Palm Desert adopts $112 million budget amid council scrutiny of police spending and transparency

The Palm Desert City Council adopted a $112 million General Fund budget for fiscal year 2027, a 2.3% increase compared to the current fiscal year’s spending driven by increased public safety and infrastructure spending.

Major capital improvement projects dominate city spending, with roughly two thirds of general fund spending going to infrastructure, such as rebuilding and remodeling Fire Station 33 in El Paseo and Fire Station 71 on Country Club Drive, together costing more than $20 million. 

Other big-ticket city infrastructure items are a stormwater retention basin at Cook Street and Gerald Ford Drive ($5 million), improvements to Housing Authority homes ($3.4 million), and sidewalk and other mobility improvements ($3.2 million).

A high-level summary of the budget presented capital improvement spending as slightly offset by a decrease in fire services spending. The summary includes a $20 million “capital projects” budget item within last year’s public safety accounting that isn’t present in this year’s. 

The summary also shows an increase in police spending over last year, most of which is spent on contracted Riverside County sheriffs. However, while contracts with the sheriffs themselves only rose by 1% in cost, a new $1.5 million contingency fund pushed year-over-year spending growth to 7%.

Councilmember Karina Moreno asked about the contingency fund during the council meeting, noting that a contingency fund of $85,000 from FY24/25 went unused.

“If our public safety partners didn’t request that, how did the figure go from $85,000 to 1.5 million,” she asked.

Budget Analyst Skky Wolkowicz said that the Riverside Sheriff’s Office initially asked for more, but the city determined their spending needs to be around $30 million based on an accounting of newly itemized police spending.

“When we started to evaluate all of the actuals that they were spending over the course of five years, we brought that number down,” she said.

However, the city manager added a $1.5 million contingency fund in case sheriff’s department spending ends up in line with their initial request and not the city’s expectations.

“The city manager decided that we should have a contingency in place” just in case, said Wolkowicz

Mayor Pro Tem Joe Pradetto said that he believed in previous years, the city made a detailed view of the budget more accessible. 

Councilmember Moreno described her difficulty in reaching a single, comprehensive view of the proposed budget, and held up a thick physical copy of last year’s budget as a contrast. She reprimanded the staff for not making more accessible the same transparency it has asked for from others this year.

“This doesn’t feel that way at all, and we need to do better to provide consistency in the services,” she said.

Staff said technical issues with renovations to the city website were partly to blame, and said they would do better next year.