Mixed feelings over solar in Desert Center

DESERT CENTER – If you want to know what's happening in Desert Center, the place to be is the U.S. Post Office on Ragsdale Road, about 1-1:30 p.m. most weekdays, when the tiny town's residents stop in to pick up their mail.

Vintage mailboxes line the wall inside the Post Office's storefront location, the only commercial space still in active use on the dusty street, a fading remnant of U.S. Route 60, the predecessor to Interstate 10, that once made the town a busy stopping point between Los Angeles and Arizona.

The news making the rounds on a recent Wednesday afternoon was that the California Highway Patrol had identified a possible suspect in a hit-and-run incident — the first one anyone in town could remember — that had left resident Harry Swaney, 67, with 12 broken ribs and a damaged spleen.

Dawn Rettagliata, 53, also pointed out the flat, bare face of a boulder, where visitors used to be able to read a brass plaque recounting the town's history as birthplace of the Kaiser Permanente health system.

"We had vandalism," Rettagliata said, surveying the street with its long-closed gas station, cafe and market. "They ripped that off and stole that."

Such incidents have become emblematic of the dilemma now facing Rettagliata and Desert Center's other 400-500 residents — about 150 full-time, the rest snowbirds — as they try to create a safe, sustainable future for the town.

Large-scale solar development on federal lands surrounding the town has had decidedly mixed results, providing a temporary and limited economic boost, while eating away the open desert and small-town sense of community that drew many to the spot in the first place.

The driver suspected of hitting Swaney, who was driving a golf cart at the time, was from the popular TKB Bakery & Deli in Indio, making a delivery to the Desert Sunlight solar project under construction six miles north of town.

"The front of a 2013 Ford E-350 van struck the rear of the golf cart and Swaney was ejected from the vehicle," according to an email from CHP Officer Michael Radford.

Swaney was released from Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs on Thursday, but has declined requests for an interview. Friends in Desert Center have been working on getting him a new golf cart.

The CHP has identified a suspect in the case, but no arrest has been made, Radford said.

"Officers are completing the investigation at this time, and felony hit-and-run charges may be filed," he said.

Brandon Sippel, co-owner of TBK, confirmed that a company employee was driving the van, but said the company is not legally liable. In the wake of the accident, Sippel said, the family-owned company has a new policy that only TKB owners and other family members will drive company vehicles. Extra safety meetings are also being held, he said.

Laura Abram, a company spokeswoman for First Solar, the company building and managing Desert Sunlight, stressed that none of its employees were involved in the collision.

"We maintain the highest expectation of safe business operations for all our vendors," she said.

Meanwhile, internecine family feuds and corporate land interests have made even such small-scale economic development all but impossible, leaving the town's survival dependent on a Riverside County government that, even with good intentions, barely keeps it on basic life support.

Most of the land in and around the town is owned either by the Ragsdale family, descendants of "Desert Steve" Ragsdale, who founded Desert Center in the 1920s, or Kaiser Ventures, owner of the now-closed Eagle Mountain iron mine and its gaping open pits eight miles north of town.

Both have steadfastly refused to sell, effectively blocking the zoning changes and other improvements needed to draw residents and allow new businesses to take root.

"If something dynamic changed and there was a really dynamic proposal, it could change things," said Supervisor John J. Benoit, the town's sole advocate on the Board of Supervisors.

He sees Desert Center as "a fine place for people who want to get away from it all and put their retirement fund into a place. Until you see some long-term job creator out there, that's where the future of Desert Center is, and some people think that's great."

"You won't see a new supermarket and a number of things you see in larger economic areas," he said.

Desert Center's one remaining economic engine is the Chuckwalla Valley Raceway, a spare 2.68-mile track that hosts weekend car and motorcycle races and race car driving classes. It draws a steady stream of visitors, coming from Los Angeles to Phoenix and all points in between, said co-owner Matt Johnson.

The track has seven full-time employees and a revolving crew of subcontractors who work during race events, he said. Plans to build garages and a second track are in the works, but have been slowed by the lack of electric and water connections, he said.

"That's all been handcuffed by lack of infrastructure," he said. "We have people coming in from all over the Southwest. With infrastructure and expansion of the raceway, I think there is much more (to be) brought into Desert Center."

Town has a long history

You would be forgiven for not knowing you were in the clubhouse parking lot at the Lake Tamarisk Desert Resort. The sun-bleached, cracked asphalt, lines setting off parking spaces long faded, is barely distinguishable from a small equally sun-baked lot next to it. Even at well-attended community events, it's rarely half-full, Rettagliata said.

On the edge of the desert, 50 miles east of Indio, Desert Center was born of the automobile age, founded by "Desert Steve" as a much-needed stopping point between Phoenix and Los Angeles. The town's heyday came in the 1940s-80s, when Kaiser Steel's Eagle Mountain iron mine supported a population of more than 4,000 and the small enclave of local businesses that lined Ragsdale Road to serve them.

Lake Tamarisk, with about 150 mobile home spaces and a nine-hole golf course, was built to provide a slightly more upscale community for employees. Homes now sell in the range of $23,000-$71,000, and the county runs the clubhouse as part of a local community services area.

Since the mine closed in early 1980s, the town has bled people and businesses, the desert equivalent of a Rust Belt community. The Desert Center Café, once open 24 hours a day, year-round, closed three years ago, said Suzanne Ragsdale, one of the remaining Ragsdale clan, who now lives in Northern California.

The town still has its own school district, the smallest in the state, with fewer than 20 students in the K-8 Eagle Mountain School. High school students are bused to Palo Verde High School in Blythe.

The public library, open 2½ days a week, shares cramped quarters with an outpost of the Riverside County Fire Department. The clubhouse swimming pool, empty on a recent visit, is open part-time a few days a week during the summer.

A small convenience store, McGoo's, is the town's sole surviving bit of retail, carrying mostly beer, sodas and snacks for the visitors coming through town on Route 177 on their way to Lake Havasu in Arizona or Laughlin in Nevada.

Dawn Rettagliata said community groups have asked to renovate the old market as a food bank and to use another storefront as an office for the Chamber of Commerce, at no cost to the Ragsdale family. Both requests have been turned down, she said.

Kaiser Ventures, which owns the now-closed Eagle Mountain iron mine, has been equally intransigent.

The company's efforts to transform the mine's open pits into a massive landfill, receiving thousands of tons of garbage shipped from Los Angeles, triggered a decades-long court battle that ended in 2011 when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Kaiser's last appeal.

Even though the company's investors voted last year to dissolve the firm and liquidate all its assets, no sales have been announced to date.

For at least the past five years, Santa Monica-based Eagle Crest Energy Corp. has been trying to win federal and state approvals for an equally quixotic scheme to turn the mine into a giant pumped-storage hydro-electric project, filling its pits with water and building a power plant 1,400 feet underground.

Even if the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission were to approve the project, Kaiser has so far refused to sell the mine to Eagle Crest on any terms.

Although her ongoing family differences over the handling of the land have stalled any development in Desert Center, Suzanne Ragsdale would still like to see the town revived with its market, café, and gas station reopened.

The family has also responded to the recent theft of the Kaiser plaque and other vandalism by beefing up security, she said.

"We have cameras; we have patrol guards," she said. "It looks like a ghost town, but it's not. It's being watched really well."

Kaiser Permanente is replacing the plaque, but moving it to Chiriaco Summit, about 19 miles west of the Desert Center, said Margit Chiriaco Rusche, whose family arrived in the desert shortly after the Ragsdales and started building their competing gas station and small café.

The Summit has now taken over from Desert Center as the main midpoint stop for drivers heading east from the Coachella Valley toward Arizona. A small but steady stream of visitors also stop in to see the Patton Museum, commemorating Gen. George Patton's World War II Desert Training Center, used to train troops for combat in North Africa.

Since 2011, yearly franchise fees from the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight solar project six miles north of town have poured more than $2.4 million into Riverside County coffers, but it is only recently that any of the money has reached Desert Center.

About half the money was used to defend a legal challenge to the county's solar fee, a $150-per-acre fee charged annually to all projects of 20 megawatts or more needing any kind of county permit. The board originally established the fee at $450 per acre but after more than a year of litigation, settled the case, brought by two solar industry trade groups, by reducing it to $150.

First Solar and the county negotiated Desert Sunlight's yearly franchise fee of $600,000, with annual increases linked to the consumer price index, before the original $450-per-acre fee was established.

The county is now sitting on $1,035,345.60 from the fees, set aside in a special revenue fund, about half of which is earmarked as community benefit money to be spent in the east county communities most affected by solar development.

The board voted last year to set aside $400,000 of the money for badly needed repairs to the roof, air conditioning system and parking lot at the Lake Tamarisk clubhouse, the town's defacto community center.

The work has only recently begun, and at least one of the planned improvements, a new generator to provide the community with backup power in emergencies, was purchased instead out of a $350,000 community fund established by Desert Sunlight.

That money and a yearly holiday collection from employees at the project have been the sole source of extra funds for community projects in the town over the past few years, paying for playground equipment and a new Wii game station for the clubhouse.

The only other spending from the franchise fee the board has approved is $195,000 to cover staff expenses for permitting large-scale projects in the east county, about $42,475 of which has actually been spent, according to an accounting report from county officials.

Town holds onto some residents

At least one thing that has kept Donna and Larry Charpied in Desert Center for the past 32 years is the view from their front porch — a panorama of stark mountain ridge lines, backed up on a recent spring morning by an endless blue sky. You can practically breathe in the sense of peace and open space.

"I like the night. It's the only time it looks like it used to," said Donna Charpied. "Sometimes I'm out here 'til 4 a.m. enjoying the solitude."

The Charpieds' 10 acres of land, where they have farmed jojoba since the 1980s, is due north of the Desert Sunlight solar farm, and the change in the view Donna refers to is the still spreading expanse of solar panels covering thousands of acres of pristine open desert.

The Charpieds are not alone in thinking Desert Center's best chance for survival is to build on its unique, isolated beauty.

Matt Johnson and Renee Castor, another longtime resident who works at the Chuckwalla Valley Raceway, both would like to see Desert Center promote itself as a gateway community to Joshua Tree National Park, northwest of the town, and other wilderness sites in the area.

An old access road to the park could be reopened, they said. Eagle Mountain was originally a part of Joshua Tree, before Kaiser acquired mining rights, and Donna Charpied would like it returned to the park and turned into a historic site.

"I've always seen a future for Desert Center," Castor said. "My own family has hiked over Chuckwalla to Corn Springs," a desert oasis with stones covered with tribal petroglyphs.

Attrition is thinning the town's already tiny permanent population. In recent months, Desert Center lost two longtime residents, Jan Roberts, who had worked as the site manager of the Eagle Mountain mine and was president of the school board, and Connie Ottinger, the school's secretary.

Rettagliata and her husband, Dan, could soon become snowbirds rather than full-timers due to health problems that have made staying in town during summer increasingly uncomfortable for her.

With no jobs and little to do, the town's handful of teenagers also are unlikely to stay.

Niki Castor, 18, who is Renee Castor's niece, currently works part-time at McGoo's but hopes to soon head to Phoenix for school and a job.

"There's nothing to do here," she said.

Also behind the counter at McGoo's, Julie Smiley, 51, is another longtime resident who left Desert Center for school, then married and lived for a time in Borrego Springs. She returned after her husband's death because she owned a home here.

"It's in your soul," she said. "It feels like home."

THE KAISER CONNECTION:

The dusty storefronts of Desert Center today seem an unlikely spot for the birthplace of modern managed health care.

But at the height of the Depression in 1933, a young doctor named Sidney Garfield opened a small clinic here to care for the thousands of workers building the Colorado River aqueduct east of the town.

The men came to the clinic, called Contractors General Hospital, and would promise to pay Garfield later, but often ended up going to Blythe and drinking their paychecks. Within a year, Garfield and his clinic were broke.

Harold Hatch, an engineer turned insurance agent, came up with the idea of deducting 5 cents a week from the workers' salaries to pay Garfield in advance for their health care in case of an on-the-job accident or injury. Off-the-job health coverage cost another nickel, as did adding wives and children to the plan.

The system worked so well that industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, whose company had worked on the section of the aqueduct closest to Desert Center, asked Garfield to provide a similar health care plan for workers at the Grand Coulee Dam and, during World War II, at his shipyards in Richmond.

Kaiser Permanente was established on Oct. 1, 1945. A brass plaque near the Desert Center Post Office, commemorating the town's role in Kaiser's history, was recently stolen.

Kaiser is replacing the plaque and moving it 19 miles west to Chiriaco Summit.