One PS - January 2023 Meeting

Vista Las Palmas Neighborhood Organization One PS Meeting

ONE PS - January 2023 Meeting

Hello neighbors,

The ONE-PS meeting for January 2023 was held Tuesday evening in person at the Palm Springs Pavilion and via Zoom. Your neighborhood representatives from Vista Las Palmas were there via Zoom.

Below are the highlights from the meeting so that you can be fully informed about important issues.

Councilmember Ron deHarte – City Council has three major focuses: homelessness, crime and affordable housing. Plan to leverage care court/conservatorship laws to address homelessness. Funds flow to the county opposed to towns/cities. Homelessness at airport is a problem. Police are addressing it.

Acknowledged work on “Reparations”. Lots of work still needs to be done. “Still early on in the conversation.” Premature to talk about cash payouts at this time. How will any settlement be paid for? Determination of “Who was harmed?”  What is the Indians’ culpability in Reparations? Etc.

Mayor Lisa Middleton was absent.

Interim City Manager Theresa Gallavan - One more round of interviews for the City Manager position. (Please recall, former City Manager Justin Clifton resigned last September after 15 months on the job.) Talked about Palm Springs applying to become a “Blue Zone”. The benefits include improving the quality of life, longer life span, among others. Where are these areas of improvement? The study cost $85K and has been paid for out of General Fund.

Additional information on Blue Zone can be found at: https://www.bluezones.com/

City has kicked off its FY24 Budget process. Assign committee assignments (who sits on which committees.)

ONE-PS Chair Peter Sipkin - Going forward ONE-PS meetings will be held at the Police Training Center on Civic Drive.  The new start time will be 4pm to accommodate the police training schedule.  A new venue was selected in part due to the poor acoustics at the Pavilion and technical difficulties. The Police Training Center provides a better meeting environment. In addition, it has better audio/visual equipment to facilitate Zoom meetings and the like.

PSPD Lt Mike Villegas - Almost fully staffed. PSPD partnering with neighborhoods to build better relationships. PSDP strives to keep open communication and have everyone on the same page. Reviewed police boundaries. VLP is in Area 3.

Sustainability LP McCloy - Saturday February 4th is the next shredding event planned from 8am to 12pm at City Hall.  The food waste collection effort is off to a good start, and they are seeing the uptake of the program as expected.   People are asking for smaller size bins, but there is a limit because of the mechanics of the garbage trucks. Suggested sharing bins with neighbors.

Single use plastic and Styrofoam ban is now in effect. City now entering the “enforcement phase”. The code enforcement hotline is (760) 778-8434 to report violations.

Turf rebates are still available. programs.dwa.org/rebates/grass_removal

Events Committee — is soliciting volunteers for the various events sponsored by ONE-PS. Please see the ONE-PS website (link below) for specific events and volunteer needs.  Over 1K people attended the annual picnic. $10K was raised. The events committee is also soliciting ideas for neighborhood booths to increase visibility of a neighborhood.

https://www.one-ps.org/projectsevents.html

Office of Neighborhoods Denise Goolsby - If you are interested on being on Denise’s mailing list, please reach out to her directly at denise.goolsby@palmspringsca.gov .

We hope you find this informative and hope to see you around the neighborhood.

-

Steve Orr and Gustav Swanson