Segundo v. City of Rancho Mirage

• Decision Date: 02 April 1987
• Citation: 813 F.2d 1387
• Parties: Juan SEGUNDO, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF RANCHO MIRAGE, a municipal corporation, Defendant-Appellee. Jean Chormicle KAPP, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF CATHEDRAL CITY, CALIFORNIA, et al., Defendants-Appellees. 85-6592.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

Page 1387

813 F.2d 1387

Juan SEGUNDO, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF RANCHO MIRAGE, a municipal corporation, Defendant-Appellee.

Jean Chormicle KAPP, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF CATHEDRAL CITY, CALIFORNIA, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

85-6592.

United States Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted Jan. 7, 1987.

Decided April 2, 1987.

Richard Cross, Riverside, Cal., George Forman, Berkeley, Cal., for plaintiffs-appellants.

Virginia R. Pesola, Los Angeles, Cal., for defendant-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

Before KENNEDY and POOLE, Circuit Judges, and LOVELL, ^* District Judge.

LOVELL, District Judge:

Appellants, members of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and their non-Indian lessee, appeal an adverse judgment by the District Court upholding rent control ordinances enacted by the Appellee cities of Rancho Mirage and Cathedral City and applied to allotted lands of the Indian Appellants. The central issue on appeal is whether local rent control ordinances may be applied to a mobile home park operated by a non-Indian entity on Indian land held in trust by the United States.

FACTS

Appellants are Indian allottees of several parcels of land located within the Agua Caliente Reservation, situated near Palm Springs, California. In 1968, with approval of the Secretary of the Interior, Appellants entered into a 65-year lease with Palm Springs Mobile Country Club ¹ for the construction and operation of a mobile home park on the allotments. Now known as De Anza Palm Springs Mobile Country Club, the park lies partially within the limits of Rancho Mirage and partially within the limits of Cathedral City.

Under the lease, De Anza pays Appellant allottees a guaranteed minimum annual rental plus 15% of the gross receipts from the subleasing of mobile home spaces plus On May 4, 1982, the City of Rancho Mirage enacted a local ordinance establishing a Mobile Home Fair Practices Commission and imposing maximum rent increase limits upon all mobile home parks located within the City. A similar ordinance was approved by Cathedral City on March 18, 1983. The two ordinances are substantially identical and, in pertinent part, limit annual rent increases in mobile home parks to 75 percent of the increase in the applicable Consumer Price Index for the year preceding the rent increase. Park owners may apply to the respective Commissions for a "hardship" increase.

a percentage of receipts from other business activities operated on the premises.

Following Appellees' attempts to enforce the ordinances against De Anza, Appellants filed complaints for declaratory and injunctive relief and for monetary damages, seeking a ruling that the subject ordinances could not be applied to allotted lands held in trust by the United States, and that the cities be permanently enjoined from attempting to enforce the ordinances against the allottees and their lessee De Anza. After a consolidated bench trial, the District Court entered findings of fact and conclusions of law, finding the ordinances to be valid exercises of the cities' police powers, regulating only relations between non-Indians and having no significant impact on the allottees.

Appellants contend that the District Court erred in failing to find invalid the application of the ordinances to the De Anza park, in failing to find a violation of 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983, in ruling that the trust patents under which the allottees hold their land would expire in October 1986, and in relying solely upon the testimony of appellees' single expert witness in reaching its determination.

DISCUSSION

The dispositive issue in this case is whether the ordinances are valid under either Public Law 280 ² or federal common law.

A. Jurisdiction and Standard of Review

Federal subject matter jurisdiction is present pursuant to 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1331. The issue, the extent to which federal law divests the cities of the power to exercise jurisdiction over non-Indians operating an enterprise on Indian land, is a sufficient basis for federal question jurisdiction. See Kimball v. Callahan, 493 F.2d 564, 565 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 1019, 95 S.Ct. 491, 42 L.Ed.2d 292 (1974). See also Cardin v. De La Cruz, 671 F.2d 363, 365 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 967, 103 S.Ct. 293, 74 L.Ed.2d 277 (1982). The fact that these cases were brought by individual tribal members rather than by the Tribe itself is irrelevant to the existence of federal jurisdiction. See Agua Caliente Band of Mission Indians v. County of Riverside, 442 F.2d 1184, 1185 (9th Cir.1971), cert. denied, 405 U.S. 933, 92 S.Ct. 930, 30 L.Ed.2d 809 (1972); Babbitt Ford, Inc. v. Navajo Indian Tribe, 710 F.2d 587, 594 (9th Cir.1983), cert. denied, 466 U.S. 926, 104 S.Ct. 1707, 80 L.Ed.2d 180 (1984).

Jurisdiction rests with this court pursuant to 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1291.

This court reviews a denial of injunctive relief for abuse of discretion. The district court will be reversed only if its decision was based on an erroneous legal standard or on clearly erroneous findings of fact. SEC v. Goldfield Deep Mines Co., 758 F.2d 459, 465 (9th Cir.1985); Bank of America National Trust & Savings Assn. v. Summerland County Water District, 767 F.2d 544, 547-48 (9th Cir.1985).

B. Expiration of the Trust Patents

The District Court ruled that the trust patents under which the allottees hold their lands would expire on October 11, 1986; thus, the court reasoned, once the patents expired and the allottees became subject to all laws of the State of California, the rent control ordinances would apply to the De Anza mobile home park regardless of appellants' status as tribal members. 25 U.S.C. Sec. 349.

The trust patents were issued October 12, 1961, for a period of 25 years. See 25 U.S.C. Sec. 348. The District Court failed to recognize, however, that the Secretary of the Interior, on July 20, 1983, extended the trust period to January 1, 1989. 25 C.F.R. app. 1 (1986) (text at 48 Fed.Reg. 34,026 (1983)). ³ The trust status clearly having been extended, the District Court's ruling was in error.

C. Public Law 280

Under Public Law 280 (P.L. 280), ⁴ state laws "of general application" were extended into Indian Country, to be applied with "the same force and effect ... as they have elsewhere within the State." Although its language is broad, P.L. 280 has been narrowly interpreted to confer state jurisdiction over private civil litigation involving reservation Indians, and does not constitute a grant of general civil regulatory authority. Bryan v. Itasca County, 426 U.S. 373, 96 S.Ct. 2102, 48 L.Ed.2d 710 (1976); Fort Mojave Tribe v. County of San Bernardino, 543 F.2d 1253, 1257 (9th Cir.1976), cert. denied, 430 U.S. 983, 97 S.Ct. 1678, 52 L.Ed.2d 377 (1977).

This court has refused to extend P.L. 280 jurisdiction to local governments. Santa Rosa Band of Indians v. Kings County, 532 F.2d 655, 661 (9th Cir.1975), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 1038, 97 S.Ct. 731, 50 L.Ed.2d 748 (1977). Accord United States v. County of Humboldt, 615 F.2d 1260 (9th Cir.1980). We held in Santa Rosa that Congress' apparent intent in enacting P.L. 280 was to "make the tribal government over the reservation more or less the equivalent of a county or local government in other areas within the state, empowered ... to regulate matters of local concern within the area of its jurisdiction." Santa Rosa, 532 F.2d at 663 (emphasis added). On this basis, and in view of the present federal policy to foster tribal self-government and economic self-development, we concluded that P.L. 280 subjected Indian Country to only the civil laws of the state, and not to local regulation. Id. at 661, 664.

Under Santa Rosa and Bryan, it is clear that P.L. 280 cannot serve as the jurisdictional basis for application of the subject ordinances within Indian country.

D. Federal Common Law

In the development of federal Indian law, the Supreme Court long ago departed from the "view that 'the laws of [a State] can have no force' within reservation boundaries." See White Mountain Apache Tribe v. Bracker, 448 U.S. 136, 141, 100 S.Ct. 2578, 65 L.Ed.2d 665 (1980) (quoting Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515, 560, 8 L.Ed. 483 (1832)). Nevertheless, the Court continues to recognize inherent "attributes of sovereignty [in Indian tribes] over both their members and their territory." 448 U.S. at 142, 100 S.Ct. at 2583; see also New Mexico v. Mescalero Apache Tribe, 462 U.S. 324, 332, 103 S.Ct. 2378, 2385, 76 L.Ed.2d 611 (1983).

State laws may be applied to Indian reservations unless such application would impair a right granted or reserved by federal law or would infringe upon the right of reservation Indians to make their own laws and be ruled by them. Rice v. Rehner, 463 U.S. 713, 718, 103 S.Ct. 3291, 77 L.Ed.2d 961 (1983). These principles constitute two independent but related barriers to the exercise of state jurisdiction, since either can be a sufficient basis for holding state law inapplicable. Bracker, 448 U.S. at 143, 100 S.Ct. at 2583. The trend has been to rely more on federal preemption, using notions of Indian self-government as a " 'backdrop' against which any assertion of state authority must be assessed." Mescalero Apache, 462 U.S. at 334, 103 S.Ct. at 2386 (quoting Bracker, 448 U.S. at 143, 100 S.Ct. at 2583).

State law is generally inapplicable when concerned solely with on-reservation conduct involving Indians. See Bracker, 448 U.S. at 144, 100 S.Ct. at 2584; Santa Rosa, 532 F.2d at 658. Where the State asserts authority over the conduct of non-Indians engaging in activity on the reservation, the court must undertake

a particularized inquiry into the nature of the state, federal, and tribal interests at stake, an inquiry designed to determine whether, in the specific context, the exercise of state authority would violate federal law.

Bracker, 448 U.S. at 145, 100 S.Ct. at 2584.

Appellants...