Vegas company abandons plans for luxury resort near Joshua Tree National Park

The project, slated for 152 acres of undeveloped creosote scrub in the Indian Cove area of Twentynine Palms, drew a lawsuit from neighbors and conservationists who alleged the city failed to adequately assess and mitigate potential environmental harms when it approved the plans last year.

But representatives of Ofland Hotels didn’t cite the litigation as rationale for walking away from the project. Instead, they said that market and financial conditions had changed, rendering the plans infeasible, according to a letter sent by Ofland’s attorney to the city of Twentynine Palms last week. The project also fell out of escrow with the prospective buyer, who was unresponsive to repeated extension requests from Ofland, the letter said.

In a press release Thursday, Ofland Hotels said that “softening market demand” drove its retreat. “As a company, we must adapt to shifts in the industry,” Luke Searcy, head of development, said in the release. “Ultimately, current market conditions did not justify the level of investment required to responsibly move the project forward.”

The company plans to shift its focus and resources toward a resort planned near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee that was greenlit in 2024 and a second project near Zion National Park in Utah, the details of which will be announced later this year, the release said. The company also operates an outdoor boutique hotel in Escalante, Utah.

“This is definitely a loss for the community,” said Stone James, the Twentynine Palms city manager. The resort would have brought in $500,000 to $800,000 in annual tax revenue, supported 40 full-time jobs and helped build the city’s brand as a destination for outdoor recreation enthusiasts, he said.

“While the project is not moving forward due to economic conditions, it was sad to see a minority of wealthy estate owners oppose the economic opportunity and prosperity this conservation-focused tourism project would have provided the city,” he wrote in an email.

Plans called for 100 small cabins, two lodges, multiple pools, a stargazing area and an outdoor movie screen, plus a wastewater treatment plant slated to process more than 13,000 gallons a day.

Some neighbors greeted news of the project’s demise with relief, saying the location — a residential area with large swaths of undeveloped land — was inappropriate for a commercial venture.

Indian Cove is home to a close-knit community, as well as a key wildlife corridor that allows animals to move between the national park and other wild areas, said artist Cindy Bernard, co-founder of community group Indian Cove Neighbors. “To have a resort in the middle of all that would have been destructive,” she said.

Bernard lives next to the project site and has documented multiple desert tortoises on and around her property — including Squiggles, who was given the nickname for leaving wavy tracks in the sand.

Yet a field survey commissioned by the developers found no tortoises, which are listed as endangered by the state of California. The survey did not follow typical U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protocols to identify tortoises and instead used less rigorous procedures, said Evan Levy, attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

The environmental nonprofit, together with Indian Cove Neighbors, sued Twentynine Palms in August over its approval of the project. The city had adopted what’s known as a mitigated negative declaration, which is shorter and less detailed than a full environmental impact report.

The lawsuit alleged that the declaration did not provide enough information to understand the project‘s impacts, and that the city overlooked evidence that those impacts may be significant.

The project site, located about a half-mile from the national park boundary, may support at least 10 plant and 17 animal species that are either listed as threatened or endangered or recognized as species of concern, including loggerhead shrikes, golden eagles and burrowing owls, the lawsuit stated.

The parties have agreed to stay the legal challenge for 90 days so the developer can work with the city to decertify the mitigated negative declaration and rescind the project entitlements, including a general plan amendment, a zoning change and a development code amendment, Levy said.