After years of tense, often terse, discussions with Wessman Development Co., the Palm Springs City Council looks next month to take a key step toward resurrecting the Desert Fashion Plaza.

City officials announced this week that the widely anticipated “Museum Market Plaza Specific Plan,” which aims to set special height and design guidelines in a downtown area that includes the Fashion Plaza, will come before the City Council for approval at its Nov. 18 meeting.

The city's broad specific plan has been criticized by some as too lofty and expensive to develop.

Wessman Development even asked the city to abandon the proposal.

However, the plan's latest version features changes that will allow Desert Fashion Plaza owner John Wessman to renovate the mostly defunct 12-acre property as he sees fit, city officials say.

“The key thing here is, Mr. Wessman's remodel proposal fits nicely within the specific plan,” City Manager David Ready said Thursday.

The Desert Fashion Plaza revamp has been estimated to cost $50 million over several phases of work.

Many people in Palm Springs see the mall's renovation as a critical part in ongoing efforts to breathe new life into Palm Springs' downtown corridor.

“Some of the issues ... have been resolved,” Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet said during a joint meeting with the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians Tribal Council on Wednesday. “We feel pretty good ... we're ready for whatever it is.”

Michael Braun, senior vice president of Wessman Development, was cautiously optimistic Thursday.

“We are on the right path,” he said.

But Wessman, the Palm Springs-based development company, which purchased Desert Fashion Plaza in 2001, still has concerns about the latest specific plan version.

It lacks “the very clear defined language” to allow for a crucial new east-west street that would run through the mall, from the Palm Springs Art Museum to the Spa Resort Casino Hotel, Braun said.

“I need to demonstrate to my lenders and my retailers that that traffic circulation” can happen in the future, Braun said Thursday.

Without that language in the plan, “It just makes it more difficult to attract the kind of retail that downtown is looking for.”

And without the new street, the mall could lose a potential tenant interested in bringing a 14-screen movie theater and bowling alley to the renovated mall, Braun said.

Once that tenant signs on, a bookstore, restaurants and other retail could follow, he added.

Whatever the fate of the proposed street, “we will continue to work to make that project happen,” Braun said, referring to the mall renovation.

If the council approves the specific plan, the next step toward a new mall would be for the city to sign an “owners participation agreement” with Wessman, Ready said.

Such an agreement details the city and developer's financial obligations to the project, he said

But even after that step, it still may be years before the opening of a new Desert Fashion Plaza.

Once the city and developer ink an agreement, it will take about two years to complete all the required planning and approvals, Braun said.

It would then take nearly two years more to build the renovation's first phase, he said.