Civil Municipal View Feb2023

100 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2 and 70’s we were kind of a bedroom, visiting a community where snowbirds as we call them, from Canada and the northern states came to visit. In the 80s, it became more of a working-class community and by the 1990s it changed from a vacation destination for snowbirds and became really all about the working class. In the 2000s, the city council changed its momentum and focused a lot on tourism and what the community was built around. And that is where we are today.” With available development opportunities in the city, Matas notes that retail and commercial growth is currently on the radar. As the first city in California to embrace legal cannabis, Desert Hot Springs has seen a significant increase in revenue, and while they are continuing to grow and diversify that industry, Sean Smith, Economic Development Director says there is also an effort to ensure the city is focused on a broad array of economic development resources and revenue. “We want to be ahead of the curve as we were initially by embracing that industry,” he explains. “We are looking at business attraction and retention. We recently had a three-and-a- half million-square-foot Amazon logistic facility approved for build-out in our city and they are going through the process now of putting together their building plans. So that’s a huge boon for us, not just from a revenue standpoint, but from a job creation perspective, which is also important to us.” Traditional retail is another area of focus, especially on highway frontage along the I-10 freeway, and highway 62. “Those are very well- trafficked highways, and that presents the last opportunity within our valley for freeway frontage retail,” says Smith. Getting away from big box stores, the city is instead hoping to attract hotels and lodging to this area, which will complement Desert Hot Springs’ growing tourism sector. “Tourism is the number one industry in our valley, by far, and we are this really fantastic gem that has a story that hasn’t been told yet,” Smith maintains.