With the city’s absentee ballots counted, Palm Springs’ two incumbent council members, Mayor Pro Tem Chris Mills and Councilwoman Ginny Foat, held a fairly sizeable Tuesday night lead over their 10 challengers.

Foat led all candidates in absentee count with 2,039 votes, and Mills wasn’t far behind with 1,959. Their closest competitor, popular anti-incumbent candidate Barbara Beaty, trailed Mills by 422 votes. The absentee ballots represented 35 percent of the total vote, according to the Riverside County Registrar’s office.

Foat and Mills appeared confident at their campaign parties, held at the neighboring Palm Springs Hilton and Zoso hotels. “An election is a job review, and I’m proud of the job review,” Foat told her supporters at the Zoso.

“Our campaign – we did everything we wanted to do,” Mills added at the Hilton.

Robert Imber, of Palm Springs Modern Tours, zipped through the Zoso lobby on a Segway scooter with a giant blue "Vote Foat" sign. He uses the Segways for his guided tours of the city's architecture, and he said several supporters were out on the Segways drumming up support for Foat earlier in the day.

Even Desert Fashion Plaza developer John Wessman, whom Foat accused of "holding the city hostage" during the campaign, made an appearance at Foat's Zoso campaign bash.

“Hey, listen, I think she’s doing a good job,” Wessman said as he left. He called her earlier comments “political.”

“It’s campaigning,” he said. “We all have to work together. Hopefully that’ll happen … We’ll see.”

Mills had not endorsed any other Palm Springs City Council candidates during the campaign. When asked if he there was anyone he wanted to see win, now that the campaign was over, Mills first checked his watch and then said: “I think the current City Council works very well together” and it would be good for Palm Springs for it to remain intact.

Dozens of Mills supporters, including former Palm Springs Mayor Will Kleindienst, gathered at the Palm Springs Hilton on Tuesday. Shortly before the first numbers were released, a television in the background showed the Los Angeles Lakers battling the lowly Oklahoma City Thunder.

Was Mills, a Council member since 2001 and a big Lakers fan, more nervous about the Lakers’ chances to win, or his own?

“I don’t know that I’m nervous. I’m anticipating,” Mills said. “Our campaign, we did everything we wanted to do.”

A bevy of candidates – 12 in all – joined this year’s Palm Springs City Council race for two open seats, in an election cycle dominated by discussion on how to solve the city’s growing number of empty downtown storefronts.

Many of the 10 challengers promised to guide Palm Springs with fresh, business-friendly ideas to help fill the storefronts and restore the city’s image as a hip, celebrity playground.

“All we have to do is look at Palm Springs’ downtown and realize we need something to happenquick,” Beaty said during a public forum in October.

Meanwhile, Mills and Foat argued that their experience could carefully steer the tourism-dependent city out of the recession and back to prosperity.

“It’s frustrating to listen to people who have not spent one month on a board commission and contributed to understanding how this city works,” Mills told the Desert Sun Editorial Board in September. “Because you don’t learn it two months prior to an election.”

And throughout the campaign, the challengers and incumbents debated how much blame for Palm Springs’ conditions should be lumped on the global economic recession.

Candidates such as David Carden, Michael Gallardo and Jim Osterberger said Palm Springs downtown businesses have faced obstacles to their success by the city for some 10 years.

Mills and Councilwoman Ginny Foat stressed that the economic conditions affecting Palm Springs are hurting business and development in cities across the country. “The empty shops are everywhere,” Mills said. “Not just Palm Springs.”

Candidates and challengers also frequently debated the city’s decision to sell park properties, the Palm Canyon Theater and the Village Green to the city’s redevelopment agency.

Beaty and Drew Sweatte, 22, led the charge among challengers who questioned whether that transaction followed the purpose of redevelopment — to fight blight and increase revenue. Beaty called it “unethical” but not “illegal.”

Sweatte went further and called for an investigation by the Riverside County District Attorney.

Mills disagreed, calling the purchases “certainly well within the privy of the RDA.”

Challenger David Carden agreed. “I think it was the right decision at the right time” with the state raiding redevelopment coffers, said Carden, whose campaign stressed his Palm Springs neighborhood involvement, at a forum. “I appreciate what they did,” he said.

Sweatte, a self-described conservative pro-business gay candidate, stirred controversy when his 2005 letter to a Spokane newspaper describing himself as a “proudly anti-homosexual Republican” surfaced in September.

The most recent campaign filings showed the incumbents far outpacing the challengers.
Councilwoman Ginny Foat led all candidates and reported receiving nearly $49,000 in contributions between Sept. 20 and Oct. 17, according to her campaign’s disclosure statements filed with the city. That brings her campaign war chest for the year to more than $77,000.

Councilman Chris Mills, who led all candidates during the last financial disclosure period, reported in the latest round receiving nearly $30,000 — bringing his total campaign war chest to more than $57,000.

Among the 10 challengers, David Carden’s funding most closely rivaled those of the incumbents — reporting a war chest of $40,000 raised and spent on the year.

As election night passes, city officials continue to work on a potential deal with developer John Wessman and his downtown 12-acre Desert Fashion Plaza property, considered key toward breathing life into a downtown that many merchants say has declined for years.

That mall project, estimated at about $50 million, is still years away from completion, officials say.