Palm Springs Addresses City Cleanliness

A spring cleaning is in the works in downtown Palm Springs after we aired a story last week about dirty sidewalks, stained benches, and overflowing trash cans.

Last week city leaders told us they would take action, so on Monday morning we checked it out and found that the city had delivered on its word.

“We as merchants had some issues, we went to the right people of the city to report it and now they’re getting fixed right before our very eyes, what more can you ask for,” said Joy Meredith, President of Main Street Palm Springs.

Meredith returned to work Monday morning to find a much cleaner downtown.

“I was mildly surprised that it was that quick actually, cause I just figured they have so much on their plate this time of year. I was empathizing that they certainly wouldn’t be able to do it right away cause they’re so busy,” Meredith said.

Last week, she toured downtown with code enforcement, maintenance, and other city leaders to address some cleanliness concerns. Many areas showed stained sidewalks, dirty sticky benches, dirty trash cans, cigarette butts and other trash littered along the streets.

Meredith says as a small resort city, the city’s image should always be at its best.

“You know,I think its really an all year thing honestly because its about pride of ownership for the merchants and for the locals and then the visitors come to, that is important, but really, I think we just want the locals to feel particularly proud of downtown,” Meredith said.

We spoke to city leaders last week about how they would be handling merchants’ concerns, and they told us changes would come immediately.

“Well, you’re recent report caused us to accelerate our schedule, we’ve been going through the city painting trash cans, benches nightly,” said Patrick Sweeney, Director of Maintenance and Facilities for the City of Palm Springs.

And they plan to keep up on their schedule.

“Our goal is to of course improve what we do down here and we want our tourists, and merchants and taxpayers to be proud of us and our downtown,” said Sweeney.

“I was very happy to just see it done, and when I saw the finished product it was just awesome that they got that done so fast,” added Meredith.

Moving forward the city says it wants to get ahead of the game doing this type of maintenance during the summer months, rather than during the middle of the season when tourists are in town.