Twentynine Palms Strategic Planning: Looking Forward, Looking Back
We recap the 2023-2025 strategic planning top ten. The City's strategic planning sessions take place Friday, April 4, and Saturday, April 5.
The City of Twentynine Palms will be holding strategic planning sessions on Friday, April 4, and Saturday, April 5. This will be your chance to give your input to help shape policy that guides the how the City tackles housing, economic development, crime, infrastructure, and emergency responses, among many other issues.
In January 2023, the City Council held planning sessions and councilmembers outlined what they saw as the top priorities. The Desert Trumpet thought it would be useful to recap the “Strategic Planning Top 10” produced by City Council during the January 2023 sessions—see our article 29's STRATEGIC PLANNING TOP 10-ISH for details on how those sessions were conducted.
The 2025 sessions promise to have a very different look and feel as a professional consultant, Moore Iacofano Goltsman, Inc. (MIG), was hired at the cost of $36,360 to outline a 20-year strategic plan, which includes goal setting at one-year, three-year, and five-year intervals looking toward the future. We’ve just received the draft agenda for these sessions from the City Manager and will provide details for our readers in a few days. In the meantime, mark your calendar as we have not verified whether these sessions will be live-streamed:
Friday, April 4, 2025, 5 pm in Council Chambers — an overview of all City Departments, including recent accomplishments and current projects.
Saturday, April 5, 10 am, probably Freedom Plaza — a five-hour workshop for visioning and strategic planning looking toward 2030.
It’s been two years since the proposed 2023-2025 “Top Ten” was codified by City Council in March 2023. Here’s where that list stands today.
1. New Shelter / Animal Control
At the conclusion of the City Council Candidate forum held in September 2024, outgoing District 2 Councilmember Joel Klink exclaimed from the bleachers:
This was not brought up, and I think it's a very good question to ask all five of those members right now. Me being on the Council after 20 years, I'm done. But there's one big area where you guys being on the Council are going to have to deal with — it’s our animal shelter. How are you going to get the money to get a new animal shelter built? And when do you want to do this? It's got to be soon.
Since then, some progress has been made toward what is likely a $10 million project.1 City staff have conducted a detailed needs assessment, worked up an initial program design with partner Miller Architecture and Shelter Planners of America, and are working on hydrology and engineering for the updated site. Their goal is to present the project and solicit feedback by summer 2025.
2. Addition of a Sheriff Detective
On August 22, 2023, City Council introduced two new detectives, Alex Thimbaugh and Shane Crowell, assigned to the Morongo Basin Sheriff's Station, specifically serving the city of Twentynine Palms.
3. Ballfield Lights
Only one bid was received for the replacement of 22 dilapidated wood light poles and dated lights at Luckie Park. A $1,349,383 contract with Qualite Sports Lighting was approved in February 2024. The replacement was started in July 2024 and physically completed in November 2024. Programming and onboarding took place the first week of January 2025. The new LED lights are expected to be more energy efficient than the old lights, and an energy savings assessment should be completed by January 2026.
4. Theatre 29 Expansion
Theatre 29 is a nonprofit presenting family-oriented community theater productions. Currently, the City of Twentynine Palms, which owns the building, leases the Sullivan Road property to Theatre 29 for $1 per year. $2.7 million slated for expansion and upgrades was folded into a grant proposal for Pioneer Park that failed, as we reported in June 2022, landing the expansion at number four on the top ten. Had the grant been successful, the theater would have increased seating from 90 to 148 seats along with other upgrades. Lighting was recently upgraded via a private donation.
5. Housing and Homeless Advisory Committee
On April 25, 2023, the Twentynine Palms City Council approved the appointments of Andrea Keller, an architect, and hotel owner Veno Nathraj to the Housing and Homeless Committee, which also consisted of all five Planning Commission members, forcing it to meet as part of Planning Commission meetings. On May 16, 2023, the Planning Commission held a study session on Housing and Homeless Committee organization for which the usual camera was turned off, a precedent that continued for most Committee meetings.
Highlights of these meetings included a November 7, 2023 presentation by Andrea Keller on hotel housing conversions, which we covered in our article Possibilities for the Unhoused, and conversations as to how the City might best handle services for the unhoused. A plan for a navigation center (now referred to as a resource center) and mobile showers remains unfulfilled.
The Committee continued to meet sporadically until May 7, 2024, when a surprise meeting/study session was held and neither Keller nor Nathraj were present — the last meeting had been adjourned to May 21. The Committee was then suspended by Community Development Director Keith Gardner without input from the public members.
They reconvened on November 4 to review a proposal from Molding Hearts, which was eventually accepted by City Council on November 12. Molding Hearts2 reported on their progress at the January 28, 2025 City Council meeting.
6. Events
Two new grant programs can be attributed to “events” landed at #6: City Council Community Events Grants and the Tourism Business Improvement District (TBID) Sponsorship and Event Grants.
The Community Events Grants were initiated in June 2023 with $50,000 set aside from City Council to support mostly cultural events intended for residents. They ran for two fiscal years, July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024 and July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025 and funded venues such as the 29 Palms Art Gallery and Sky’s the Limit as well as supported events ranging from a choral performance to a food festival. Applicants were reviewed by a two-member Council subcommittee, which made recommendations to City Council for funding. While the application improved with clearer and more comprehensive questions the second year, the program still lacked a transparent process for selection. It’s also unclear if this program will be funded in the July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026 budget.
The TBID Sponsorship and Event Grants were created when City Council directed TBID to spend its $200,000 of its reserves on funding events geared to supporting tourism. The first grants were given in early 20243 and funded everything from the 29 Palms Book Festival, To 29 and Beyond — an evening mixing comedy, science and astronomy to a series of health and wellness activities with a focus on queer spaces at DESERTRADE. These grants are continuing and the next deadline is April 1 for events taking place between July 1 to December 31, 2025.
While a goal of the program has been to cultivate and support annual signature events, so far only the Book Festival has run more than once.
There is also some controversy surrounding whether the events funded by TBID are affecting tourism with stakeholders requesting better accountability and grant management. However, business owners such as Mike Usher have pushed for a system that “prioritizes community building and community events because building and investing in our community is how we increase tourism.”
7. IT Improvements
The primary focus for IT improvements in 2023-2025 has been cybersecurity, with “tremendous progress enhancing and streamlining our security posture.” Per staff, “effective Cybersecurity is a never-ending process of adaptation and education.”
In addition to beefing up security, investments were made in ongoing IT education for all staff, and inter-departmental data sharing capabilities were enhanced, increasing efficiency. Enhancing video streaming capabilities for better public access and reliability is on-going. Staff also noted that “inflationary pressure continues to impact the number of projects we can complete.”
8. Debt financing to pay for major improvements
During the strategic planning sessions, Councilmember Daniel Mintz advocated for utilizing debt financing to fund significant City improvements. This would mean consolidating several projects, such as renovations to Palms and Paws and Theatre 29, under a single loan, enabling them to be completed more quickly as the City pays off costs over time. This approach was part of the preliminary two-year General Fund budget for fiscal years 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, which was set for approval in July 2023. The budget acknowledged that these renovations would require leveraging specific financing beyond the City's current fiscal layout.
We tried contacting Councilmember Mintz, but were unable to obtain specifics on the current status of this item.
9. Revenue Augmentation to pay for debt financing
Item 9 follows from item 8. How would the City pay down this debt? Several times in recent years Council has discussed the possibility of raising the Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) and/or sales taxes to finance needed improvements. In October 2023 Probolsky Research conducted a survey that appeared to float the concept of a sales tax increase to fund renovation of the animal shelter among other needs. This followed a 2021 survey that queried residents about a 1.25% increase to fund sewer construction. A third survey “to gauge community needs” using a different firm was recommended by City Manager James at the January 25, 2025, Council meeting.
Councilmembers have pointed out that, unlike a loan, taxes are ultimately decided upon by a vote of residents and, to date, a ballot measure not been brought forward by Council.
10. Emergency Response Plan
Within 18 months of the phrase “FEMA EMERGENCY PLAN” receiving three out of five Councilmember votes of support in January 2023, the City was hit by catastrophic flooding in July 2024. The floods laid bare the need for a more comprehensive approach to disaster response. The flooding was our #2 story of 2024 and we recapped progress — or lack thereof — in that report.
City code 2.20.080 outlines the formation of a “Disaster Council” that “shall be responsible for the development of the City's Emergency Plan. Such plan shall take effect upon adoption by resolution of the City Council.”
In February 2025, the City announced Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Basic Training courses taking place in March and April. These free sessions equip residents with essential skills in disaster preparedness, fire safety, light search and rescue, team organization and basic medical operations. In 2021, the City adopted a hazard mitigation plan, which is intended to minimize the impact of disasters through actions in advance.
However, while there have been internal rumblings of progress within City departments, an actual Emergency Response Plan hasn’t yet been presented to Council.
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On January 10, 2025, Molding Hearts was sent a Delinquency Notice from the DOJ indicating that Charitable Trust reports were due for 2019 through 2023. DOJ also advised that failure to respond within 60 days would result in a notice to the Franchise Tax Board and potential revocation of tax-exempt status. Per a March 3 email to the Desert Trumpet from the California Attorney General’s Press Office, “Generally, a charitable organization’s registration must be in good standing to operate; delinquent organizations are not in good standing and may not solicit or disburse charitable funds. (Code Cal. Regs., tit. 11, section 312.).” A search conducted on March 30 indicates that Molding Hearts remains delinquent with the DOJ.
Disclosure, I helped design the TBID grant process and sat on the TBID grants subcommittee for a short time.