Sam Friedman and Ben Toffey and their company, Belfield Landing, Ltd, have applied with San Bernardino county for land use permits to construct a hotel on the 5.7-acre property located on Belfield Boulevard north of Reche Road in Landers.
Both Friedman and Toffey represent themselves as Landers residents, in their parlance, Landroids.
They say the hotel they are proposing will be called “The Landing.”
Though they maintain The Landing will be an upscale hotel, they said they do not want to impact the town any further than constructing and operating the hotel, which they insist will not disturb the rustic nature of Landers.
“This won’t change Landers at all,” Friedman said.
Their project will consist of a 35-room hotel, a lodge, an observatory, a bar, restaurant and market contained on the property. The project is to replicate, to some degree, the glory days of Landers, where George’s Sky Room, a hotel had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s before it fell into disrepair and disuse in the 1970s.
The bar, restaurant and market will provide conveniences for the town’s exisiting residents, according to Toffey. The major advantage will be that Landers residents will no longer need to sojourn to Yucca Valley or Joshua tree to buy groceries, he said.
A primary feature/attraction of the hotel is an onsen — a facility that is best described as a community spa popular in Japan.
When pressed, Toffey said it was not right to think of the onsen as “a typical American private spa. Those have separate treatment rooms. This will be communal.”
The other elements that will make the hotel a success already exists, according to Friedman, that being, he said, “Landers’ natural desert beauty and the dark skies at night where you can see the stars.”
That is what will bring outsiders from Los Angeles and elsewhere to the hotel and lodge, Friedman said.
The other component that will lead to the project’s success is its appeal to locals.
Friedman and Toffey envisage the lodge as “a gathering space for the community.”
Both project proponents said they were open to suggestions from the Landers community as to what features might be added to the project.
On the county’s land use map, the property is currently zoned for commercial use. A slight tweaking of the county code will be need to develop an hotel on the property.
They are in discussions now with the Bighorn-Desert Water Agency to construct a pipeline that would supply water to the project.
Some were skeptical about that aspect of the project, as the cost of the utility infrastructure will be quite expensive. Belfield Landing, Ltd will have to pay the entirety of the cost to put that infrastructure in place, and will recoup portions of that initial investment as other developers of property in the area tap into the pipeline. But that return on their investment will come to Friedman and Toffey only when further development occurs. Thus, the assurance given by Friedman that the project won’t entail any change to Landers could not possibly be true, some Landers residents said.
There were other discrepancies in Friedman’s and Toffey’s story. While they seem intent to go forward with the project and are undaunted by the multi-million dollar expense of bringing in utilities, they simultaneously want to skimp on the project’s environmental certification. They are hoping to get a mitigated negative declaration from the board of supervisors for the project. A negative declaration is the least exacting from of environmental certification there is, one which relies on a finding by the governmental entity with land use authority that there are no negative environmental impacts of the project that will not be offset or mitigated by measures specified in the project’s conditions of approval. A full blown environmental impact report for a project is far more expensive and and environmental study can be quite expensive as well, as they will list out all of the impacts of a project and include the alternatives to the project and the mitigation measures, some of which can be extremely involved and expensive, needed for the project to be permitted. If Friedman and Toffey do not have the funds necessary to carry out an exacting environmental report, some have said, it is doubtful they have the money to construct water lines, sewer lines and pipes, build a sewage treatment facility and establish miles and miles of electrical lines to service the project.
Friedman and Toffey have hired a Los Angeles-based consultant, Jessica Krushner, who is the CEO and managing principal of Los Angeles based Impact Sciences. Krushner is compiling a compendium of the impacts the project will have and the proposed mitigations of those impacts, which they hope they can hand off to the board of supervisors and have them sign off on without any further adoabout the California Environmental Quality Act.
Friedman and Toffey are further pinning their hopes for the project on another consultant, West of West Studio’s Jon Rieke, who they hope can convince public health and county officials that the sewage and wastewater issues that will eventuate from a hotel and the other features of the project can be handled by a seepage pit and septic systems rather than requiring a sewer system. Rieke is also dealing with the Bighorn Desert View Water Agency in the effort to obtain access to water.
Other locals were troubled by Friedman’s and Toffey’s inability to provide specifics with regard to pricing and other details of the project’s hotel and commercial components upon completion.
Some questioned Firedman’s and Toffey’s claims that they currently live in Landers, saying their grandiose plans for a hotel in an area they want to preserve as it is that has homeless people living in their cars does not comport with reality.
“Whatever they say, there not from around here,” is how one Landers resident put it.
In addition to the long-term advantages the hotel and its accompanying commercial features will offer, according to Friedman and Toffey, the community will experience the temporary benefit of employment opportunities for local construction workers who will be hired to work on the project, a financial shot-in-the-arm for Landers, they said.
Some Landers residents are in support of the project. Others are not.
Friedman and Toffey want to get local endorsements of their plans when the project goes before the board of supervisors, who will be called upon to sign off on the variance and conditional use permit for the project if it is go ahead. Local support may not be all that important, as the board of supervisors has overridden opposition to other projects proposed at relatively remote desert locations in recent years. In this regard, Friedman and Toffey will very likely see the project approved if they indeed construct the utility infrastructure that will be needed for the hotel, simultaneously creating something that can be tapped into to provide utilities to other projects to be undertaken locally that cannot now be accommodated because of the lack of existing utilities.
The project will begin construction in mid-to-late 2026 and be completed by late 2027, if the infrastructure, utilities and other off-site improvements required can be lined up.