06/07/2026
A Message From Our Co-Director: The City of Desert Hot Springs Planning Commission is holding a public hearing on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, at 6:00 PM in Council Chambers at 11999 Palm Drive, Desert Hot Springs, CA 92240. On the agenda is Development Permit No 26-2, called the "Snider Logistic Center" a 1,002,109 square foot warehouse (roughly 17 football fields under one roof) proposed for Calle de los Romos between 18th and 19th Avenue. City staff is recommending approval...... The hearing will also be streamed live on the City of Desert Hot Springs YouTube channel. but it does not seem you can engage online.
I am not a lawyer. I am not a politician. I am a farm girl who runs an animal sanctuary in Sky Valley a dog trainer and behavior consultant, the daughter of immigrants who taught me that when something smells wrong, you do not look away and hope someone else deals with it. You walk toward it. You find out what it is. And right now, standing downwind of this Planning Commission agenda, I can tell you something smells.....
Before we get into the details, you need to know what is at stake and who has been circling this territory turjey vulture style. This warehouse sits in the I-10 corridor which is the same industrial zone that Mission Springs Water District has been trying to expand into using your water infrastructure as leverage. Earlier this year, CVWD's General Manager signed a Letter of Intent to hand our ID-8 domestic water system over to MSWD without a single public hearing, without a board vote, and without any completed financial analysis. That signature was not authorized. When community members demanded records proving the board approved it, the CVWD Clerk responded in writing: no records exist. We fought back. MSWD had 2 directors who saw the potential issues and voted to table, the other 3.... well thats embarassing for them... because even the day after their lawyer said that "CVWDs silence is support"... which was May 27, 2026, CVWD voted to rescind that Letter of Intent and cited it needed board approval. The meeting is publicly available. But the pressure to expand MSWD's reach into this industrial corridor has NOT gone away. A 1-million-square-foot warehouse needs water. Lots of it. And MSWD has been openly positioning itself to be the water provider for exactly this kind of large-scale industrial build-out along the I-10. That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern. And patterns on a farm mean something is either growing or dying. This one does not smell like growth to me.
Now here is what we found when we actually read the 4,804-page packet (Thanks Alani Nu for the boost to keep this research powered) which the public had exactly 11 days to review. This was a multiple people effort thanks to some AMAZING Community members in Sky Valley.
The Fire Department put it in writing!! YOUR Fire Dept... Condition 99 of the approval packet states that this project "will have a cumulative adverse effect on the Fire Department's ability to provide services." In plain language: the Fire Department is telling the city that approving this warehouse will make it harder for them to respond to emergencies in your community. Condition 100 goes further and it says a separate strategic planning review "may" impose additional requirements, and that review has not happened yet. The Commission is being asked to vote yes before the people responsible for your fire protection have finished their own analysis. That is not a technicality. That is a public safety issue. When a house catches fire at 2 AM, do you want your fire department tied up calculating how to cover a million-square-foot building that got approved before anyone finished the math?!?! I don't.
The water supply assessment has not been done ( Insert Bombastic Side Eye Sound) and that violates state law. Under California Water Code Section 10910, also known as SB 610, a water supplier must complete a formal Water Supply Assessment before a project like this gets approved. The assessment has to answer one basic question: is there enough water to actually serve this building? MSWD's own condition buried in the packet, Condition 106, requires that assessment to be done after approval. That is backwards!!! I'm all for backchaining but thats not this. State law says it must come BEFORE. The Commission is being asked to approve a million-square-foot building without anyone having answered the most basic question about whether the water exists to run it. Out where I live, you do not dig a well after you build the house. You find the water first. If it is not there, the community pays the price, not the developer. THATS WRONG.
The parcel number does not match. This sounds like a minor clerical issue. It is not. The parcel number is how the government tracks which piece of land a permit applies to. If the permit is approved with the wrong parcel number, the legal right to build attaches to the wrong piece of land. The staff report says the parcel is 666-350-008. The conditions of approval say it is 666-350-015. The architectural drawings say it is 666-350-080. Three different numbers, three different sections, one packet. If you went to the county recorder to look up which parcel this permit covers, you would get three different answers depending on which page you read. We microchip the animals so there is no confusion about who they belong to. This developer cannot keep straight which piece of land their own project sits on........and staff is recommending approval anyway.........
Now a word about what happens when residents start asking questions out loud.
When I began raising concerns publicly about the ID-8 water fight, the Assistant General Manager of Mission Springs Water District joined a private community group on social media without disclosing who she was or why she was there. When that was discovered and formal complaints were filed, MSWD's law firm sent a letter threatening to sue me if I did not retract my complaints. I want you to sit with that for a moment. A public water agency, funded by ratepayer dollars, accountable to the public, sent a lawyer after a sanctuary farmer in Sky Valley for filing complaints through the proper channels. I did not retract them. I am still here. I grew up watching my family navigate systems that were not built for people to figure it out. I learned early that the threats come when you are getting close to something real. So I kept going. And I am raising these questions tonight because every person in this valley, in Desert Hot Springs, in Sky Valley, in Indio Hills, in Garnet, deserves a water system and a planning process that works for them, not for the developers waiting in line behind this permit.
Desert Hot Springs has spent years and real public dollars building Pierson Boulevard into something worth having, a walkable downtown with local art, local food, and local business owners like the women behind Espresso Self, a community coffee shop on Pierson Blvd that sources from Coachella Valley vendors, and holds a 4.9-star rating from the people who actually live here. Small business owners on Pierson had to earn every customer, source every bean, and build every relationship from scratch. The Snider Logistic Center cannot even keep its parcel number straight across three sections of the same permit application. We deserve to ask out loud: why does a locally owned coffee shop have to clear every bar on its own, while a million-square-foot warehouse gets a staff recommendation for approval despite three unresolved legal deficiencies sitting right there in the packet?
The ask is simple. Table Development Permit No. 26-2 until three things are resolved: the correct parcel number is confirmed and consistent across all documents; a completed Water Supply Assessment is submitted, reviewed, and accepted before any vote; and the Riverside County Fire Department's Strategic Planning review under Condition 100 is finished and any additional conditions are in the record.
If you cannot attend in person, you can submit written comments that become part of the official public record. Email your concerns to Travis Clark [email protected] Eva Lara at [email protected], Patricia Villagomez at [email protected], and City Clerk Jerryl Soriano at [email protected] before my best guess would be 12:00 PM and if its after send it anyway... on June 9, 2026. In your email, state your name, your city of residence, and that you are requesting your comments be entered into the public record for Development Permit No. 26-2, Snider Logistic Center, June 9, 2026 Planning Commission hearing. You may also request that your comments be distributed to all five Planning Commissioners. You do not need to be a Desert Hot Springs resident to comment. Anyone with a concern about this project has the right to be heard.
The physical location is the City Hall 11999 Palm Drive Desert Hot Springs, CA
Want to submit your own request for public records? Here is a how to video https://youtu.be/P520a5dGH-8
Want to view all the public records we have compiled so far? https://esperanzassanctuary.com/leaveid8alone
