160 acres, including land Bill Gilcrease purchased in February in the Amargosa Valley by Pahrump.

The Las Vegas Valley land includes the remaining portion of the orchard, the sanctuary -- which includes a mostly still-unearthed paleontology site of prehistoric animals -- and a portion of the old homestead.

The original ranch land near Rebecca and Elkhorn roads still has crops on it, including pecan trees dating from the 1920s and a mini-orchard, as well as the family home, a silo Ted Gilcrease designed to hold his hay, and 80-year-old chicken coops from when poultry was the family's main source of income.

Roughly 20 acres of former alfalfa fields on the south side are vacant, and both Gilcrease and Racel said they tried to sell that land first. But Rainbow Boulevard, the main access road into the property, has been shut off by the estates surrounding the property, and developers told the foundation it wouldn't "be worth the battle" to try to build a housing division there, Racel said.

Gilcrease, who has never had much interest in business, said he's trying to figure out why the land was sold. His brother Ted handled the business operations, and Bill Gilcrease said he often even signed documents without reading them.

He said if he has any money, he would give it to save the orchard.

"Some say I'm poverty stricken and others say I'm a millionaire," Gilcrease said. "I don't know which is true."

McKnight, his accountant since the 1970s, tells him he's a bit of both. There is about $1.5 million in his personal trust, but at the rate he has been pumping money into his nature sanctuary -- about $240,000 a year -- that won't last long.

The fact of the matter is, McKnight said, that the Gilcreases have been selling land for decades to subsidize the farm, and later to keep the orchard and sanctuary in the black.

The orchard makes between $230,000 to $240,000 a year from fruit and vegetable sales, according to forms filed with the IRS. But expenses are now upward of $400,000, Racel and McKnight said.

The only donors ever listed since the orchard became a foundation in 1997 are the Gilcreases. The foundation's assets are almost entirely in land.

Running the orchard has become increasingly more expensive, said Bill Allan, who handles the day-to-day operations. There's equipment to repair or buy, and new Environmental Protection Agency regulations have made it difficult to keep some of the pests and plant diseases away from the fruit.

The sanctuary is annually in the hole each year by $80,000 to $100,000, and that's after Bill Gilcrease pitches in. The sanctuary receives about $20,000 a year in ticket sales or other resources, McKnight said. The deficit is covered by previous land sales.

Keeping things afloat

The sale of the 40 acres should keep both organizations afloat for a while longer, Racel said.

The profits will go toward restoring and maintaining the remaining orchard and buying some of the homestead land for the foundation, Gilcrease said.

He said Racel and Allan each inherited 10 acres of the old homestead land from his brother. That land is tied up until he dies, when they will each get another 10 acres.

Gilcrease said the orchard foundation wants to buy some of the homestead land as a possible new home for the sanctuary, and he said both he and Racel would profit from that.

Racel denied that. She was angry that Gilcrease talked about the sale of the land and the inheritance, and said the inheritance wasn't a done deal. She said the land could still be sold before the inheritance.

But as executor of Ted Gilcrease's estate, it's her decision on whether to sell, Racel said.

Racel, whose family of nine lived with the Gilcrease brothers for two years in the 1970s after her home burned down, got involved in their businesses by serving as a volunteer "gofer" running errands for them, both she and Gilcrease said. She later was hired to manage some commercial property.

Racel said she was put in charge of the orchard by Ted, and that she is just trying to carry out his and Bill's wishes.

"Despite what people think, there were no shenanigans going on, with three people on top of it," Racel said, referring to the overseers of the trust -- her, Gilcrease and Wells Fargo.

Gilcrease said he trusts Racel "quite a bit," but he thinks her sole control of the two nonprofits foundations may have driven donors and volunteers away.

"People think she's making off with things because of the monopoly," Gilcrease said.

"She's just like President Bush. She decides to do something and she does it. She doesn't think about getting someone else's opinion."

He says he can't do much about the orchard, but as president of the sanctuary, he is finally adding new board members, including longtime employees Oscar Munoz and Charlene Chadwick; university Regent Thalia Dondero; and Assemblyman Harry Mortenson, D-Las Vegas.

Gilcrease said he's hoping they'll be able to help him plan for the future of the sanctuary, including finding grant money and bringing in more community support. His dream is to build a rain forest for tropical birds.

Racel said with just her family members on the board, Gilcrease could do what he wanted and they would follow. Now, she said, he will have to answer to this new board.

She said the makeup of the orchard foundation board will not change.

"It was Bill's wish to have more people on the (sanctuary) board," she said. "It was not Ted's wish to have more people on the (orchard) board."

In the meantime, many of Gilcrease's friends and neighbors are worried about the future of the land.

"That was his (Ted's) pride and joy out there," Abele said.

"If the one part (of the orchard) goes, the other part will go next year. It will be the end of an era completely."

Christina Littlefield may be reached at 259-8813 or at clittle@ lasvegassun.com.

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