Developer presents 20-acre mixed-use project for Highway 111 corridor

The Indio Planning Commission reviewed preliminary plans for a 20-acre mixed-use development to be located at the southwest corner of Highway 111 and Madison Street that would bring apartments, retail space, electric vehicle charging, and a hotel to the corridor.

Schmid Desert Investments presented the Madison Pointe project at the Planning Commission meeting on Wednesday.

The first phase includes three commercial buildings along Highway 111: a 2,400-square-foot Starbucks with drive-thru, a 3,600-square-foot Quick Quack car wash, a 5,500-square-foot retail building, and an electric vehicle charging station with 20 ultra-fast chargers off Madison Street.

Jim Fitzpatrick, a representative of the owner, noted that a relative of the developer purchased another 19 acres across the street to the east of the Madison Pointe project. Those 19 acres are currently home to the Madison St. Produce farm stand.

“So really, the team that you’re in front of [has] 40 acres of blank canvas we’re trying to paint,” JIm Fitzpatrick, a representative for the developer, said. “This 40 acres is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform Indio in a major market window and in the gateway to the city.”

The developer changed course from the original 400-unit senior housing project approved in 2022 after determining it was not financially feasible.

“For senior projects in this market area, rents hadn’t gone up in two years, so we kind of were at a ceiling of what that number would look like,” Fitzpatrick said. 

He added that high construction costs and slow absorption rates also made the original four-story senior project unworkable.

The revised residential component calls for 300 market-rate one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments in two- and three-story buildings. The apartment complex will be gated, and commissioners wondered about the possibility of traffic backing up onto Highway 111.

“We have to go through long studies with the different departments about how it queues to ensure that doesn’t happen… the gates are offset to allow enough cars to get through there,” Fitzpatrick said.

Vice Chair Gloria Franz warned the developer that the city has been staunchly against “auto-related uses” along Highway 111.

“I’m not on council,” Franz said. “But I wanted to give you a heads up that [Quick Quack has] come here before, multiple times, and it has not worked out for them.”

Fitzpatrick said the design team is confident in its plan. He compared it to the recently opened Quick Quack car wash in La Quinta, located about one-and-a-half miles west from the Madison Pointe project site.

“It’s open right now, very successful. They called it a soft opening, but it didn’t look like a soft opening to me today,” he said. “They have a brick wall up front. What we’re proposing is better than what La Quinta is offering.”

He said their plans called for berms and thick landscaping to buffer the car wash from the street and said the car wash is just “five percent” of the property.

Another piece of the plan, the L3.Energy charging station, would operate under streamlined state approval processes requiring cities to approve EV charging applications within 20 business days and limiting review to health and safety issues only.

The charging station would include solar canopies over the charging spaces, commercial battery storage in a 2,500-square-foot area, and a 3,000-square-foot artisan grocery store. The developer emphasized the store would focus on grocery items for home meal preparation rather than traditional convenience store products like alcohol, tobacco, or lottery tickets.

Future phases would add up to 130 hotel rooms and 30,000 square feet of medical office space. The developer also proposed installing solar panels over a 1.6-acre retention basin with a perimeter walking path for residents.

The project has to return to the Planning Commission to seek its formal recommendation to the city council, which Fitzpatrick said would happen sometime early next year.

---