Twentynine Palms Planning Commission begin updating 15-year old City General Plan

Community Development Director Keith Gardner informed the meeting that on August 26 2025, the Planning Commission gave the direction to begin the process to update the General Plan which has not been updated in almost 15 years.

The City’s current general plan includes land use, circulation, housing, conservation/open space, noise, safety, recreation, equity/environmental justice. As there is no budget available to hire outside consultants, City staff has been working on the Plan update to determine what needs to be reviewed and have come up with five goals. These include land use designations that should reflect current lot sizes and actual developments. So far each parcel within City limits has been identified along with ownership and zoning designations.

Keith Gardner explained: “Where appropriate, new land uses may be developed or existing land uses may be consolidated or simplified. The reason why I’m saying that, I believe we have six commercial zones, commercial land use designations. We may come to the conclusion that that is too many just as a discussion point right now.

“That is part of this process. And of course historical and environmental considerations also play an important part in this. If there are environmental hazards such as geologic hazards, flood control hazards, those should be taken into consideration as well.

“We have numerous specific plans that are quite old and if you read them they may or may not be relevant to today’s world. So we’re going to have to go through those and determine whether or not we wish to carry them forward into a new general plan or handle them separately. So those are our overall approaches to updating the general plan.”

The Planning Commissioners all confirmed they approved of the direction the General Plan was taking.