City Council - Regular Meeting

l special City Council meeting of November 24th, 2025 to order. May you I have you please stand if you're able to, and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, to the Republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Are you extremely thirsty tonight? You got. I'm seeing a. All right. Thank you. I acknowledge that the land we gather, live and work on today, currently known as the City of Palm Springs, is the original homelands of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the sovereign Band of Agua Caliente people have stewarded this land throughout the generations and continue to steward this land for all future generations. We honor and respect the many diverse indigenous peoples still connected to this land. City clerk, may we please have roll call? Let the record reflect that all members are present. We have public testimony for special meeting items only. This time has been set aside for the members of public to address City Council on these special meeting item agenda. Only two minutes are assigned. And first up we have Felina Daniels, our Dennis. Great. Good evening everyone. My name is Felina Daniels. I'm the founder of Palm Springs. Semantics. I am a full time resident. Long term, if the

City of Palm Springs and a small business owner and a former world Bank staffer. When I was working at the world Bank, I spent a lot of my career working on international economic development, as well as sustainability and stakeholder engagement. And I want to thank and applaud the City of Palm Springs, as well as everybody in the city, for this fantastic initiative, as well as our consultants, notwithstanding the fact that I'm highly interested in issues related to affordability, economic development in our city. However, over the last year, I didn't hear about the survey. I didn't hear about the survey. I didn't hear about the stakeholder engagement that was happening, that I heard about happening in the business community. And so I acknowledge and want to bring to the attention of the city Council that if that's the case, for me, that's probably the case for many, many, many other members of our community. So moving forward, I'd really love to be able to participate more in shaping the narratives and shaping the conversation so that we truly make a Palm Springs that is not only economically viable and strong, but that is truly equitable as well. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you. Madam Clerk. Do we have any other speakers? Yes, we have one more Kenny Cassidy. I expected a lot more people would be speaking tonight on this, but here we are. Good evening, mayor, council and staff. I'm Kenny Cassidy, as you know. Speaking tonight as a longtime Palm Springs resident and community stakeholder, many know me from tourism and vacation rental work, but I also served six years on the city's architectural advisory committee, reviewing projects that were often out of reach for working families. I strongly support the Economic Development

Strategic Plan. I believe it's forward looking, emphasizing diversification into technology, sustainability and year round economic activity while keeping tourism our economic foundation front and center. One area I want to highlight is workforce housing. The challenge is clear we need to build more affordable homes. Recent rental projects are a step forward, but we also need home ownership pathways for the people who keep our economy running. Nearby cities have more attainable homes for middle class families. Palm Springs, I feel, could create similar with smart incentives, partnerships and zoning tools. Homes that are purpose built for our workforce, helping workers put down roots, build equity and thrive. Here. Supporting workforce housing strengthens our year round economy and preserves the values that make Palm Springs special. Thank you for your leadership and the opportunity to comment. Thank you, Madam Clerk. I have no further speakers. Are you whispering tonight? Two two online. Two online. Alright. Who do we have first? Vander Brown. Yes. Sandra. Hi everyone. I believe you can probably hear me now. Thanks very much for the for the time and for facilitating an online visit. I'm a local hotel owner. I'm based in New York, but my family has a long history of of visiting Palm Springs and we're really excited as of last year to have made our our first our first acquisition in the city of Springs, where we've been

terrifically excited to work with the city to learn more about the community, including working with members of the council that are here tonight, as well as a local team of architects. Which the community will be familiar with. Over the last few months, we've learned a lot about the Tot incentive program that's been long standing in the city of Palm Springs, and understand that there is a discussion forthcoming about a proposed a renewal and some modifications to that plan. I think the two previous speakers said it well when they referred to the dialog that exists and has existed historically between the city of Palm Springs and its constituents, and I as a as a hopefully a very long term member of the community, just wanted to express my appreciation of the dialog that's occurred to date. The extremely the extremely forward thinking initiative on the Tot incentive not only to provide great construction jobs, but long term hotel jobs, and to help, frankly, incentivize the development of a hotel which strives not to charge $1,000 a night, but actually to be very much a staple for the local community as much as it is for for for tourists at a more affordable price point. Delivering on the on the promise of of service and hospitality. So excited to continue to participate in the dialog and really greatly appreciate everybody's involvement thus far. All right, Xander, thank you. Do we have Harry Pflueger? Harry and Michael are not available, but Philip is Philip is online. Yes. Philip Hodges. Oh, good. Can you hear me, guys? Good. Good afternoon. I

actually didn't think I was registering to speak, but if you are giving me the microphone, I will take it. I have only good things to say. I mean, I think this is fabulous. Wayne's team has done a really good job under, I think, sometimes difficult circumstances. The consultants, Adam and Uday have been incredible. I think this what they've produced isn't just sort of a generic consultant product like we're used to. It's very data driven. It's specific to Palm Springs. It's like they've they've done incredible work. The mayor and council member Bernstein, I know, have also put a lot of hours into this. So looking forward to the discussion because I think the council can now provide some sort of prioritization and buy in and follow through on this one thing, just to sort of riff on what others have said. Affordability is the thing that's going to connect this plan. I think it is included, I think, in but if we're going for growth, it's not going to succeed unless we can stabilize housing and affordability. I mean, new jobs for people who can't afford to live here is not a win. New jobs for Bay area transplants like me is not really a win either. The real win is if young family in Palm Springs today can build a career here, can afford to stay here, can sort of see a future for their kids here. So the press is talking about this mostly as diversifying revenue. I think it's bigger than that. I think I think the council can make it about sort of sustainable, equitable growth, like your first speaker said, and assuring the people who make this city work can afford to live here. So I think well done all round. I'm really excited to hear this conversation, and thank you for letting me speak, even though I didn't know I was

going to thank you. Okay. And Harry and Michael are not on. They're not okay. Very good. Then one other, one other speaker just came in. Larry Yard. Cheever. Larry. Larry. The next one over the next one. The one over. Wrong one. Sir. Okay. Hi. My name is Larry Yard Cheever. I'm a full time resident here in Palm Springs. I'm also very actively involved in Modernism Week and volunteer my home for public tours. I want to commend the city on how well the streets are being paved and maintained, and it looks great. The problem that we have that a lot of cities in California have is there's a lot of wet paint that is being dumped, residential wet paint, and it's being dumped by individual independent painters and they tend to get away with it. I know it's illegal. It's a big fine if they're caught, but it only takes a few seconds to dump paint. I've got examples that I've put together for you guys to take a look at, but I'm the type of person that doesn't just like to complain about something. I have some ideas on how we can create some more awareness of of what this is, because when I first saw it, I thought, oh, somebody must have bought a five gallon can of paint and it fell out of the back of their truck. Now they get dumped. And the paint companies around here, like Sherwin-Williams and Vista, they take paint back for free. All they have to do is just bring it back. But it's a lot easier to just dump it on the streets. So I wanted to bring that up and let you know that not only do I have some ideas, but I'd be

willing to volunteer some of my time as well to address that in our city. Excellent. Thank you and thank you for the emails to the city clerk and grab it. Thank you. Okay, now is that wrap us up. No further speakers. Okay. At this time, I invite the city attorney to give us a report on closed session. Yes. Honorable mayor, members of the city council, members of the public. The city council met in closed session earlier this evening to discuss the items that are listed on the agenda, and there was no reportable action. Thank you. Beautiful. Next item is item three A, which is the Economic Development Strategic Framework and in Hotel Incentive program overview. May we have a staff report please. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council members, while Wayne is coming up to the podium, I just want to take a quick second to thank the council members for dedicating a specific meeting to this topic. It's an important topic. We probably wouldn't have done it justice if we tried to talk about it late into the night, at the late at the last meeting, so this is good. Wayne Olson is our chief economic development officer who's at the podium, and he has his consultants here who are going to be giving the presentation. They put a lot of work into this. And as you're going to hear, we want to kind of do two parts. Primarily we're going to spend a good bit of time going through the entire report and the presentation we'd like. And certainly we want to invite lots of questions and discussion from the council members. And we'd like a lot of this to be really focused on this economic development framework, which is really important to help guide us going forward, knowing that there's been discussion about economic development incentives recently on a lot of different things. I

have asked Wayne and his team to just give us a little. Scope of some initial thinking we are doing about incentive programs is kind of part two of this presentation. It won't. It's not intended to be the the the longest piece of the of the work that we're doing. But we'd like to share some initial thoughts with you. Just get some feedback from you to help us as we continue to develop the plan a little further. So with that, I will turn the discussion over to Wayne for commentary and introductions. Thank you. We have a single page, 3031 from CBL. Correct. Is that to replace what's in the staff? That's to replace what's in the staff report. There was a technical error. And by that I mean my error of the report. So that replaces the page that's indicated at the bottom in your packet. C4 was repeated twice in the table in the new sheet that you have before you. That includes C5. So that should replace the information in your current packet. And we can walk you through that once we get to that point. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Mr. mayor, again I'm Wayne Olson, chief economic development officer for the City of Palm Springs. I was hired in January of 2024 to engage and expand on the work that staff had already done on economic development. It became quickly understandable to me that there was a lot of pent up demand for the services of economic development, both myself and Dean Grubel. I'm not quite sure how a staff member was able to do this. Half time we replaced him with two people, and we're still trying to keep up with all the great work that we're doing. By about mid-year, it was clear to me that we needed a plan or a framework, and the reason for that is threefold. I think one is alignment, both internally and externally as a community,

in both internally, as a department, aligning our work product and our goals. Second is focus. This is a town of many, many ideas. All great, but with the current staffing, we can only attach ourselves to so many ideas and thoughts moving forward. So focus is another element. The third is prioritization. The budget for economic development is understandably where it's at for the biannual budget, but we do need prioritization to occur. There are a lot of elements in the plan, and Uday and Adam are going to be going through those shortly. But that was the other element that I felt necessary for the plan. So we sent an RFP and the council approved civil Economics, who are here tonight, Uday Rob and Adam Fowler. They are principals and owners of civil economics, and they'll give a brief background of themselves in short order. So tonight, the agenda on the screen, they'll provide an overview. And then defining the problem. We wanted a pragmatic understanding of the real situation in the community and what we're facing in the future. Well, I wanted it to be data driven. So I asked the consultants, please create an appendices of data that you can refer to going forward. And that is what drives a lot of the outcomes that they're proposing tonight. The initiative's principles and the action items. Then we're going to understand some of the challenges, some of the hurdles that are coming towards us, both systemic and temporal. So those that are systemic, how do we fix that long term? And some that are temporary, short term issues related both to the economy and also community goals, then a framework. And you know, we initially started with a strategic plan. I asked Adam and Uday to change this to a framework. Why? I think that a framework allows for

mutability. It changes. Framework is a structure around which you can hang initiatives and programs and projects. And so you have a good bones, so to speak, of something moving forward over the next five, ten and 20 years. So and then we're going to have some next steps. And then following the conversation and discussion we'll visit the second topic. But I'm going to introduce you today and Adam to come up and introduce themselves and their firm. And we'll start the slides. To get the spotlight. I think you hold that down. All right. Okay. Hold the top down for the and I can. And this advances okay. Perfect. Good evening. It's great to see everyone again. Thank you for carving out a full hour to talk through this. It's been a lot of work. We've had a lot of conversations, done a lot of data analysis, and super excited to present what we've come up with here for conversation tonight. I'm Adam Fowler, this is my partner today. He will be taking the second half before we open up for dialog. I'm going to lay the groundwork a little bit. When you talk about the economy, that is everything and anything or nothing at all. And so trying to put some parameters around exactly what we mean and how to operationalize it with regard to a strategic plan is often easier than it sounds. We're going to talk through a little bit of that tonight. I think it's important we work with cities, counties, jurisdictions across the state of California and really across the southwest. I think it's important to kind of ground this conversation in what makes a city prosperous. A city

is generally prosperous when it creates value for the people who live, work, invest and create there. When those people can see a future, their residents generally think about success in terms of the ability to build stable lives. Businesses think about being able to grow with confidence, and the community is able to attract talent, creativity and investment not just today, but over time. So you can see here in the first slide, we've bucketed a little bit. Generally, what makes a city prosperous is that housing is affordable and accessible, that services and infrastructure are reliable. It's a safe, welcoming and engaging place to both do business. It has engaging public spaces. It has opportunities to learn, work, create and connect. And finally, it has a sense of belonging and a shared identity for the business community. Predictable and transparent processes are really important. Anybody follows the national news today, that exactly is what is continually being reinforced when policy changes day in and day out. The ability to be predictable and transparent is just really important for business planning. It's important to have access to talent, consumers and affordable space. Supportive networks and partnerships. There's a lot of literature on when smart people get together. They're the agglomeration. Economy is what it's called. It's really important because there are unexpected spillovers. When you have people that are creative, doing interesting things across sectors, in a space, in a town, in a place together, you see really amazing innovation. Finally, confidence that investment will be welcomed is really important. And finally a stable year round market. So most industry sectors, whether they're retail, hospitality, manufacturing, really think

about cash flow in a in a 12 month cycle. And so that's important to understand. Why does it matter? I would say this slide is almost even more important for municipalities in California. Economic development. What is it. It's the work of shaping the local economy, making sure you're attracting and supporting your businesses, promoting job growth, strengthening key industries and building the conditions, making sure the conditions that allow for residents and communities to thrive downstream. This does touch most everything that you do week in and week out from where you sit. So this is part and parcel of stable revenue streams to maintain things like parks, safety, infrastructure, community services. If we grow, you see things like a stronger economy that supports local businesses and attracts new investment. This is important because oftentimes when communities are kind of ossified or have really put up the boundaries against growth, it doesn't allow for new and diverse folks to break in. So even during periods of disruption, that's actually the time when you see a lot of different people from different backgrounds breaking into an industry sector or a business space. So when something, you know, large conglomerates, it's often very hard for them to grab the will of the ship and turn in real time to market conditions. And that's what's kind of cool, is that you're often able to see entrepreneurs, people from diverse backgrounds, seize that opportunity, whether that's through a startup or a small business. If you don't, this is a California story. Almost none of this story on the don't side is necessarily a Palm Springs story. It's a function of how municipalities have to fund themselves. In California, we could do a whole six week series on that. It's

very complicated. There's a long history of decisions that have been made at the state and other levels, not the municipality level, that really dictate that. If if we don't. The other thing is business investment. Look elsewhere. We've seen that even in other industry sectors here in California, we thought were ours for now and forever, if you pay attention to the motion picture industry, that's an industry where we got a little complacent as a state and said, that's ours. It's always going to be here. Until it wasn't until other jurisdictions began to really think about it systematically and put policies in place to poach that away from us. And finally, economic stagnation ultimately deepens inequality and limits mobility. The way I like to think about this in the short for shorthand is my economics is, you know, when economies are locked in place, when there's not growth, people are battling and throwing elbows to carve up that pie. And if the pie is a fixed pie, the people with the sharpest elbows are the people that already have existing power. So when you begin to think about equity and equality, growth is really important because if you're just keeping the pie the same size, the existing strong players are often the ones that are able to win that battle easier than folks that aren't. So it is a positive cycle when we're talking about growing the economic base that feeds into ultimately increased tax revenue. So when folks send you an email or come to give public comment about fountains in the park or all the other things, that is 100% related, and we're going to talk a little bit about your business activity of certain types. That's happening. City services can either stay the way they are or expand. Right. We know that talent is expensive in whatever department, and being able to invest in those city services over time is really important. And finally, once city services,

things like that, the economic base is growing. When a snowball is rolling downhill, it really attracts investment and attention, attracts top tier talent down the road. So for this project, I do want to talk about a number of existing plans. You're a city with lots of documents and plans. There's a lot of these documents that actually talk about the framework tonight. I'm not going to read through all these, but I do think it's important to flag the general plan and its updates, the current zoning audit you have going on, a number of city council staff reports. We've looked at parking evaluation for downtown. We've looked at a number of reports around the airport, as well as a number of the reports that have been done around the convention center. All those and what they say do in impact and are folded in in a number of ways. A number of those reports, especially for the forward looking ones, do require growth. If you look in the airport, for example, that's an ambitious airport plan. The convention center is an ambitious convention center plan. There are a lot of pitfalls on all of that that if the economy isn't growing, I think that suddenly gets a lot harder. And that's I'm not breaking any news with that. That's in those reports. I just think it's worth flagging as we anchor the conversation tonight. We've also done a ton of trends analysis. So there is an appendix once this is finalized printed, I, I think this can live in a number of ways. Data should be accessible. I'm a very small d democratic person. I don't think any of this should be treated as confusing or a math equation that's. I find that very frustrating. So there's a ton of data series that in each of their own framing ways here, have been kind of organized and put together a number of them going back 20

years. So depending on what the metrics metric is, it may go back quite a long time to understand and capture some different business cycles. We have also talked to lots of people, not everyone I that's kind of always the challenge, but we have built a number of touch points. Again, a number of these findings are kind of summarized in their own standalone debt. Just because during that early meeting with city departments, they're like, please don't give us the Bible Bibles. Don't they sit on shelves? We have done our best to try to streamline some of that, but there is from the Resident stakeholder survey to the focus group discussions that has all been summarized across a number of of dimensions. So what are Palm Springs residents want? The $64,000 question. People love this city. That's what's amazing. You've got so many things I would call wind in your sails. People want to invest and make it better. They are very interested in the public realm, better services and more connection to each other. To deliver these improvements, we've made a number of recommendations, but one of them really being to shore up the sustained revenue sources over time that it takes to keep the lights on across all the things people have come to expect. Some things that I think are worth flagging as it relates to this conversation. Specifically, 87% of the residents in that 582 survey said public shade, public realm shading, especially in those shopping and commercial corridor districts, 84% flagging affordable housing. Folks have already talked to that, but that is so important as being upstream, whether that's an

entrepreneurial conversation, whether that's economic mobility for a workforce program, the if the types of people that are kept out are often the types of people that really produce innovation and build workforce pipelines over time. Health care access, this one for the Valley is going to continue to be a challenge, I think over the next couple of years. The analysis I've seen is reimbursements and things like that are going to continue to make that a challenge. That's a sector that's super important, local serving. But folks flag that health care access is important to them. Public safety, broadband reliability. Both of those are, I would say, very similar to other jurisdictions across the state. 79% flag public realm lighting, 73% a broad array of social services and 72% flagged public transportation. I want to flag on this next slide. This is me being a data visualization weirdo because I think better in infographics and pictures. But what makes up all the revenue that's going to pay for those things that people are interested in? And I always think it's really important to flag really those top three pieces of plumbing that go into that tax percentage on the right side, sales and use tax, transit occupancy tax or bed tax, and then finally property taxes. Each of those three are actually malleable to a certain extent under economic development frameworks and strategies. And in a lot of ways, when we're trying to operationalize different segments, we're coming back to think about how these three revenue sources will be impacted and impacted in a positive way. Sales and use tax. We do flag. The world of retail is changing. It's been changing for a

while. That's continuing to change transit, occupancy, bed taxes. That requires that your brand stay strong, which there's no reason not to think it will, but requires a continued finger on the pulse of what the market is saying in terms of people that have historically traveled here will continue to. And some of that on all of these is going to be outside of your control. You don't set trade policy. You don't set a whole set of policies that do impact your jurisdiction. And so some of that's going to be out of your hands. And finally, property taxes. The interesting thing here to flag is this when the fed increases interest rates, it does slow down the housing market in California. When that normal churn year in and year out of houses being sold isn't happening at the normal clip, that reassessment doesn't happen, right? So folks that have lived in a property for a long time end up staying there, or new, new homeowners don't come into town, that property isn't reassessed. So you actually see property taxes based on fed interest rates around mortgages, etc. be impacted. And again, this is universally across all the jurisdictions in California. So some of that is in your control. Some of it isn't with all data. How the hell do interpret it is really the category of, I think what you hired us for. So the world of transit occupancy tax by revenue type, you've got a time series here. These this is historically fluctuated in our research going back to the 1970s. So looking at materials, both reports and popular press coverage going back to the 70s, this has had some cyclical challenges over time, really beginning in the 70s. In the 90s, I think the headline was the fireworks have been ended around 4th of July because of budget

challenges. Over time, you've had some cyclical challenges that would be expected. This is certain type of consumer spending that does trend very systematically, depending on where household finances are. So it's not just completely random urine in year out. There are certain types of consumer decisions that are very systematic sales tax, especially during that summer period, is been kind of flat and total liabilities per capita. When we pegged that against nationally aggregated municipalities in California, municipalities are a little bit higher. You are a full service city in that sense, and you're not alone in those challenges. The additional problem, and this is more of a economics best practice. Economists don't like to have economies. The metaphor that is often used is a stool. We don't like stools that have less than three legs. Just because those legs can be kicked out very easily. So to the extent there's a flag around lack of diversification, it's not so much a normative statement. It's more about risk aversion. There's just lots of things. When you are really reliant on one specific sector where whether that's external shocks or other changes in consumer behavior can quickly unravel that historic activity. That gives us pause. So the idea is not that one sector is good or bad, but that you are you do better over time to have a stool that has more than 1 or 2 legs. If you can think about having additional legs on that stool, you can see there as well a number of those largest sectors. The average wage doesn't translate even with the full time hourly equivalent, translate into what we know and is presented in the appendix on housing costs. When we talk to folks,

tourism is really important. It's a great product here in this area, 82% of folks across industry sectors. So not just traditional tourism sectors, but across all the industry sectors, flag how important that is for their work and their activity and their strategic thinking as they invest. So I'm going to take a break here and throw in a little Trixie Mattel, because economics doesn't always have to be boring. I don't know if anyone watched, so I'm not going to call out my friend back East, but a friend back East said, wait, did you watch this show? And I didn't in real time I have now. I'm caught up. He's like, oh, they're talking about economic development in this discovery series. I said, oh, great, good. He's like, well, so I thought before it becomes a meme and a public planning or economic development textbook, I'm going to shout it out here. But I do think it's important to talk about how these things touch down most cities that we work with around the state and around the southwest would be head over heels to have a discovery TV show in their neighborhood. We work in the film and television industry. Mississippi is an example of where, you know, some home and garden TV shows have radically changed communities. I do think it's worth flagging here. And quoting from Trixie Mattel just a little bit, Trixie comes in to a segment and says, so what I have discovered so far is there's a lot of regulations here. You can't just roll into town and pay your motel. The city official responds. That's right, Trixie Mattel. I mean, even the color of the motel is like a topic of discussion. City official yeah, we say Palm Springs is like no place else and we want to keep it that way. City official. We want to preserve our mountain views. We want to preserve our architecture that's famous all over the world. Trixie Mattel yeah, I get it. I

mean, we're trying to create something that is very in line, I think with Palm Springs values, it's just like. And then if you watch the closed captioning version, there's like a gasp in parentheses. I'm just trying to paint my front door, you know what I mean? So I flagged that to say that isn't as uncommon. I think the fact that they've got a total film crew and probably have more resources than the average entrepreneur would have, I think, flags an important takeaway that is summarized here in this next slide. There are high operating costs. This isn't necessarily a Palm Springs story. It's a California story. 46% of those 141 businesses flagged that local regulations give them challenges. I don't think you should interpret that as throwing all the regulations out the door. I think thinking about how to make them interpretable, transparent, whether that's visualizing workflows, processes, making them out in the public, it's very hard to understand how various municipal code updates for 30, 40, 50 years that have all gotten layered on top of each other come into conflict, and maybe inadvertently add confusion or unclarity from a business point of view, 68% flagged that they have trouble navigating permitting or license requirements, 50% flagged they have costs associated with regulatory compliance. 29% at the time of the survey, flagged that they have considered relocating to another city in the Coachella Valley, 34% share business owners who have considered closing down entirely. I would flag the thing to think about here, too, in this city is there aren't a ton of what I would consider giant

corporate businesses. When we look at where your employees are, those are health care systems and hospitals. But almost everyone else is by definition a small business. So when we're talking about business, just assume there's a footnote there that says small to midsize, because that's really what is driving a lot of the economy here. And so I think to the extent you look at these numbers and feel a little bit of empathy, I would flag that this isn't some sort of nameless, faceless corporation that most of the folks that are here under the business licensing regime are what I would consider small, for all intents and purposes. Finally, my last slide. And then I'm going to kick it over to my colleague Uday. So beyond the lack of diversification and difficult business climate, the city's navigating major shifts. A number of these, we call out, you know, whether that's heat and heat infrastructure around what the summer months look like, that those forecasts, whether you believe state or before they were taken down, federal models around climate, that's important to really understand and think about. So the idea of having a summer economy, by definition, you're losing days almost every year in terms of what is considered not summer. There's also the real time. So because we are in a market economy, the market moves quicker oftentimes than our regulatory or other infrastructures do. And so what we're seeing right now is a lot of right sizing around retail that might show up with folks flagging that they're really frustrated that a strip mall or something in their neighborhood has been vacant for a long time. They might be you might see opportunities to look for last mile investments around logistics, warehousing. That has all radically really shifted

quite a bit since the pandemic. There was a shift in consumer behavior that's really proven to be quite sticky. A number of those other things, I would say demographic transitions. You have been losing a little population year over year. Nothing to like, lose your mind over. But again, directionally, I think growth is always better. Finally, just some long term infrastructure deficits. There's always capital improvements that probably have been back burnered that I think only get worse over time. With that, I will give the rest of the slide presentation, my colleague Uday, and then look forward to your conversation and questions. Thank you. Cool. Thanks, Adam. So we have a lot of challenges. Before I start, I just want to mention that a lot of things can be true. We can love Palm Springs. We can admit that there's work to do. Change can be good, change can be bad. But one thing I do know is that if we do nothing, we'll get we'll change regardless. There are going to be external forces out there that will make Palm Springs change. And what we have to make a decision about is how do we shape that change. So this is what the strategy aims to do. It's not enough just to address each challenge as it arises. I mean, we should be proactive not reactive. So it might be easier to start with what this is not this is not a wish list of every single project we want to do over the next ten years. This is not something that is rigid. This is a living document. It is not going to be by year X we have to get this done. But this is helping us try to figure out where do we want to spend our time, our priorities, where do we need to partner up? Where do we need to collaborate to make sure that we're actually addressing a lot of these issues that may have not arisen yet, or that are getting more acute as time goes on, but being smart about it. What is this document then? Essentially, it's a coordination

mechanism. What I mean, economic development doesn't just live with Wayne. I mean, this is a shared responsibility. This happens in every department in City Hall. It happens with all five of you. It happens with our. Sorry. Can I just go back? Sorry, sorry. I'm just too, because you're waiting around here. So it happens with the businesses. So what's been lacking to this date is one overarching vision that brings all these pieces together. And where we can have this discussion, we're going to have tonight, figure out where those priorities are and make sure that we are all swimming in the same direction, because we all want Palm Springs to be Palm Springs. But again, we can shape that change and we need to understand what change do we want, what change do we not want, and how do we talk about it? We need a common language. So what are we trying to do here? Yes. Common understanding. We don't want to have a bunch of unrelated initiatives out there. This is meant to build some parameters, some guardrails. So when we do talk about certain things like hotel incentives, they match into a certain rubric. It's not just an isolated policy. This is fully falling into a policy bucket that makes sense in a cohesive, holistic sense. And most importantly for for you. It gives you a sense of what levers are available, what options do you have, and where do we get more money? Because even if we don't think that growth in and of itself is a good thing, in order to get all the things that Adam talked about off the ground, we need fiscal revenues. And that's going to happen through responsible growth, not by keeping our fingers crossed that it'll be a much milder summer next year. So I'm going to spend some time on this slide. I know it's a little dense, but this is really the heart of the economic development strategic framework. What we did was bucket all the challenges that Adam discussed into five

principal areas, five problems to address. And within each of these principles, we have a number of initiatives and actions that provide the whole realm of stakeholders with some direction as to what needs to be done, by what point, and with some degree of of of metrics and indicators. So let's start with problem number one. This is a question about capacity. I think we can all acknowledge Wayne and Dean and the rest of the city. They do an amazing job. But the systems and the permitting processes, the infrastructure, it's not perfect. It can be improved. So principle A is about building that internal muscle that the city needs to implement everything else in this framework. It's building capacity, building smarts. It's making it easier for businesses to experience Palm Springs in a way that they can work with, with clear processes, shorter timelines, fewer surprises. It's making sure that everyone in this building has the tools and the coordination mechanisms to make a lot of this change happen. It's about allowing any resident or entrepreneur that wants to set up a business, transparent process of being able to achieve that, and not kind of left scratching their head about what needs to happen next. Why is this taking so long, and how do I do any of this work by myself? So what is this initiative include? There's a systems process and technology audit. There's a municipal code review. There's upgraded internal digital processing and tracking system. And then also taking all the work that we've done, making it public in a data dashboard. So the public can also help keep us accountable and track how the economy is doing. So problem number two, this is tied this almost external facing version of problem number one. But the business climate is very fragmented. It's hard to navigate. And we're facing increasing competition from other cities down Valley as well as peer cities around the country. And we need to make sure that Palm Springs remains not just a great

place to visit, not just a great world class destination, but a great place to do business. So that's the heart of principal B. So what does this feel like? It feels like regulations being fair and consistent. They're not arbitrary or confusing. It means that businesses feel heard and supported, that the city shows up as a partner, sets the conditions for growth, is able to make things happen that otherwise wouldn't be able to happen, not the other way around, and ensure that they remain on the side of business. Not just because that's where the money is, but also that's that's how we want to make sure Palm Springs values its its residents and its workforce. So what does this mean? This includes an expanded roster of incentive programs, such as the hotel incentive. We'll be talking about priority industries and nighttime activity, discussions of formal district designations with their own guidelines and roles. Nighttime business zones. During the summertime, there are going to be certain mechanisms and vehicles in place to be able to allow for nighttime activity that otherwise wouldn't be able to take place. Preapproved permit packages and all forms of technical assistance to small businesses. Problem number three, and this is what Wayne touched on earlier on. The economy is concentrated on tourism. And we know because of just changing consumer preferences, rising heat in the summertime. This guy out in DC who does unpredictable stuff that tourism is not always reliable year round. So what does this mean? Principal C acknowledges that tourism is our anchor. It doesn't mean that we diversify away from tourism. It means we integrate tourism into the diversification process. So we use this to integrate with health care. I mean, we already have medical tourism happening now, but it means having a bit more of a focused look and a focused strategy to to

encourage that. If we want to focus on climate innovation, that means having these showcases that serve as a lightning rod, a place that global audiences can come and see how that's working in a city like Palm Springs, it means being able to extend out into some of the areas that Palm Springs has some competitive advantage, but building on top of those. So with creative economy technologies, with a lot more emphasis on that, the the technology infrastructure that's really fledgling here, the whole workforce that's moved down from Silicon Valley, the people who live here for a reason, and they're trying to create something different here that is new and exciting and will have ripple effects across the entire economy. So what do we have in here? This is really trying to leverage a lot of the airport expansion. This is looking at foreign trade zones, creating designated business support teams and creating accelerators to help businesses go from seed to operation. Number four, this is the the next step beyond bolstering our existing industries. This is how do we nurture our emerging clusters and clusters are just certain groups of industries. So when we say that we have health care as an industry, we're focusing on things like a health and wellness cluster, which will include some degree of tech integration and a new ways of being able to leverage the health care industry that we have, but in ways that have not been undertaken before. So principle D is really where long term transformation happens. It's where Palm Springs is not just a leisure destination, but it's an innovation hub globally known as an innovation hub. So what does this feel like in terms of success? Palm Springs can attract companies and workers who wouldn't have considered

the the city previously. It means people will move here and you can have kids that grow up here, go to Palm Springs Unified, they go to College of the desert or some other regional college, and they're jobs here that they can come back to, and then they can raise their own families and retire here. It's making that whole cradle to grave lifestyle possible. It's giving the city the ability to be a leader in global tourism. When it comes to climate innovation. How does I mean? Palm Springs is not the only city dealing with heat. So if you look at destinations in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean, elsewhere, everyone's struggling with this, this problem, like how do we have like hot climate tourism? Palm Springs has, as it learned through the pandemic, a lot to offer in that regard and also a lot that it can contribute to in terms of being a bit more advanced and forward thinking in what it means to be a hot climate destination. So what does the framework include? We include things like workforce development, partnerships with research institutions and educational institutions, innovation campuses for healthcare and wellness, for climate sustainability, for creative economy technologies. We talk about building public private innovation funds so that we're able to support entrepreneurship in emerging clusters that don't otherwise have the infrastructure to be able to seed on their own. So this really is where I think people might be concerned that we're moving away from what makes Palm Springs, Palm Springs, but really, it's embracing the best of what's out there, bringing that to Palm Springs and making it uniquely Palm Springs in a way that nowhere else can be. Problem number five, this is more on the residence side of the equation, but we all know that housing affordability, rising heat, infrastructure that can stand to be

improved, mobility challenges, these are all real concerns. And this is where having a strong fiscal revenue stream will help build out some of this infrastructure that we need. So what does this look like in the framework? What does this feel like as a success? This is having new housing products, not just affordable housing, but live work spaces, workforce housing, adaptive reuse. We have flexible spaces for different industries to be able to use over time as needs change. Being able to create more shade structures, cooling centers, evening activation strategies for public spaces so we can create a Palm Springs that comes alive at night, making major destinations more connected so that there are fewer dead zones between them. And by and large, improving the infrastructure that tracks business investment. So, I mean, Adam and I have been coming here for the last 14, 15 months, and the hotels that we stay at don't always have great Wi-Fi, and that's not the best look you want to give the the tech workforce or any workforce that you want to attract. You want to be able to have the infrastructure there to support work. So what does that include? Multimodal upgrades, climate adaptive infrastructure, expanding housing options, telecommunications upgrades and public space in interventions. So that was a lot. We can talk more about that. How is this organized? So by this point you've kind of gotten a sense of the vision. We want to be focusing on both tourism but also other export oriented industries. We want to create a year round economy. We want to integrate tourism, culture and design into innovation, sustainability and the creative industries. And we want to ensure that Palm Springs remains competitive and a place that people want to live and visit. So the the strategic framework, it's it's applied in focus. So it's not just conceptual. It contains if you add

these all up, 93 action items that are meant to produce measurable actionable results. So in the short term we have 38 actions that are meant to be quick wins that build momentum in the medium term. Between 3 to 5 years, we have 43 actions that are about building new programs, new training pathways, building district identities, or at least recognizing them formally conducting some innovation pilots and upgrading the infrastructure. And then the the longer term, which will be the the stage setting for longer growth over the next ten, 20, 30 years. These are the investments that include innovation campuses, major infrastructure upgrades and the scaling of emerging sectors. So we're almost done. Cool. Wayne just said move along. So we are moving along. We're also moving forward together. So what does this mean. So institutional alignment and political will. This sounds like a negative. It's not. It's just an acknowledgment that we live in Palm Springs. We have a new mayor every year. We have turnover and staff. And we just want to make sure that this really is a document that guides us across these changing dynamics. And it's something that we can all sign up for and commit to inside City Hall. It means more communication and collaboration between departments, making sure that departments realize that economic development, even if it's not maybe part of the formal mandate of that department, they are inherently contributing to economic development no matter what they do. Whether you're in housing, public works, engineering, obviously planning. So making sure that there's an acknowledgment and coordination mechanisms to make sure that we're all moving in the same

direction. Resource alignment. This means building capacity. I mean, this doesn't always require new funding. It just means new prioritization. Being able to engage in some modest modernization and work on improving processes where they can be, where new investments are required. We want to make sure that they're sequenced correctly, and we're getting the biggest bang for the buck. This is about putting resources behind what works and not what doesn't. Finally, and this is why Adam and I have really enjoyed Palm Springs. I mean, as much as it's got a very storied history, there really is very strong, beating heart of experimentation and creativity and really wanting to try something different. Even if you're a preservationist, there's still something about you that really wants to keep things that were once very forward looking, still very much part of the Palm Springs culture and ethos. So this is more of a embodiment of the modernism approach, being able to embrace, embrace change and be a bit more unified in the environment we live in. So almost last slide. Implementation kind of starts now. I mean, this is not a plan that necessarily is waiting to be approved, although it is. What we mean to say is that there are six priorities that we would want to focus on in the next year. Some are already underway, some we would love to help jumpstart the convention center modernization process. I mean, that's been extremely important and something that we want to make sure continues in a way that anchors the Convention center district becomes a bit of a test case and a model for what smart growth and the embodiment of the 21st century tourism dynamic that Palm Springs wants to embrace. What that looks like being able to drive midweek in off season

tourism. Number two an internal process audit. This gets to principles A and B where we just go through the the internal infrastructure here and make sure that we understand what technologies, processes and resources need to be upgraded and aligned, essentially looking under the hood of the city systems and addressing needs as they as they arise. A municipal code and regulatory review. That's something that we look forward to doing in terms of being able to make sure that there are no ordinances that either conflict with the principles in this plan or otherwise could present problems for a lot of the growth strategies that I think a lot of people in this room do agree with defining activating business districts. We do have business districts here. Obviously, we know a lot of them have names, but we'd like to formalize that, be able to assign resources guidelines and allocate the the the kinds of attention that will help these districts become self-sustaining as well as draws on their own, without having to necessarily feel like they're fending for themselves completely. Number five fiscal sorry, fiscal toolkit development. Adam mentioned that there are only so many tools that are currently available to the the the city we want to help work with with Wayne to develop a bit more of diversified revenue stream model so that we are in an age where we have so much economic uncertainty at the federal and state level. Creating some degree of self-sufficiency at the local level is going to be very important. And finally, creating a digital economic development hub, which will help build transparency both internally as well as with the public, and ensure that the public can keep

track of what's happening with the plan, track progress and help engage on on future work. So with that, I'll toss it back to Wayne or open it up for questions. Thanks. Thank you. Eugene. Adam. Mr. mayor, if it pleases the council, we're available for questions or discussion. I wanted to thank you, Adam, for the thorough presentation and the deep work they've done. Obviously, you can see there's a lot of information to be shared. I appreciate you all taking the time tonight to hear us in full, and we'll turn it over to questions or discussion. Excellent. Thank you. And thank you, Adam and Uday, for coming back again and bearing with us. Hope it wasn't too, too harsh on you having to return to Palm Springs one more time. Excellent. So we're using throughout some different numbers on the the responses from surveys and a lot of reliance on the surveys. 2100 plus. What's the statistical accuracy of of like on page eight. You know are we is that demographic based. Is it geographic based. Are we are we looking at specific business sectors who responded to these different questions? Sure. So it is statistically valid. It's not necessarily representative. So we did farm this out to the greatest degree we could. And we unsolicited about I think what was it 400 business responses. About 600 plus resident responses. And we kept the surveys open and tried to solicit

as many as we could. But just given the delivery mechanisms we had, we couldn't atone for representation. We also so you're aware we worked with the modernism team to provide the survey to that group. We also had on the street interviews as well, and then a final stakeholder output of over 100 stakeholders that an additional survey went out to. And so we're interviewing people on the street. So how are we qualifying those people? Well, I want to be clear. It wasn't strictly just Mr. Mayor. Folks on the street, we sent this out as a community wide survey through one working with one PS on that as well as the businesses. And in addition, the modernism survey went out to all of their members as well. And whose their membership. Those would be the ticket holders of the Modernism Week. And do not necessarily residents of Palm Springs, not necessarily residents of Palm Springs. But a portion of the survey was resident that's attached to an attachment. B yes, you had a 600. Some I forget what the end is on some of them. It varies between 590 and 625. Okay. All right. Cool. And then on the page seven when we talk about 20 plus interviews with external stakeholders, I didn't see in our staff report where we're where we're acknowledging who those interviews were with. Do we have do we have that somewhere, Mr. Mayor? Yes. We typically wouldn't name specific individuals in the staff report, but I believe one of the slides showed some of the groups that we contacted, but I'm sure we can list those off for you if you would. If you would like, we can provide a list for you. And why wouldn't we share with who we interviewed individual names? We could certainly share those if that's what

the council wishes. Happy to to provide those individual names. Yeah. No, I'm just curious why we why we wouldn't. Okay. All right. Council thoughts. Questions. Well, we've got staff. Mayor pro tem. Thanks to you all for literally months and months and months of work. I guess a few follow up questions to the mayor. So do we. In your survey data, can you tell who's a resident who's employed, who is an employer? And kind of the distinctions of kind of how they participate in our economy? Sure. So there are a couple of things I would flag, however you want to organize that information is totally up to you. So it just varies by city, county. So in a lot of places where we work, they do these every few years. So there's like a bit more muscle memory. That's not the case here. So I think part of it's just like how do you want that to look. And we'll just bundle it up. The survey is the 592 that you'll see listed in the in under that specifically the businesses are the the one the 140. Sorry. Too many things open here. And then the administrative data. So an area on capacity building for example. Right. Would be in some cities where you have maybe a business licensing fee. Infrastructure is one of the main revenue sources. That's a very robust kind of real time CRM. That's not the case in terms of existing capacity here. So this is kind of a system that's built a little different than other cities, just as a function of how you've historically done business licensing. Does that make sense? Mentioned to your question specifically, Mayor Pro Tem, the individual that received or chose to log in self-identified as either a resident or a business, and the survey was advertised in the Palm Springs

Post for several weeks. And do we identify if they are working, if they're employed? Yeah. Mike. Yeah. I mean, so one of the interesting parts about this was that the representation of employed individuals when it came to the survey respondents, but 85% were retired. So. That's fascinating. So tied to this. And maybe, Wayne, can you share how maybe job growth retention has previously been measured and or monitored by the city and how that kind of informs a little bit how you're thinking about job growth as like an economic indicator. Mayor. Mayor Pro Tem, I think that's a great question. And yes, I think the answer is we do need better data analytics, just collection. There's a lot of tools out there right now that we are starting to employ that are platform based, but there are currently no metrics of performance right now for economic development. And part of the plan would be to develop those metrics and make a determination of how we measure our success going forward. But yes, fundamentally, typically it would be jobs, overall tax revenues, usually vacancy rate is a measure that we use in our community. Of course, since tourism and hospitality is such an important dimension of our community, we would look at occupancy rates for hotels, average rate of nightly expenditure. So there's a variety of KPIs, for lack of a better word that we can develop. But to date, I'm not aware of many that I've been operating under. So part of the plan was to develop these metrics. And then kind of speaking to that of some of those stakeholder interviews and. Kind of engagement. You talked about how most of

our employers are small, small business owners. Was there any distinct strategy of reaching out to large employers? You know, we don't have many. So I'm curious as to if there was kind of a special strategy for, I don't know, any of 500 more employees since we don't have that many. How, how they interact with the city. Mayor pro tem. Yes, the the effort was to identify, keep individuals in the community and attempt to have conversations with them. We got dozens of those scheduled and conducted those conversations. The survey was advertised in the Palm Springs Post. As I mentioned. The. For instance, we reached out to Eisenhower via some of the folks that we work with on the Texaco and also through the chamber. So that would be a representation or example of how we spoke to the institutions themselves. Okay. And I wanted to mention you just whispered in my ear, sorry to interrupt that. Cod also participated in the conversation as well as well as the high school. Great, great. Yeah. I think those are super, super important. You mentioned in in the report, it shows that, well, I'm going to try to hold my comments later and stick to questions. A couple more questions. Core industry versus emerging industry. How how do you make that distinction. What were some of the kind of how did you define those? Can you just maybe describe it to to the public? So actually the terminology we used was existing industries and emerging clusters. So we overindexed on tourism hospitality just because that's what that's where a lot of the economy is. And we felt that that's also where a lot of struggling is happening. So when we look at healthcare also very established in Palm Springs, that is not

struggling as much. That wasn't really an industry we focused on in terms of creating policies to bolster it. Where we did tie it in was in the emerging cluster of health and wellness. So health and wellness would incorporate not just healthcare, but also the wellness industry, tourism, technology. So really creating these Cross-pollinating forums to be able to take what works here and then make it a bit more integrated with other emerging sectors and make them, I guess, be able to leverage them in new ways. Thank you. I think there was a comment also before about maybe moving health care into the existing industries, and we can do that too. I mean, if there if there's an issue about having that be viewed as being emerging, which wasn't the intent, we can make that more clear in the actual revision. Councilmember. Ready? Okay. Sorry. Questions yield to you. And then another question on the entertainment zone. Can you share any other cities that when you talk about the entertainment zone, that's something worth exploring. Model cities that are worth looking at or was, you know, how should people who are looking at potential entertainment zone in the city of Palm Springs and what it means? Are there any other examples you can kind of share as? So some of it came with feedback on Village Fest when we were on the streets collecting data there. Oftentimes when there are special events. Historically in California municipalities, people assume that the the businesses on those streets, whatever that is, whether it's a parade, a flea market, or super excited to have it there. Often, depending on the the regulatory kind of framework, those folks aren't able. They'll be outside vendors that are brought in for legal and liability reasons. So

oftentimes the the mom and pop restaurant won't be able to actually serve the folks that are walking on the street. They'll be sometimes it's a big third party vendor that does those all over the state. Sometimes it'll be other forms of food trucks, things like that. So it's actually a net loss sometimes the entertainment zones. I would suggest looking at Santa Monica or Long Beach. I would say both Santa Monica and West Hollywood have some parallels to your retail in terms of existing kind of retail stock. That's having some trouble as the consumer base is more interested in experiences and experiential than traditional retail. Santa Monica, just a couple weeks ago, has kind of put out some framework materials you can look at. I think that's another example where people would have thought the Third Street Promenade would live forever. It'd be amazing. And it's struggling terribly, and they're trying to reactivate that space by making that public space available for those businesses. You can also think about in West Hollywood, for example, when they do pride occupancy in in retail, restaurant and others floor spaces, there's a fire limit. And so by definition, you almost can't you get this rush of demand and you actually can't capture all the dollars. So by allowing those folks to either utilize some public space or having that entertainment zone for very specific days allows those small businesses to not leave that money on the table, but when there is period of uptick, be able to capture it, rather than there be the kind of artificial chokehold based on safety, if that makes sense. Great. And then one more last question was around sales tax. So as kind of, you know, sales tax and Tot is crucial to our Palm Springs economy. Were you able to kind of dive deeper into sales tax around what are some of the primary sales tax drivers for our city? Need more car dealerships? I mean, it's

big ticket things that drive wherever those. That's why cities battle to get them. I mean, you see, we did some down valley comparables on across some of these metrics. I mean, I would say far down Rancho Mirage has been leaning in. Some folks are using the Greater Palm Springs brand, labeling those even though they're not in your city, city district. So things like that, where it's big ticket is usually really important. You also rely on a lot of department stores. So in one of the slide decks there is like your top, you know, the Ross's things like that you're actually quite reliant upon. If, you know, I don't know if ten years in the future I would be comfortable thinking about like the status of Ross in terms of my fiscal bottom line. So I think thinking about where there might be opportunities to curate activity around something if it's a priority. But I would flag the car dealerships have been growing down in. The problem is you don't get to capture that in the same way you would if it was in the city. Okay, thank you so much. I'll have comments later. Thanks. Councilmember. Ready? Yeah, just questions. You mentioned on one of the the principles reinvigorate the business climate. You talked about the internal process audit. Could you just explain maybe give a few examples when you did your surveys, what kinds of issues did you find with planning permitting that process? What kinds of things were you finding? So I would say some of the findings are about government with air quotes around it. And I would flag that for a lot of business sectors, what they are confusing or rightfully being confused by might not be just all internally here. So part of it is transparency and mapping for folks that are

interacting with various levels of government. So if you're a restaurant that touches that has a whole city process, and then whether that's the health department, depending on grease traps, depending on what you're doing, that's going to be a different part of government, maybe even the state, the air district. That all feels very unintuitive to the small entrepreneur. So while they say they get confused on repeating the same stuff over and over, forms, materials, I think mapping that out in a very clear way, not only internally. Who's got to touch this and what are the estimated times, but who are the other non local governmental departments or agencies that they're going to have to touch base with so that they can be set up in a little clearer on that, if that makes sense. That would be my interpretation of that data. Yeah. Thank you. Councilmember. Ready if I might just append to that. You know, I've been working in and around cities since about 1997 and, you know, improving processes, particularly around permitting and etc. has been a challenge for cities for many, many, many decades. So this isn't new. This isn't a unique to Palm Springs. I think to Adam's point, it's more about providing the information more clearly. I've spoken with the planning director, the building official engineering, the finance director who managed the processes that touch businesses when they come to the cities. And we're all in agreement that we could certainly enhance the services that we're delivering. So it's we're doing good right now, but there's always room for improvement, particularly around where businesses touch the city. Thank you. Thank you mayor. Councilmember Garner, let's go down the line, Jeffrey. Yeah, we were involved. So thank you all. I really appreciate this report. I just had a few questions

back on the question of engagement. Did you talk at all with caravanserai and was this sent out through their folks as well? Councilmember Garner yes, we did talk with Mihai when he was CEO of caravanserai, and we did work with, I don't remember if we worked specifically with their their constituency or graduates, but it's certainly an element that we can introduce if we move towards an implementation prioritization process. So did you get responses back from from those folks who went through the their program contact? Yeah, we wouldn't have tagged them specifically as caravanserai clients. So we did speak to caravanserai. But at the leadership level, okay. I mean, that's helpful. But I you know, I think a big part of this too, is we're talking about emerging industries, etc. is talking to those emerging industries and finding out what their struggles are or just small businesses generally, these more micro businesses that are growing. And we have a lot of stories in Palm Springs of businesses that started out at our Village Fest and are now freestanding places. And so it would be good to be able to really hone in on on how that happened and what was needed, what were the difficulties. We even have some business owners of that level here in this room tonight. So thank you for that. But I'm glad you did talk to their leadership. So a lot of this plan touches on I think it touches on really every single department in the city and different groups that we work with. So how are you working with this other city departments on this, and how are you working with other groups like Sunline, for instance, Councilmember Garner, the the plan was distributed to department heads and offered an opportunity to have a response. I've been working closely, obviously, with our development services colleagues, our planning director, our building official on thinking about ways we can

strategize and work some of the implementation into fiscal year 26. Even already I know our IT director and he and I spoke. He's running an audit of the current IT system for the ERP. So that's another element that's ongoing. And so we have a lot of ideas around implementation. Of course we need a structure to implement going forward. We don't have that as of yet. So we would you know, that might be something that we would ask council to consider is how if they approve the plan, how they would like to see staff implement some of these actions going forward? Thank you. So that is but you did talk to department heads and yes, gave them the report in advance. And yeah, we started there. We started there. We had a team meeting actually it was in this room I believe. Yeah. So we had a meeting here with department heads. They had an opportunity to speak on, on their topics that they found of interest to them. So this has been done in consultation, constant consultation with all of the department heads in the city that that are primarily affected by the outcomes of the plan. Great. Perfect. Thank you. That's really helpful to know. Council Member Bernstein. Okay. We're just doing questions. Are we having comments okay, okay. Well I was in in worked on this with the mayor and the Economic Development Council. So a lot of mine have been answered. I have some first of all, thank you very much for this. And this is a tremendous I make this comment now tremendous job amount of work. Two years ago, we didn't really have a dedicated economic development department. So to have this now is really is really a huge step forward. So thank you to everyone involved. And again this wasn't because of it just takes a lot of capacity to do economic development. I want to also

just a couple questions and you know some of the surveys. And I think there are some questions about that. And and in retrospect, there's different ways that we could have really talked to sectors. One of the sectors that's come up. Did you talk specifically with real estate brokers and business brokers as to who's looking to come here, who's here, who, what businesses that are trying to open here, what they're finding. Council member Bernstein. Yes, we did have comments back from real estate brokers and real real estate agents, and I was able to have dialog with those folks both through email and, you know, conversation. Okay. So it would be helpful to know specifically, you know, who is actually looking here, what they're missing or who is hesitant to come here because of some other reasons. It's always helpful to know when people leave, but it's kind of harder to find that out. You mentioned here the foreign trade zone. And in this document, could you just explain briefly what that is and what it would do? Yes. A foreign trade zone. We Palm Springs currently has a foreign trade zone and the geographic distinction is around the airport. So the airport itself is considered a foreign trade zone. What that allows companies to do is experience reduced costs of importing goods and materials into the foreign trade zone. Sometimes your cost of goods reduces as a result of being able to carry some of the goods. If you manufacture the goods into another product, you can sometimes have cost reductions and import. So it's basically a way to assist businesses that have import and export activities with reduced costs. There are several strategies in place to move the foreign trade zone forward. I'm working closely with Harry Barrett at the airport. It is complicated by customs Border Patrol staffing at the federal level. So there are very there's quite a few layers of government involved in this, but the end goal would be to have this new foreign trade zone

expanded to its its entire capacity, which is 60 miles in a radius around the airport. Staff has yet to present that to the council. That would certainly be something that we would be looking to do. As that matures and develops, particularly from a strategic perspective. Okay. And also see how much makes sense, efforts to focus on it. Correct. And you also mentioned Economic development Authority. What what do you see that as. So I think, you know, again this plan when we send it out for RFP, we asked to envision the future almost 20 years out, which is very challenging for any economist to look that far in advance and, and make a prediction about how to manage the local economy. That's just one of several ideas that we have in ways that we can structure. We don't currently have a Port authority. We don't have an economic development authority. So that would be a tool ten, 15 years down the road that the city may consider employing to enhance the economic development abilities. For instance, issuing debt, for example. Okay, I have a question on on this on page 21, you talk about wild swings in T.o.t, and I don't think that is accurate. You know, we first of all, I don't I think you've got some those numbers may not be right. We never had a $62 million t.o.t. Right, right. I mean, we were using whatever data the cities provided. I'm not sure. I'm happy to take a look at that and see if there's something. I don't think we've ever had more than a 53.7. So I don't think we've had wild swings. I think we had two swings down during the pandemic, which is, you know, we probably fared much better than a lot of places, but

it's basically been fairly steady. What is more interesting is that it's declined from something like 53.7 to 50.4 in the last four years, but again, going to the survey results, I mean, it's not the best data considering that we still had the pandemic. I think what is more concerning and just, you know, and I don't want to do too much, but that data, we don't know whether that actually came from. It says we had 62 million in total in 2122. I don't I don't think we did just double check. I'm not sure if that's it's from your folks. It might be a year over year or a typo I don't yeah. So one of the things just and I'll just make this comment. So it really the concerning thing is that it's been on a slow decline for the last. It's been on a decline. But while costs have risen significantly and that's what's more concerning I think to the hotel. Okay. So maybe you can find out where that came from. I also I mean those are my I have a lot of comments and I will I will wait till other people have made their comments. You mentioned here that we city needs to municipality needs to move at the speed of business. And do you really think that is possible? That was aspirational wasn't it? Did we write that inspire you and is this then achievable if we can't do it, which is more than likely? Yeah. Councilmember Bernstein I, I once worked for a gentleman who was very experienced, and the oversight and management of cities, and his commentary was that government shouldn't reflect the principles and activities of business. It's a different entity altogether. I think what we're trying to say here is that we should at least respect and

identify what businesses face on a day to day basis, particularly for small businesses who don't have time to necessarily unwind bureaucracy. So again, I think this isn't about becoming more like business. It's making the government the business of government better. And I think that's a better distinction. So I appreciate you bringing that up okay. Okay. And and I just I want to mention because you mentioned Cod, but you also have included the Palm Springs Unified School District in the discussions, which I think is probably key, as I mean, Cod is obviously preparing for the workforce, but those students in the school system, if they don't see the future they are leaving or have left or left and come back as some as some have done. So I think it's important that when we talk about and you mentioned a couple places talking about the education system here, I want to make sure that you are clarifying that you have included Susd in these discussions and will be going forward. Okay. I have. And on the nighttime ordinance, did you specifically talk to existing nighttime businesses or about challenges? Councilmember Bernstein I think that was a multi-pronged strategy to address several issues. One, of course, is the heat during the summer. Desert nights are beautiful and wonderful for all of us that live here. And so one effort was to look at ways we can enhance the nighttime experience relative to particularly hot, hotter times of the year and a possibility of building the shoulder season as a result of nighttime activity, and also relative to just overall sales tax. I think by looking at ours, of course, balancing that with livability and issues around noise, etc. is going to be key. But that was the primary interest. I don't know if you'd want to speak any more to that. No. Okay, okay. Since since I was

working on this with the mayor for a lot, a lot, I think it's probably better to have other people make comments and then I'll come back on other ones. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? All right. Beautiful. Appreciate the the input and the answers to the questions. And don't take it that we're being too nitpicky because that's not the reason why we're here. We're here to look at adopting this framework to move forward. But it is helpful for us and others to understand what this information means and how did we get it. So I appreciate that and thank you. So I think we're done with questions. Don't go too far though. We won't. And you know I'm I appreciate Council Member Bernstein mentioning the mayor's economic workforce. We started at the first of the year, and I'd like to give kudos to members of that working group. Rich Weissman, who's here tonight, Philip Hodges, who was on the phone, and Ellen Goodman, who was all three of them were very instrumental in that working group. And what I think is really interesting, and I'm a little proud of, is that working group brought to the table almost parallel the findings that. The that we're addressing tonight, you know, we we had maybe 80% of the findings from the Economic Council were really fed right into what we're hearing from the group tonight. So it it further says we're we're going the right direction. I think the findings that we're reviewing today. Are, are, are on point. You know, we

may use different words in how the Economic Council was looking at these, the issue than what are being used in in our staff report today. But at the end of the day, it was, you know, fueling the economic development department to do the job of the Economic Development department, lean into tourism, which is our industry, that we are not running away from. We have to lean into that and continue to invest in a very large way, emphasize arts and culture as we move forward. And interesting. These are all findings that are coming, you know, that are both in our staff report and from the Economic Council and and the new industry. And I really don't say it's new industry. We've the city's invested $2 billion. We've had $2 billion of investment in green energy in North Palm Springs in the last ten years. We have the industry. We just need to focus on that industry and use it to our greater advantage from a revenue standpoint and from a job standpoint, as we move down the road and really look at that green zone or the green industry, we're we're there, we've invested. There's a lot of money been invested in it to it. So now we just need to continue, in my opinion, continue to. Really get as much out of that as we can in the years ahead. So I think, you know, our our objective today is to give approval. We're going to get more comments from. My colleagues, but we're the recommendation is to

approve the Economic Development Strategic Framework and adopt its strategic priorities, a guiding policy document. One overriding question and concern I have is, is where is the commitment for funding? We we talked about not wanting this to be a something that's going to grow dust on the shelf. But if we don't have a commitment to fund, even if we want to start with the A principles, you know this we're we're not going to get too far. So I just want to make that as a highlight. As we're thinking about this to my colleagues on council, that we've got to make a commitment to, to fund the work so it can it can move forward. Other comments. Mayor Pro Tem, you had more comments. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you for again everyone's thought leadership on this and engagement. It's really exciting to know all the different ways this conversation has been evolving, including in the Economic Development Council. I think one piece that I've been thinking about is really around, you know, as the mayor said, where does this live next? You know, and really seeing that be a standing open meeting where the public can really see this framework live and evolve and iterate and kind of see what those focus areas are from fiscal year to fiscal year. So that would be kind of one opportunity to make sure that that institutional and political will that Adam mentioned has a place has a home. So that'd be one I think another piece around jobs

and employment is is really important. A lot of the conversation in the last few years when we talk about cost of living and Palm Springs has been unaffordable housing, and that is so, so key. And it was mentioned many times in our presentation today. You know, we do need to build housing for the middle class. Every housing unit in my opinion is a success. I'd like to see Adu development fast tracked. But I do think housing is one piece meaningful employment is another. It's still going to be really hard to find and purchase a a market house on the market. If we don't have enough jobs and work for everyone. And so one thing that I'd really love to be able to kind of see grow is, you know, a real appetite as a city on our workforce. So what are what are our FTE numbers? Look, from year to year. How are we retaining jobs? What industries need help? How do we need to be better about messaging and framing the city as a place to come to work, to build your career? You know, I know visit Greater Palm Springs has a role in that as Valleywide. I think there's also an opportunity here in the city to make sure that this is a place that people feel excited to come to work. It's not a city, transient city where people come to for five, six years and then leave. We should be excited for people to come at, you know, earlier in their careers. I think part of that too, is, you know, again, having an appetite, aspiring around job growth. What would it mean to have another large employer, employer of 500 employees? What would it mean to have five employers with 100 employees? Workers spend time in our city. They spend money in our city when they're here. And

so, you know, it'd be great if they're all residents. Sure. But even if only half of them are residents and the other are still here getting lunch at Chipotle, like, that's a win. I can't almost every time I have a Chipotle, I either see a firefighter or a police officer getting lunch because it's one of the few places you can get a quick, affordable lunch if you're on a quick lunch break. Right. And so I think about these things when we're talking about understanding our workforce. So that's a huge area that I think I'd love to see strong on kind of throughout the key priority areas. The other piece was around sales tax and vehicle sales tax, and I thought it was really interesting. Adam's comment around a heavy reliance on kind of big department stores. And if we're saying that's going to be, you know, recognizing that's evolving, we approved a fulfillment center. Like what? What does that look like? You know, other cities, especially cities in the Valley have done has put time and attention in making the vehicle purchase experience a really sleek looking experience. Rancho Mirage never has potholes in front of their car dealerships, I can tell you that. And I think there's just other things that we can do to make sure that this is a very a place where you can go and buy a nice car. This is it helps stabilize our sales tax revenue. And the rest of the valley is already pulling on the Palm Springs name to be able to get that sales tax revenue. So it is a loss to them that is directly going to our neighboring cities. It's a loss to us that's directly going to our neighboring cities around the nighttime kind of engagement, nighttime economy. I agree with my with my colleague, Councilmember Bernstein.

You know, I guess I'm kind of interested in exploring, like alongside with an entertainment zone, but really kind of having a nighttime economy strategy, like who is spending money at 9:00, 10:00, 12:00? Where do we have enough businesses at each of those hours to kind of convene people? The idea is that the Plaza Theater is a huge success. A lot of those people are going to want to go out for drinks and dinner after the show, not before. Where do we have enough businesses to really cultivate that? So in addition to just like general climate change responsiveness, it is, I think, a key part of our opportunity to really bring people to downtown and keep them there longer, especially if we want to move away from Partizan short term rentals. Let's have a party downtown more often. And the last piece around this that is kind of tied to it is like radical shade. I'm going to say it and I'll say it again, we need to make it more comfortable for people to be outside. And so if we make it more pleasant, I mean, 85 degrees without a cloud in sight is still uncomfortable for somebody from Chicago. It's pleasant for us, but it's still really hot for some of our tourists. And so, you know, we can make it easier to stay out with real aggressive shade strategy. So those are my general comments. But again, huge thank you to everyone and for for moving this forward. And I look forward to really seeing this live in a standing committee meeting where the public can see it really evolve and take root comments on the strategic framework in front of us. Councilmember Garner, thank you so much. Appreciate that and appreciate the Mayor pro Tem comments as well. I'm going to just talk a little

bit more about employment. Since Councilmember Bernstein looked at me, too and said, you know, people, our kids who grew up here and then leave and then come back, right? There's me and a lot of my friends, and a lot of those friends have come back and really invested in this city. You know, you have Marcella Gobineau's, you have, you know, Christine. And she had dead or alive for many years. You have all these people who have come back and reinvested in the city in some way or another. But we left because we didn't think that there was anything for us in Palm Springs. There wasn't any jobs, there wasn't any opportunities. And it took us a while to get ourselves back, even though we always wanted to be. So I think that that's something that's really important, and it's something that we've done some work on already, and something that I've been talking about for a while now is making sure that we're working with our schools, especially our younger kids, you know, talking about middle school, high school and making sure that they see us here at City Hall, that they know that there's opportunities here. And, you know, middle school sounds really young. But the thing is, as soon as they get into high school, people are asking them what they're going to do for their job. What are you going to major in in college? What are you going to do? So having them get some influence now is really important. That way. We don't always have to have nationwide searches for directors. Instead, we can have these students that we've been investing in for this entire time who become our directors and who know the city better than anyone else because this is their home. This is where their parents even grew up. Right? You know, twice in December, Raymond Cree Middle School students will be here, and I'm giving them a tour of City Hall, and we're going to be talking to some of the different department heads. Those are the types of activities that I have personally been investing in to try to get kids here, but I would love to see us do this larger, broader outreach with our schools that is more complex than just me trying to always

talk to kids about opportunities to eventually work at City Hall and explaining what a pension is, right, because a lot of people don't know what a pension is, even if they're an adult especially. They don't understand if they're kids. But kids do understand if they have parents that are struggling, so they understand that their parents are having a hard time. So if you tell them, hey, this is how you can possibly not have a hard time when you're older, they get that. But I do want to go back to principle E, which is the strengthen community assets and infrastructure. Really appreciate this being included in this. This is something I talk about a lot on this council, and it's something that I feel I've, I've had people say in the past is not as important. And so to see it in this economic strategic plan is is very satisfying to me personally because it is all connected. We it's not we cannot have a striving. Sorry. We cannot have a robust industry here, an economic industry here. If we don't have a livable community. So the pedestrian experience specifically is something that we've been talking about a lot more, especially the convention center. But something that's important to me is making Palm Springs a walkable city. It's the easiest to do in our downtown area, and that's part of why the convention center plan makes sense, right? Connecting our convention center to our downtown. But we do have an opportunity to connect some of our other commercial districts to our neighborhoods. Some of our neighborhoods are close to to commercial, but we don't make it easy to want to walk to those places. Some of it is shade, some of it is just how quickly cars go by on some major roads, but we don't really encourage it. And we should, right? There's lots of cities

across the country where people walk to go get a few groceries. You really don't see that here. And the heat is not the reason, right? Right now, for the last three weeks, if you lived very close to a grocery store, you could definitely walk to get groceries. It's just not something that we think about doing. So I love this idea of really creating these connections and getting more people out. And this is something to that we're talking about in our zoning code. We've been working on our zoning code update for the last year. A updated plan is going to be presented, I think, in January, and that's going to be really important for all of this is really looking at what our zoning code can be, how it can encourage development in different areas of our city. And that also could mean bringing commercial closer to residential. Right? Sometimes that scares people, but we can be very targeted in what kinds of businesses are in the residential areas. But imagine if you could walk down the street and get a coffee really quick, right? Those businesses aren't going to be open all hours, so we have opportunities to to do stuff like that to create these more mixed use spaces within our neighborhoods, and not just in these targeted downtown areas. Housing, of course, is huge. And I do want to say, you know, we do need more middle income housing and housing for purchase in those those pay scales as well. But I also want us to remember, too, that we also need rentals in that realm. And the reason I bring this up is because I think there was a comment that was stated. I think, Adam, you mentioned something about. Just different this I think the Santa Monica promenade not being as continuing to be a successful. Right. That's because every generation is different.

Every generation brings something different. They have different interests. My generation doesn't necessarily appreciate the what the people in my parents generation want to do, right? We want to do different things. So we're always adapting. And so that's why creating these spaces that are adaptable is really important. And being open to different possibilities. And one of the things that I know folks in my generation, and definitely in the generation after me are talking about is why are we going to buy a house when we can rent and be have an easier time moving to somewhere else if we wanted to, or just, you know, not having to have all of these different expenses. So I think that we should be constantly thinking about what the next generation wants and how we can include that in our plan, and just really making sure that we're not only talking to retired folks in our community, but we're talking to the people who are looking to have a business who are employed here, like the mayor pro tem said, or who are the next generation or kids and what they're thinking about, what they like, what the trends are. You know what's cool on TikTok, all of this stuff is, is, is. But it matters, right? Because that can give us a forecast into the future of what people are interested in. So anyway, this is really exciting to me that we have all of this opportunity. And I know that was a lot, but I was just really excited to see principal E included in this economic plan. So thank you for for that. Excellent. I appreciate you pointing out the principal E, I think other other comments specifically on the strategic framework are are welcome. So oh, council member ready unless you want to go Council member Bernstein. Oh thanks. Thank

you I'll go. Thank you B becomes before our so council member Bernstein. No I'm happy for him to go because we have been working on this document. I'd rather hear their comments from someone who wants to correct anything I say and rebut his anything he says. Yeah, then I don't have to repeat. Yeah, yeah, I'll be shorter anyway. All right. Thank. Thank you. So, you know, this is all good. I mean, there's a lot of work that goes into these projects, you know, and from a solutions perspective, it's very important. So since I've been associated with the city, this is about the fourth or fifth one that we've done. And they can work. The last one really resulted in in on East Palm Canyon, the, the cars, you know, the Mercedes, the Porsche, Kia Genesis. So it it all depends which way it goes. Does it sit on the shelf as we all know, or does it actually get actionable. And and so the challenge is really for us to provide staff the tools and resources that can build governing capacity for them to do this. But it's not only just a organizational capacity. I found it's a psychological capacity as well that we can actually do it. And so that's why, you know, I was glad to see the, the the process piece audit because I think when I look out and I see some business people sitting in the audience here and, and they think, well, what does this really mean to me? How does it affect me? How will I even see this manifest that I feel good? So whether it's the business district saying that you've been working on or, you know, the large and small things detail speak when they come into town, is there a sense of arrival? Right. So there's a great Thompson Hotel, but down further the tree wells are a mess. So, you know, it's it's a combination of the large and small. A lot of it is in here. You know, I support doing as much as this as we can. I think there is going to have to

be some sort of of process with staff and council to really keep this moving along and updates. So, you know, I certainly support it, and I certainly will do all I can to make sure it happens because, you know, keep in mind, you know, 15 years ago our general fund was 70 million. Now it's 175 million. So these economic development plans can work. They are solutions perspective. But again the burden is on us. And that's not lost on me to provide staff the tools and resources. So thank you. All right. Councilmember Bernstein thank you, Mr. Mayor. So first of all, I want to I want to actually concur with what Councilmember and Mayor Pro Tem Soto said about how to keep this going in the business community. I mean, we had the Mayor's Economic Council who has worked on this. I'm not sure if you mentioned Scott Atkins, who is here as well. Scott. Scott. Yes. Yeah. But he but he's here and it probably would not have happened this way without a focus group going throughout the year. We did it would have helped to have other business groups and having ongoing discussions. And I think going forward, that's what we're going to need to do with the council subcommittee that really is focused on reporting back to council on this and to make recommendations for what might what might happen with council, with the city manager and how it gets executed. I also want to mention a couple of things, because, you know, I see I've seen some press reports and social media, you know, that we are abandoning tourism or turning away from tourism. And I just want to reiterate that's not can't be further from the truth. Our two biggest projects in the city are the airport and the convention center. We have Cod that's doing their own project, and they're already going, and they remain to be. I also think we need to understand that it's really an

ecosystem here, and that we may talk about a reliance on big events or conventions which which are important, but healthcare, tech, all of those arts and culture all add to the tourism economy and hospitality. And I also think we have to understand how the city's budget may differentiate from the overall economy. We are T.o.t is 25% or of our of our city's general fund. And that's because the lodging pays a huge percentage of their revenue in total occupancy tax. I would think if you took food and beverage, there probably a bigger industry in our city overall, but they're not. They're paying a much lower to the city. So we have to look how it all ties together with that. And they become employers. We have lawyers because we have lots of businesses. We have doctors because we have lots of people working here. So it all works together. So it is not one or the other. And in fact, part of it is, is how everyone helps the helps the other. And so growing a tech industry will help tourism growing a healthcare will help tourism. So I want to be careful that you mentioned one here. And there's a some of the terminology that's used may have caused confusion. You know, Palm Springs once led the world in redefining modern living. And we can do so again, I would say our brand name right now is stronger than ever. And so there's a, there's a, there's somewhat of a of a of a miss implication in saying that we no longer define it. I think Palm Springs has a real brand and we are seen as a place to live. And that's important to remember. I do want to mention, you know, and again, to this having how this gets prioritized, you actually have 100 plus action items in here. This

is on top of what the Economic Development department is already working on and what our city manager is. And so part of what needs to be done is to really prioritize and to group it and to understand which has to be a city activity or which we can help spur and support outside activity. So, for example, the arts and culture in our, which is historically always been for Palm Springs in the last hundred years, and obviously the tribal culture before that is extremely robust. And so the council member, Garner and I have been gathering the arts and culture community, and they're all want to work together. You mentioned some things about a summit. They want to work on a, on a, an event, starting annual event starting next year. They're already there. And so what it takes is for the city to support it and move it forward and say, council. Yes, we agree that arts and culture is a priority so that we can then say, okay, it's a budget. Is it? Or, you know, do we want to go talk to the hospitality about how they tie in with this and tourism? So that exists? The tech community we have seen that has started to grow significantly. I mean, in this area in terms of in terms of brain power, we actually have a brain dump here versus a brain drain that a lot of cities have. Part of what we need to do is, is to say that we, as a council, support the growth in this. We're not going to invest billions of dollars to grow tech in here. We are going to make it a business friendly environment. And whether it's, you know, you know, there's there's all forms of AI and tech. We've seen College of the desert make a big, you know, focus on this, which is great because we actually may now be able to tell investors and bigger and other companies from outside that, hey, we are working on building an internal

workforce that can support it. So the tech community wants to hear and I'm sure investment, you know, tech investment wants to hear that we as a city are supporting this and are open to it. You talked about small businesses, and I think one of the things that you're going to hear or I'll hear is that, you know, local business and unique businesses are very important to our brand name. And, you know, when we had our Business retention and Economic Development subcommittee before we were all on council, there was a whole focus on uniquely Palm Springs businesses. And so I think it's key to keep keep that always at the forefront. We also talk about LGBT, which is which is extremely important and it's extremely important in all fields. I mean, if you talk to the health care, a lot of doctors want to be here because it's an LGBT friendly place for doctors. But I also think all diversity is important in this city. And I think, you know, we we have it, you know, we we have other other people, you know, all all groups are welcome here. And I think that's is our brand. And that's important to keep saying I want to mention this, I've mentioned this many times in terms of the outreach and who you're reaching businesses. We do not have a good database. You know, we get every single business in Palm Springs has to renew their license every single year. We have an opportunity to get extremely robust data, not just on who signs the business license, but who is the on site manager. Or we could ask other questions they may not have to answer. Are they, you know, are they women owned? Are they black owned? Are they LGBT? Are they looking to expand in Palm Springs? How many locations? You know, how do we get their main contact information? We don't have most of that. And so we as a council should really once again, I mentioned this before I was in council that we should say this is a priority because be able to institute a lot of this requires having good communication with who our

existing businesses are, and it's really important that we have to do that. One of the things you mentioned, really Blank everywhere, is the lead entity on all of this. And that goes back to what I think the committee can start to do, because it cannot be waned. Being the lead entity on 100 and action items. And so it has to be other people. And so we have to put that on. I'm going to mention that visit Greater Palm Springs does have their new economic development mandate. And we've seen how effective they've been in the past with their tourism driving tourism that then connects with our convention center, with our hotels, with our restaurants to help keep that going. I think they're ready to keep that going with economic development. So, as you said, a website and other portal, we need to be able to have that input when they drive businesses to come to our area that we say Palm Springs is ready. Want to talk about commercial districts? We have an ordinance on commercial districts. This needs to be reviewed. It has been it has stalled. It has not quite worked. We know this. I know at one point we said it was. Some people think that it's set and can't be changed. I think it should be changed and reviewed like other ordinances. The idea was to have this robust tool out there where we can have our districts defined together. We're also just a mayor pro tem point about nighttime. I agree, we are going to have to consider whether that means changing noise ordinances or not, or whether it's other types of nighttime and how that's defined. I'm not saying one or the other is right to Mayor Pro tem point about radical shade, I strongly agree. I think it's also cooling and heat mitigation, which are part of our plan. And, and, and the convention center connectivity should help. Let us experiment ideally or get a how that all can work because, you know,

we're looking at other industries. But if we shorten our traditional tourism season by a week or two weeks, that has a significant economic impact. It's hard to make up with new industries. On energy costs. You know, I do want to mention we have our own energy CCA here with DCE, community aggregator with Desert Community Energy. That is not that that is really fairly new, but there's potential to have revenue that we can give back to support businesses. I want to mention something that's not here. We have stalled and vacant businesses in Palm Springs, and we've seen a lot of progress happen recently. And whether it's some of the hotel projects, we have 100 room hotel that is empty in walking distance of the convention center. We have empty lots in our downtown. And I think we really need to look at what we as a city can do, not just in, in, in sticks, but in carrots. How do we incentivize, how do we make it easier for these people to develop and open or businesses to occupy? And it may be a combination of both of those. And I think those are my comments. I think I think this is a framework. I know things will change over time. We will have new council members, we will have new staff and and we will have new businesses and new things happen within our city. But what is great about this document is that there is enough in it that we can adapt, and we can find if if it doesn't make sense to focus on one area now or another, or if we don't have the resources, there's plenty of other things to do. So I thank Adam and Wayne for working on this and the Council on Economic Development that helped do so much of this and all the other input we had. So those are my comments for now. All right.

Thank you. Reserve the right to have more. We know that for sure. So Wayne, what are we. We have two parts the Tot incentive. And my first question is why is it combined and why didn't Tot stand alone? Is there a reason that it we combined the one item we wanted to. If I could chime in, what we wanted to do is we knew we were trying to, in the infancy stages of trying to put in an incentive program together. So like I said in the very beginning, what I'd like to do is just take a couple minutes right now and just walk through some of the initial thinking that we're talking about in terms of incentive program, not that we're asking council to approve that this evening, but I think Wayne would like to present some of that and then just get some general feedback from council. Not again, not that we're trying to approve something on it tonight, but give you a a little big picture of some of the thinking that they're going through. Clare, the floor is yours. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll just continue from Scott's point. So what I thought would be helpful for the folks that are listening and some of our residents and that don't deal with this day to day, is to explain the fundamentals of a hotel incentive program and how it's operated in the past, and how successful it actually has been. I understood this to be a fairly revolutionary at the time that it was adopted, and I think I'm proposing some additional solutions here that the industry seems to be responding favorably towards. So what I have here is an example of what how the incentive program works. So if you look at the totality of the building structure there, that I have demonstrated the black area to the below the yellow line is the baseline. What that means is that's how much Tot is generated on any given property. Let's call it $1,000. It's a different

number. But to call it that, after improvements are made, the tot should go up because revenues to the hotel go up. The idea being that as hotels renovate or if new construction occurs, we're expanding that base of Tot. We just heard a lot of information about how important that line of revenue is, both to our current tourism and hospitality industry, but also to the future. So the program that was designed previously and wisely split that increment above the baseline 50% to the city and 50% to the developer. So the way I give that example is if you were making $10 in Tot before you had improvements, and afterwards you make $20 in Tot, your increment is $10. And under the current program, we split that $5 with the city and $5 to the developer slash owner. So I thought that would be helpful to ground us all in the understanding of what we mean when we talk about increment. Of course, you can manipulate that increment then, and we do in certain cases in the original policy, 75% to the developer and 25%, for example, in historic properties. So if you're renovating a historic property you get a a bonus split. So again, in the same model, if you have $10 of a historical property that you're making after you make your renovations, it goes to $20. In the case of a historic property, we give you $7.50, and the city keeps $2.50 to the point of reimbursing the costs. So the idea here is that we can manipulate the share of increment across the board to incent developers and owners and potential even small hotels that are looking to renovate. So the program and by the way, Seth Meyerowitz BBQ is on the line as well to answer any questions. If they come up, I wanted to just highlight where staff is momentarily. As Scott mentioned, we're looking for general direction. The idea would be at some point to bring back ordinance that would append or amend the current ordinance hotel incentive

ordinance, but the highlights of the program and the structure that we're looking at now is to move from renovation, new construction, or the form of the project into tiered investments. The current industry talks about how much dollars per key a key is a hotel room. So how much investment is made per hotel room. So if you had a hotel that was ten rooms and you spent $10, that would be a dollar per key of investment. So just to simplify that. So we're looking to move towards a tiered investment and incenting additional investment in tier categories. And you have those before you in your report. The other issue is to approve the covenants before the issuance of the building permit. This is key so that we can identify those participants early, prior to them in the building process, and also to ensure that the appropriate labor laws are being followed. Then, as the project progresses, the covenant itself would be recorded at the Certificate of Occupancy. This is a mechanism that ensures that what gets built is incented if they don't build it, or there is no certificate of occupancy, the incentive goes away. If there is a new hotel or renovations and there's a certificate of occupancy issued, then they get the incentive. This is what is new to the program. What staff is looking at right now is in the first five years, having a split of 90% to 10%. And I know that sounds radical right now. The cost of capital, which means how much does it cost somebody to invest in a hotel property, both from debt and equity is extremely high. That mechanism is called weighted cost of capital. In order to reduce that barrier to entry, staff is looking at the idea that the split be heavier in the front end. What this does is it enhances the ability for

banks and construction lenders to make loans. Yes, it is a it is an increase in contribution to the developer, but it favors the city in the long run in that we get projects built and it's all new dollars. So that's a new element that we're considering. And then again, continuing with the bonus categories of historic or and or convention center hotels, we want to look at ways we can incent our current hotels that are looking to rebrand, that are the larger hotels as well as, of course, all the small hotels that would be included in this program as well. So it doesn't leave them out. Here's a slide with too many words, but this is basically the tier structure that we're analyzing. I've had several hotel industry experts look at this. Several folks here in our community, as well as nationally, have reviewed this and support the idea of a tiered entry. Overall, it simplifies the ordinance as well, away from whether you're renovation or a new construction. Right now, what we're seeing is some projects are coming in with a blend, and we're not able to incent the new construction. It would be only renovation or they can't make the dollars back. And so you can't get over the hump of prevailing wage. Once that's triggered, we want to ensure that the incentive actually works. And so some of the updates to the numbers are going to be required. So for an example I wanted to share this as a cost because one of the questions would obviously be what's the impact overall impact of the city. So if you had a tier one hotel room, that would be 150,000 a year, 75 rooms. These examples here are elements of the underlying structure that we're assuming the overall impact over 25 years is a reduction of 79,000 to the city. I know that's problematic, but the overall new investment in this scenario would be close to $2.2 million in new dollars that would come to the city that wouldn't otherwise be invested. So just wanted to share some preliminary thinking on how that's working out. So you see here in $2.7 million in net present value, new money. So as we continue to

develop the program and hear feedback from the council, we'll be bringing more analysis and examples towards. I've spoken with Chris Mooney on this. He is supportive of the program, who is our finance director, and we feel this is a strong program that will address the current needs of our hotel community, our hotel development community that completes that portion of the presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions. Councilmember. Ready? Thank you. Wayne. You know, I, I think you probably hit on a couple good points that needed to be changed. Although I'm curious from your perspective, I presume that the need to increase is I presume that the two things the cost of building is just so much higher now and then, you know, it seems like the incentive is is less of incentive with prevailing wage on top and this sort of offsets that. So it comes back in to be a real incentive for developer. The additional money. Councilmember Brody. That's that's correct. The current program, as it stands, while it's very good, doesn't expand the term long enough for developers to overcome the hurdle of prevailing wage. In other words, construction costs are higher because we request and we demand that any new project that receives public dollars has to pay prevailing wage. Oftentimes, that can be a 25, 35, 40% increase over the current labor rates. Well, so we want to be able to support that, but then also get them over the hump of paying that prevailing wage. So the the extension of the term is one of those methods, as well as the structure of 9010, in the first five days, or excuse me, first five years assists with that. Yeah. And I think it's important we realize that it still is a a seasonal market. And it is difficult for these hotels to pencil out like so for example, one of the the biggest things that's not helping the convention center is the Renaissance. Now, you know, that was renewed, you know, 15 years ago and sorely needs it. Now, this might be an

incentive enough to make them want to do the renovation. So so I support this 100%. Well, final question is, you know, before we had sort of large and small hotels, I presume this is going to combine them. So this will even cover small hotel. Who's doing a smaller project. That's correct. If you look at the tiers the base tier stays the same. So if you invest and bump the key, count up a little bit to 10,000 the key rather than 5000. Every hotel that we've had in the program that I've processed easily matches that. So I don't think that's going to be a concern. But 10,000 to 70, excuse me, 150, 75,000 is the base tier 75 to 150. So that's sort of the category that we're seeing. A lot of our smaller hotels come in at. They're not going to spend the three 5450 A key. That's more for new construction. So the short answer to your question is yes, this will help the small hotels. So now here's the big question for you. If I could just chime in, Wayne, it might be helpful for you to talk about from time to time, some of our smaller hotels. They want to renovate their existing rooms, but in some cases they might want to add on some rooms to some new construction to to it. So maybe you might kind of alliterate on that sort of scenario. Yeah. City manager absolutely correct. We're seeing that several of the small hotels or people interested in investing in hotels in the community want to increase the key count. To date, we haven't considered that under renovation because the new construction sunsetted in the current ordinance. So we want to capture that hybrid model where they're adding keys to our community, which is entirely new Tot. So bottom line, it will definitely help the small hotels renovate if if they desire. And for those entering the market to purchase. Okay. And then the final question, this one is just in case your crystal ball is not cracked. This new program, this will help jumpstart the long standing hotels that have yet to been built in your estimation. I in preliminary conversations with several of the folks that are in hotel development in our community, they seem to

think that this structure is a positive and would help that positively. Yes. And I would just say to the council, this is a great thing, you know, to the point, put a finer point on the economic development discussion. We just had this modification of the program to meet the need of today, the prevailing wage, the higher cost is, is, I think, the very first thing we're doing that gets us down that path. So it's all it's all integrated and combined. So thank you for bringing this forward. Thank you, Councilmember Bernstein. Yes, thank you, Wayne, for bringing this forward. And I know there's a hotel waiting for it. So I guess a couple questions. So Councilmember Ready brought up the Renaissance Hotel. And you know, they would need a multi tens of millions of dollar renovation. And would this be enough of an incentive in your I mean have you spoken to them that that's sort of key as we do our convention center that would incentivize them to do that. Councilmember Bernstein Yes, I'm speaking for them, obviously. Right. I don't want to speak on their behalf. But yes, I've had several conversations with both the general management as well as the underlying ownership. I spoke with the CFO of Ashford Group, who's the entity that owns all of these properties, spoke to them about the current renovation program. I think it's challenging under the current environment, under the current renovation program, to make those numbers work. I think this would be beneficial to anybody that's in that type of situation. The tiers are designed in a way that help get over that high cost of construction, as well as the high cost of labor. And so we've designed this not specifically to the Renaissance, of course, but in ways that we are seeing the market respond. Yeah, okay. And because again, we're investing so heavily in the airport and the convention center, we don't have a lot of room to build new big hotels necessarily. And so making sure the ones we have are the best quality is good. Good all around for the whole for the whole city. This would need to then you need to

bring this to an ordinance that would then take that. We'd have to then review and go back. So what kind of timing are we looking at? Councilman? You know, to change an ordinance does take a little bit of time. But what we're kind of hoping if we're on the right track with what we're talking about this evening, it still doesn't prevent us from listening to a proposal from any developer that wants to come through and present something to us that makes some sense for us to then fashion some sort of incentive program together and bring it back to bring it back to council. For for your consideration, if we need to move faster than, faster than the amount of time it'll take to change an ordinance. Okay. And I think Councilmember Ready mentioned existing hotels and development would would this this would affect those. I mean, we obviously have some that are working or they already have agreements that are better. Yes, the current covenant agreements would stand. We would have it would be a matter of policy of whether they could abandon their current agreement and join the new program. Obviously, they'd have to meet the terms of the new program, but that would be an element of ordinance that we would address. But as it stands now, no, the current covenant agreements would not be affected. Okay. So someone like Nexus, who didn't want to participate in this before they could potentially if they do build, they could potentially still come in under I can I can say globally that I think with updated programs it would at least enhance the ability for for new construction to be to enroll in the program and benefit from the incentive. Okay. So for the convention hotels, because we don't I don't know that we do this. We don't require room blocks. Correct. Is there an option to do so? I would have to Councilmember I'd have to do some research on that. I don't know, it's a matter of law whether we can require that or not. I'd have to confer with our legal counsel as well as the industry to see how

that would work. Other cities have may have done this. I mean, certainly ones that are real convention center hotels, I mean a large hotel somewhere else in the city. I think we could whether whether, you know, from a business perspective, that would be incentive enough. Joining our program to have them do that is a different question. But legally, we'd be able to you add on another bonus for convention center hotels, right? Correct. Originally that was the design was to be a geographic within a geographic footprint, but then we weren't capturing some of our larger hotels that lie outside of a footprint. So this would require a definition in the ordinance that what qualifies as a convention center hotel? The difference if you're outside the area, you hit it. If you're inside, you might get an additional incentive. But you need to have committed blocks or I don't know how that works. Yeah, I think that would be feedback that we could take into the process. You also mentioned for historic buildings that would get a bonus, and that's if they or historic or historic elements or is that correct? The current renovation is for class one and class two. So we would want to define that in ordinance. What class, what's classified as historic, and how much of the project we would determine to be historic. We could either do it by status or percentage of project. Project, I would assume. I think percentage might be a little bit difficult, because having historic designation on a property limits the whole development. Correct. So just my opinion and. This is a great program that we have and it's proven successful. I would also think is there a model to do this. And we mentioned something about in the economic development framework about incentives as other tax incentives. We have other vacant properties in our city that are not hotels or, you know, that are restaurants and things like that. Are there incentives that we could look at for getting those

occupied? I know we have some on South Palm Canyon, some downtown even had an option as part of this, obviously. But Councilmember Bernstein, I think generally, I don't know if you and Adam want to add on to this, but yes, I think being creative with our incentive structure, obviously redevelopment has gone away since 2013, so we're limited in our tools in terms of revenue capture models and other types of incentives. But certainly, yes, I think a suite of incentives is a smart way to go, depending on which element you want to incent, whether it's a vacant building, you want to get it occupied, whether it's tech, you know, there's a variety of incentives that we can do from a revenue capture, getting a new business. I mean, we have very few. We don't have lots of money to give out, but we do have incentives in terms of tax re, you know, reductions or rebates that we could do. So I think as part of our economic development, that's kind of key. I know also, and I don't want to speak on behalf of the planning director. Chris had one, but he and I have had discussions. There's also things on the planning side and the development services side that we can do as incentives as well, that are not necessarily monetarily based from the city's perspective. Okay. And when you do that, I would also look at the difference the same way you've done here between historic and non, you know, buildings that might provide other challenges, businesses moving into those need may need other incentives. So I would move I would like to move forward with this. I don't know if there's other comments, other questions. Council Councilmember ready I yield to my other members. First. Mayor Pro tem o just just a little more on the point from Councilmember Bernstein on the what we can do for some of the retail. There is a model, and we've used it in the past where we can share some of the city city's only sales tax. So so that may be a tool that we can

use. But in, in addition to and I think I heard you mention this sort of a little earlier, councilman, about what we can do about those projects that haven't happened as part of this economic development thing. Consider a we'll call it a vacancy fee. That may be a tool we want to consider coming back in a larger program as well. I would suggest a vacancy fee as well as an incentive, you know, incentive. So there's both the carrot and the stick. Yes. And involved. Thank you. So you want them you want to give direction to come back with incorporate vacancy fee in this Tot incentive program. No that's a separate discussion. It's just this is part of our economic development strategic framework that that should be a topic. And within that within this one I think this is good okay. So we're just giving direction on this incentive program that's in front of us. So. Yeah. Correct. Mr. mayor, there's two recommendations. The first one is to approve the Palm Springs Economic Development Strategic Framework and adopt its strategic priorities as a guiding policy document. And then, secondly, provide direction to staff on updates, which I think we've heard to the hotel program and direct staff to bring the appropriate ordinance back before the council. I expect that could be in January, as soon as January. Okay. Council do entertain a motion. So moved second to accept staff recommendation. That's the motion. Yes. And we're voting. Motion made by council member Bernstein. Seconded by council member. Ready. Is it showing up

somewhere? I did, but it doesn't. You have a little circle. Bear with us. We have another gadget today. Can he ask? It says carried. I know. So five. Oh. Where? Would you like to make the motion? Okay, so Council member ready? Seconded it. Okay. Oh, now we go. Thank you. I got a green on my. Maybe we do a voice vote. Alright, so can we just do a roll call vote? Thank you. Do I have I have a motion by council member Bernstein and I have a second by council member ready. Council member. Bernstein. Yes. Council member. Ready. Councilmember Gardner. Yes. Mayor pro tem. Soto. Yes. Mayor de heart. Yes. Motion carries five zero. Thank you. Very good. Thank you. Council. Thank you, Wayne and everybody for your time and energy on this. Now we move to. Oh adjournment. So

before we get to adjournment we have council comments, additions agenda items. Mr. City Manager do you have any. No no comments Mr. Mayor okay Council. I'm glad we did this. All right I've got I've got two items I'd like to see if council has the appetite to agendize the conversation on a city wide elected mayor, as called for in the city charter at some point in the near future. Could you explain a little bit more, mayor generally, specifically to to get on the agenda so we can get guidance on what the process would be for city at large elected mayor, and how would we correct the city charter, which calls for us to elect the mayor at large, which we're not doing. Could I could could I ask, so is that or is that part of the discussion, whether it has to go to ballot or is it a council action that would be part of the discussion. So we can't have the discussion unless we understood. Okay. So I don't hear any others in favor. Well I don't I don't have a problem with it. Okay. So we just have two that are in favor of bringing it back so it won't come back on agenda. Next is to see if council would support Agendize, the downtown park palm tree trimming policy. Currently, the policy is to provide a 12 foot minimum clearance of the fronds and it's not being applied. And the fronds are not presenting a clean look. In the downtown

park specifically, we're only talking about the downtown park, and more specifically, change the trimming policy for the trees that are visible around the Forever Maryland statue that are showing up in photographs that are being posted around the world. This. Council member. Gardner. Sorry. Thank you. Just for clarification, we this is an actual formal policy we have to change as a council. This isn't just something that our team can staff can look at and decide if changes need to be made. I'm just it seems like something we wouldn't need to agendize to discuss. There's a there's a tree trimming policy in the downtown park falls within that policy. So if council if we want to have the discussion to talk about it, we have to agendize it to be able to talk about it, to clean the park up for those photographs. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council Member Garner. Yeah, I've talked to the public works director about this. And he says there is a policy that guides public works and how they trim our palm trees. You know, we had a long discussion about this about a year and a half ago. We spent a little bit of time over the weekend taking a look at the area around the the Forever Maryland statue, and it seemed like there were, as we know, there's Mexican palms and there's the California palms, and it's the latter that are the more highly regulated. They're the ones we see on Palm Canyon that are trimmed along the bottom edges, and we don't have for the other. For the former Mexican palms, we don't have those regulations. So at at minimum, there's some trimming we will be doing of those make those look better. But as the mayor indicated, the other California palms, a lot of those are very young,

immature palm trees that probably could stand some trimming and still be within the regulations. But in general, to do more extensive trimming might require us to bring back an ordinance just about if we're going to look at that specific area. Okay. Mayor Pro Tem, I just have a question. So there's a different ordinance for trees in the downtown park versus tree. Can I finish my question? Yes, you can certainly. Thank you. Or is it one tree trimming ordinance that you we want that we're looking at possibly in only one part of the city. Yeah. I think the let your the latter statement is correct. We have one policy but I think as the mayor indicated, there might be some interest in trying to take a look at a specific part of the city related to that policy that guides the whole city. So would be modifying the ordinance to, for a certain section, that that could be one option we could talk about, would we? We would have to look at the ordinance and then just just you just want to look at the park aspect. You could do that. Council member ready. So I think I'm hearing is that the what you're trying to achieve right now, the city manager does not have the discretion to do or he does within the ordinance. I've been told I really probably don't because it's in an ordinance. Okay. Because you want to go lesser than the 12, or you're saying we the discussion, the discussion that I'm asking that we brought being brought forward is that we change the policy specifically for the park so the trees can get trimmed and not look like a lot of untrimmed dead branches behind Maryland and surrounding Maryland. I support bringing that back for discussion. Yes I do

okay, so we got three that support that coming back. Thank you. Probably, Mr. Mayor. We will look at that. Maybe one of the early meetings in January. Very good. Thank you. So today we will adjourn to the next regular city Council meeting on Wednesday, December 10th at 530. And we will adjourn in the name of Udo Kier, who passed away yesterday.