Acrisure Arena, now completed and sitting along the north side of Interstate 10, is hard to miss for frequent travelers through the Coachella Valley — but where exactly has the $500 million project been built?
At least three names have been given for the location at different times — Thousand Palms, Palm Desert and “Greater Palm Springs” — so it can get confusing. And there's even a fourth possibility: Cathedral City.
The arena, which will host the valley’s new minor league hockey team, along with plenty of other entertainers, was originally slated for downtown Palm Springs, but the plan faced hurdles due to concerns about traffic and parking in the bustling tourist area. The COVID-19 pandemic also forced the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians to leave the project.
Music industry titan Irving Azoff, a leading partner in developing the arena, said at the site’s ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday there was “big pressure” to move the project outside the Coachella Valley after the plan in Palm Springs fell through.
Instead, in 2020, arena officials managed to move their project to the mid-valley on an unincorporated piece of land owned by the H.N. and Frances Berger Foundation, located just across the freeway from Palm Desert.
The project, which won unanimous approval from the Riverside County Board of Supervisors last year, is located within the official boundaries of Thousand Palms, an unincorporated area with nearly 8,000 residents.
However, the arena has a Palm Desert address listed on its website, and the U.S. Postal Service also lists its address as in Palm Desert.
That’s because the arena’s ZIP code, 92211, largely covers Palm Desert, meaning any place in that postal code has the city in its address. Joyce Szudzik, the arena’s vice president of marketing, noted a similar dynamic with the adjacent Classic Club north of the interstate.
“It has to do with the post office that services us, and the smaller Thousand Palms post office cannot handle a business of our size,” Szudzik said.
But while the arena’s Palm Desert address is more a technicality than a straightforward truth at this point, the land where it sits could someday be incorporated within the city’s limits.
Thomas Soule, a Palm Desert city spokesperson, told The Desert Sun there has been some discussion within city hall about annexing the arena site, “but no action steps have been taken at this point.”
“I expect this may be a topic on the table when council meets to discuss its goals for the coming year,” Soule said. “That meeting will be sometime in early 2023, so we’ll know more at that point.”
As if the Palm Desert-Thousand Palms dynamic wasn’t enough, one other municipality — Cathedral City — also has some stake in the area. The arena, despite being about 10 miles east of city limits, falls within Cathedral City’s county-designated “sphere of influence,” which identifies areas of future growth and possible annexation.
The Cathedral City Council has had recent discussions about possibly annexing Thousand Palms into its borders. But Mayor Rita Lamb said any plans are still in the research phase, and the city has not gone forward with any actions or community outreach.
Riverside County’s Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, makes decisions over local annexations, as well as incorporations, special district formations and agency consolidations, among other tasks. The commission, which includes county, city and special agency representatives, meets monthly.
Meanwhile, when the arena opened Wednesday night with a Chris Rock-Dave Chappelle concert, the company that runs it sent out a press release entitled, “Acrisure Arena in Greater Palm Springs officially opens its doors.”
Desert Sun staff writers Andrew John and Ani Gasparyan contributed to this report.
Tom Coulter covers the cities of Palm Desert, La Quinta, Rancho Mirage and Indian Wells. Reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter @tomcoulter_.
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