Listen here:
Flamingo Blossom was pitched at the last community meeting as a retreat center and a community artist space – something that didn’t sit very well with the standing room only crowd back in May.
It was a different scene this last Saturday. Only a handful of neighbors were at the October 5th meeting at the Flamingo Heights Community Center to meet with the developers of the project, which will be built on a 4.4 acre commercially-zoned lot at 777 Old Woman Springs Road.
The developers led with iterations on the design that was shown back in May. What was once twelve cabins and an event space and art gallery situated around a pool with changing rooms has now expanded into nineteen cabins spreading further out on the acreage of the lot, removing the pool and moving the event space to the southeast corner. They also rearranged some buildings, while also adding a kitchen for grab-and-go style food and a community market – changes that partner Mike O’Connor says came from community feedback.
Mike O’Connor is the third partner in the Flamingo Blossom group and led Saturday’s meeting. He was joined by partner and gallery owner Nicholas Fahey and architect Brando McDonnell.. After presenting the project updates – O’Connor took questions from the small audience, which mostly consisted of direct neighbors to the project.
In stark contrast to May’s energetic audience – the question and answer period was framed around Flamingo Blossom being an inevitability, rather than a planned project that the community aimed to stop.
The directness of the question and answer period struck a different tone than last May’s meeting, which often spiraled into raised voices talking over each other. The small handful of neighbors that showed up in person and online had a more resigned tone to their questions – like Debra Melford who has lived in the Flamingo Heights area for 13 years.
The rest of the Q&A period addressed concerns about occupancy for the event space – O’Connor estimated the maximum being around 50 people for a weekend event. Despite the opposition to the project, the conversations had a less confrontational edge than back in May.
Jason Hansen is the acting director of the Flamingo Heights Community Association, and spoke to the dialogue he was seeing at the calmer community meeting..
“We are going to have progress at some point coming in.. and it is just nice to see developers that do want to hear your feedback and that are trying to be good community members.”
Other projects around the hi-desert have faced similar opposition in community meetings – with some of them successfully being stopped due to land-use issues with the county or proposed zoning changes. However the Flamingo Blossom project is planned for a commercially zoned piece of property adjacent to popular high-end restaurant La Copine and the community center that the meeting was taking place in.
“If it’s not us, it’s somebody else. I get offers on that piece of property monthly, so those folks are coming. So hopefully you see what we are trying to do is be respectful of your community and although you may not like us, I’d hope that you can say ‘at least we were transparent with what we were doing the whole time.”
While the dialogue was seemingly appreciated, neighbors like Debra sounded skeptical and a little defeated.
“You have people here that are locally affected by it… and we are, and we can’t stop it . So we just have to figure out how we’re going to address it and as a community how we are going to deal with it. And that’s all we can do.”
