Rancho Mirage swears in new council members Meg Marker, Lynn Mallotto

Two newcomers were sworn into the Rancho Mirage City Council on Thursday, marking the most substantial turnover among the city’s elected officials in several years.

The two new members, Meg Marker and Lynn Mallotto, took their oaths of office alongside councilmember Steve Downs, a former planning commissioner who was appointed to the council last year to fill out the remainder of Dana Hobart’s term.

Downs comfortably led the field of six candidates vying for the three available seats in this year’s municipal election, while Marker and Mallotto each garnering more than 3,500 votes — enough to beat out the remaining challengers for the other two spots.

With three new members joining in the last year, the council has seen its greatest level of turnover in several years. Hobart retired last year after nearly two decades on the council, and members Charles Townsend and Iris Smotrich — who also didn’t seek re-election this year — both had multiple terms of experience.

Council members in Rancho Mirage are elected at large for four-year terms. The other two seats, currently held by Ted Weill and Richard Kite, will be on the ballot in 2024.

“I look forward to the future working together, and we've got a council that I believe has changed dramatically with the addition of the two of you,” Kite said during the meeting. “We look forward to a lot of changes in the future (while) still maintaining the highest-quality lifestyle that our city can have.”

Mallotto, a longtime Rancho Mirage resident who was a municipal employee in Cathedral City for several years before switching to a career in real estate, expressed her gratitude to local voters for electing her to the seat, adding her focus will be on maintaining residents’ quality of life.

Marker, who owns a local broadcasting company with her husband that controls several valley radio stations, said she’ll bring a similar focus, as well as a commitment to bringing the “right businesses” into Rancho Mirage.

Also during the meeting Thursday, Kite rotated into the city’s mayoral seat, after the city’s voters approved a ballot measure aligning the mayor and mayor pro tem rotations to follow the November election.

As part of the rotation, Downs became mayor pro tem for the coming year, and he briefly addressed some of the city’s hot-button topics at the close of Thursday’s meeting.

Downs described Cotino — Disney's master-planned community in Rancho Mirage slated to feature a hotel, a lagoon and a mix of houses and condominium — as “the right project in the right place at the right time for the future of this city.”

He also briefly discussed short-term vacation rentals, which have been fully banned in the city since the council unanimously voted to eliminate them last year. Downs — who, along with Marker and Mallotto, was less critical of the prior council than the other candidates on this year's ballot — noted the three won with roughly 61% of the total vote, compared to 39% for the other trio.

“There are those who would say that the issue of short-term rentals should have been on the ballot, make no mistake, it was … 61% to 39%,” Downs said. “I think we know the answer to that. The people of this city are opposed to short-term rentals in our residential neighborhoods, and I know that all of my council members will be true to that trust that the people of the city has had placed in us.”

Tom Coulter covers the cities of Palm Desert, La Quinta, Rancho Mirage and Indian Wells. Reach him at thomas.coulter@desertsun.com or on Twitter @tomcoulter_.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Two new Rancho Mirage City Council members sworn in; Richard Kite now mayor