The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians plans to build a 10,000-seat arena in the heart of Palm Springs for ice hockey and live entertainment.

The new facility will be north of the tribe’s downtown casino and two blocks from the desert city’s main drag, according to a press release from the tribe.

The project will be on 16 acres of tribal land between East Alejo Road on the north; East Amado Road on the south; Calle El Segundo on the east; and Calle Encilia on the west.

The tribe has signed some big names in the sports and entertainment industries on the project, which it expects to start early in 2020 and complete by the fall of 2021.

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It is partnering with the Oak View Group, a global sports venue development company whose other projects include building a $300 million basketball arena for the University of Texas Longhorns.

Other partners include Live Nation Entertainment and NHL Seattle, which hopes to win approval for an American Hockey League franchise team to play in the desert.

Tribal Chairman Jeff L. Grubbe said in a phone interview that the partnership was more than a year in the works and came about because Oak View Group was looking for a home for the expansion team. The Coachella Valley’s large number of winter residents from Canada made it a natural fit.

“Partnering with OVG gave us an opportunity to diversify. This partnership is going to have a positive ripple effect throughout Palm Springs and even the Coachella Valley because of the jobs and tourism.”

Tim Leiweke, chief executive officer of OVG, said in a separate interview that hockey in the arena could attract hockey fans from the Northwest.

“We expect there will be an awful lot of activity. Alaska Airlines has Palm Springs as one of its major growth hubs, so it just makes all the sense in the world … This will drive the local economy. We will be very focused on booking room nights and golf courses and restaurants and making this a real juggernaut for the business community in Palm Springs.”

Leiweke, who described himself as a 20-year visitor to Palm Springs, has experience to back up his claims. He was president of Anschutz Entertainment Group when it built Staples Center in Los Angeles in the late 1990s. AEG is also the parent company of Goldenvoice, which puts on the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and Stagecoach Country Music Festival in nearby Indio.

“It’s perfect,” he said of the Palm Springs location. “We couldn’t be more bullish on the marketplace and excited to be part of it.

Leiweke said the arena will be partnering with big events in the valley such as the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells.

As a concert venue, the arena will supplement The Show, the tribe’s concert venue in its Rancho Mirage casino. The Show books headliners such as Styx and J Balvin to the desert. It seats 2,000 people, and the arena would bring in acts that play larger venues.

“This allows us to do so much more at a bigger level,” Grubbe said.

The arena would be the largest indoor venue between the Arizona border and the Toyota Arena in Ontario, which can seat 11,000.

The tribe was a major presence in Palm Springs even before Las Vegas-style gambling became legal. It ran a hotel and spa on the site of a natural hot spring on the corner of Indian Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way. In the 1990s, it opened a casino with slot machines in a tent adjoining the hotel, and later replaced it with the Spa Resort Casino across the street.

In 2001, the tribe built the Agua Caliente Casino Resort in Rancho Mirage, which became its flagship. It closed and later bulldozed the Palm Springs hotel and spa in 2014 and is building a cultural center on the land.

In February it renamed the Spa Resort Casino the Agua Caliente Casino Palm Springs.

The tribe has announced a third casino in Cathedral City and expects to break ground on it soon, according to the news release.

Grubbe said the tribe has no plans to open a new hotel in Palm Springs. But he said there are enough lodgings and restaurants surrounding the site of the arena to supply it with customers and that the city is a good place for the tribe to me.

“There are a lot of good things going into downtown Palm Springs, businesses, redevelopment. The City Council has been doing a good job of bringing Palm Springs back to relevance. A lot of developments and opportunities have gone down valley, but recently things are coming back. And this arena is a big part of that.”