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Palm Desert council weighs keeping Portola interchange in mobility element amid steep cost uncertainty
Summary
City staff and consultants asked the Palm Desert City Council whether to retain the Portola Avenue interchange in the mobility element. Consultants estimated the 2018 construction cost of $88 million could be roughly $120'$140 million today and requested $18,000 to update design, cost and funding options; council signaled support to keep the interchange in the plan and asked staff to return with more detail.
City staff and outside consultants told the Palm Desert City Council on June 26 that the council must decide whether to keep the Portola Avenue interchange in the city's mobility (circulation) element as part of an ongoing update to the general plan.
Jason Pack, principal with consultant firm Farr and Piers, said the interchange is shown in the city's adopted 2016 mobility element but that a 2024 council resolution had deprioritized the Portola Road project "mostly because of a lack of funding at the state, federal, level." He said key technical steps on the project were completed earlier in the decade but that funding and changing standards complicate moving forward.
Pack said the project reached a PAED (project approval/environmental document) milestone in April 2018 and a PS&E (plans, specifications and estimates) milestone in April 2022, but he told the council the work has been "fairly stalled" since 2022 because funding has not been available. He cited a 2018 construction estimate of about $88,000,000 and said, "If I had to guess, in…
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