Contact Don Thompson at campaign@donthompson.org for more information

To the citizens of Cathedral City

There are many things that concern me about Cathedral City nowadays and I am running for City Council to make a serious effort to change things. 

I applaud the North Cathedral City plan and the impending arrival of a new Stater Bros. store and a fine apartment complex in the north end of the city. However, I think attention should be paid right now to our original downtown area, now a series of vacant lots. There are acres of undeveloped land east of Cathedral Canyon Drive. This area has been empty for years and it’s well overdue for commercial and residential development. There will very soon be no grocery store south of Ramon apart from Trader Joes, which, though excellent, has limited supplies. Such a venture would be welcomed by the many residents in the south of the city and the land is right there for it. The affordable housing project is a start but that took the best part of five years to complete and a similar delay would be unacceptable. The area east of the Mary Pickford theatre is also crying out for development. An attempt was made to close the little restaurant row there so that the development could begin. Thankfully vigorous protests by the restaurant owners forced a change in that plan. That’s a charming part of Cathedral City, as opposed to the almost empty new shopping/restaurant development anchored by Trilusa Restaurant. Store owners there were enticed into moving into that development by the promise of foot traffic from new hotels. But neither promised hotel has yet materialized and many stores are now closed and good people made bankrupt.

The long promised Sheraton still shows no signs of progress, and the Boutique hotel promised for the space next to the IMAX seems to have sunk without trace. Action needs to be taken.

Sam’s Club, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Albertson’s at Ramon and Date Palm have all closed. Smart and Final is scheduled to close soon. Why are all these vital businesses moving away? What are Palm Springs and Palm Desert doing that Cathedral City is not? I mean to find out and attempt to stop this hemorrhaging. The absence of sales taxes from those businesses and the loss of occupancy taxes from the missing hotels is a principal cause of the city going $5 million into the red this coming year.  Measure Q failed to pass and some other inventive steps need to be taken to raise funds.

A good sign is the arrival of the Burlington Coat Factory and some new businesses in the old Wal-Mart Building but that should be just a start.

A new bridge is to be constructed over the wash on Cathedral Canyon but that will take years. In the meantime, when that wash is flooded and impassable, people in the gated communities just north of the wash are in great jeopardy. Police and emergency services would have to drive a circuitous route to get there. The CCFD average response time is 4-6 minutes. A person having a stroke or heart attack can die before that time and that time could be seriously increased if the wash is flooded. Some action needs to be taken to correct this problem as soon as possible.

 There is a huge population of retired people living on fixed incomes in Cathedral City.

I also am retired from my job with the state of California and would make it a priority to look after the interests of our older citizens if elected.

Sincerely,

Don Thompson

MORE TO COME!
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Updated March 27, 2008