Palm Springs in 2023: City leaders focused on fixes while a major storm showed all that’s right

Say what you will about the leaders at Palm Springs City Hall, but you can’t say they don’t have a firm grasp of the community’s priorities.

Case in point: The intertwined issues of homelessness and affordable housing. While not always making headlines, they are always a popular topic in public forums. Calls on social media to “fix” the homeless crisis in Palm Springs, and demands to “make the city more affordable,” are rarely followed by actionable ideas.

That’s where City Manager Scott Stiles and his leadership team come into the picture.

Stiles took office in March, becoming the fourth person to occupy the city manager role in three years. He immediately set to work hiring a half-dozen senior team members, assigned to work on everything from the city’s finances to homelessness.

Perhaps none of the hires was as crucial to solving the issues residents care most about than Dana MacAllister. Hired as the city’s new building official, MacAllister helped oversee implementation of a streamlined permit process that makes it easier to both construct new housing and make improvements to existing dwellings.

“When I got here we had 700 building permits backlogged,” Stiles said during a recent interview. “We got a chief building inspector hired, and now we’re down to 60. That backlog should be eliminated by the end of 2023.”

Also coming onboard this past year was a new homeless services coordinator, who will work closely with the staff at Martha’s Village and Kitchen as a new navigation center that broke ground this year is opened.

If all goes as planned in 2024, the facility off McCarthy Road will have 80 units of modular housing, dozens more temporary beds, and offer “wraparound services” ranging from job counseling to family reunification. While not intended as permanent housing, the facility will join three major affordable housing projects currently under construction — including one for seniors that broke ground in October — in addressing residents’ calls for housing across all income levels.

Even without that permanent facility in the city, attempts to address the homeless crisis appeared successful in 2023. Stiles and others are quick to note that many of the city’s most problematic areas now see far fewer reports of open drug use and crime. For that, credit goes to Palm Springs Police Chief Andy Mills, his leadership team, and the officers they command.

The police department launched two new efforts in 2023 that residents said made an immediate difference in the city. They followed “Operation Clean Streets,” which was launched in 2022 and focused primarily on issues impacting downtown.

The first, Operation Relentless Sun, aimed to combat the issue of criminals — both housed and unhoused — preying on the city’s homeless population. The second, dubbed R.I.S.E., (which uses the words resilience, inclusion, supportive, and ending in its acronym), saw officers offer behavioral and medical health services, housing assistance, temporary shelter, and more in area washes each Wednesday morning.

“I hope that people are noticing some differences both downtown and throughout the city,” Stiles said.

Residents certainly noticed a difference in their city when disaster struck this year. Tropical Storm Hilary, mentioned by most readers of The Post as the biggest story of the year, dumped more than three inches of rain at Palm Springs International Airport on Aug. 20, putting Stiles, emergency personnel, and elected officials to the test.

As water rushed through neighborhoods and city streets that Sunday, efforts at filling sandbags the day before paid off. So did preparations by the Palm Springs Fire Department, led by Fire Chief Paul Alvarado, another of Stiles’ new hires in 2023. While a major roadway connecting the city with Interstate 10 — North Indian Canyon Drive — was hit hard by flood waters, there was no loss of life or major injury reported, and very few swift water rescues required.

“Palm Springs leadership protected us so much better than many of our neighboring jurisdictions based on lessons learned during 2019 Valentine Day floods,” noted Ed Dube, a Canyon Estates resident. Added Warren Becker, a resident who lives near Ramon and Sunrise: “It underscored the havoc being caused by climate change in very real terms and forced our community leaders to address the need for resilient infrastructure.”

As the end of the year approached, funding for one of the most crucial pieces of infrastructure needed to alleviate closures of the roadway — closed dozens of times just this year — was secured. On Dec. 7, he California Transportation Commission (CTC) approved $50 million to help install bridges over the wash, helping to solve a decades-long transportation weakness. 

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