With the city's ballots counted, Palm Springs' two incumbent City Council members, Ginny Foat and Chris Mills, held leads over their 10 challengers Tuesday night.

Foat led all candidates, though Mills wasn't far behind. Their closest competitor was challenger Barbara Beaty.

• 2009 election returns

• Visit mydesert.com/elections for complete election coverage

It’s estimated between 35 and 38 percent of Palm Springs’ 22,500 registered voters participated in Tuesday’s election, according to City Clerk Jay Thompson.

The city typically sees a turnout of nearly 50 percent, but Tuesday’s Palm Springs numbers still surpassed the Riverside County-wide turnout of around 20 percent, Thompson added.

Votes for the race’s qualified write-in candidate, Willie Holland, Sr., will be counted during the hand-inspection of ballots to take place in the coming days, Thompson said.

Write-in ballots first must qualify to be counted.

“You’d be surprised how many votes Mickey Mouse gets,” Thompson said Wednesday.

More than 1,000 vote-by-mail ballots, postmarked before the deadline and received by the Registrar’s office on the day of the election, still had not been counted as of Wednesday, Thompson said.

Barbara Beaty trailed the incumbents by 409 votes and David Carden by 629. Thompson said it was “mathematically possible but statistically improbable” the two challengers would make up the difference.

Councilwoman Ginny Foat said a top priority in her next term is to “help get back on track” Palm Springs’ 30 or so commercial and residential projects approved before the recession — such as the mixed-use Port Lawrence at Alejo and Palm Canyon Drives, as well as the proposed Mondrian and Hard Rock Hotel projects.

“Once you build them everything else will follow in place,” Foat said Tuesday.

Foat said the business conditions downtown aren’t as terrible as some challengers made them out to be during an often tense campaign.

“If you walk downtown, you don't have that many vacant buildings,” Foat said. “Our restaurants are doing well. I think we’re very lucky in these economic times.”

Mayor Pro Tem Chris Mills called keeping the city’s budget balanced amid dwindling tax revenues his top priority in the coming term.

Palm Springs likely will “need to do some belt-tightening” — on top of the cuts to address a $12 million deficit affecting the city budget in the last two fiscal years, Mills said.

“That’s going to be hard to do” because it affects the livelihoods of many city employees and impacts public services and programs, he added.

Both incumbents also identified the Museum Market Plaza specific plan, expected to come before Council later this month, as a top priority. The plan includes the Desert Fashion Plaza, which local leaders and businesses say is vital to revitalize downtown.

Foat and Mills had appeared confident at their campaign parties, held at the Hotel Zoso and Palm Springs Hilton, respectively.

“An election is a job review, and I'm proud of the job review,” Foat told supporters.

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

A bevy of candidates joined this year's council race in an election cycle dominated by discussion on how to solve the city's growing number of empty downtown storefronts.

Many of the 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 happen quick,” candidate Barbara Beaty said during a public forum in October.

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

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 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.”

Wessman drops in

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.

During the campaign, Foat accused Wessman of “holding the city hostage for many years.”

That didn't stop Wessman and Wessman Development Co. vice president Michael Braun from making an appearance at Foat's party Tuesday.

“Hey, listen, I think she's doing a good job,” Wessman said. He called her comments “political.”

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

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 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's Office.

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. “I appreciate what they did,” he said at a forum.

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

The most recent campaign filings showed the incumbents far outpacing the challengers, financially.

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 brought 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 — leaving his total campaign war chest at 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.