Sonny Bono Sings Praises of Palm Springs to Business

Sonny Bono wants you, babe.

Wants you, that is, if you happen to own an insurance company or a bank or some other business that you might consider moving to Palm Springs. (Sorry, he’s not interested in those traditional, clunky old factories that make parts of Los Angeles seem so . . . well, unglamorous, but he’d consider a nice clean high-tech company.)

Palm Springs, it seems, wants to bulk up its tax base. Put a little muscle on its economy. Palm Springs has this problem, you see: It’s those tourists that flock in every November, clad in Bermuda shorts and bikinis and lime-green golf pants so that the warm desert sunshine can bleach the winter out of their bones.

Now, don’t get Palm Springs wrong. The tourists are nice to have, and they spend a lot of money, and they fill the hotels. But most of them go home in April, when it starts to get hot in the desert.

And tourists are fickle: Lately a lot of them are bypassing Palm Springs for some of the newer resort towns of the Coachella Valley. An insurance company, unlike a tourist, doesn’t rent a car at the airport and drive over to Rancho Mirage. It stays put, and it provides jobs.

Hence the ad in the Orange County Register this week with a picture of Mayor Bono looking mayoral, smiling into the camera and chatting on the phone.

The ad copy underneath takes a jab at Orange County’s legendary traffic jams and high prices. It reads: “I Want You Babe. Join Us! For Lunch in Newport Beach.

“Tired of Smog, Congestion, High Land Costs?

“Palm Springs is a Premier Business Address.”

Other cities may boast of parks and museums and tax incentives. But few have their own celebrity mayor to offer to the captains of industry. Bono, of course, was one-half of the ‘60s recording duo Sonny and Cher, whose biggest record was “I Got You, Babe.”

But while Cher went on to become a movie star after their divorce, his career had been nondescript. He owns a restaurant in Palm Springs, then in 1988 he surprised a lot of people by running successfully for mayor of this city of 40,000.

Bono isn’t actually going to be at Wednesday’s lunch, the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce hastens to explain. His picture’s just on the newspaper ad to get your attention.

“You can go across the country and ask people to name five mayors, and one of them will be Sonny Bono,” said Rolfe Arnhym, the chamber’s executive vice president.

“So we’re running with it. We’d be foolish not to.”

Once the chamber has your attention, they want to tell you about how houses are cheaper in the desert--a median price of $208,000 contrasted with $335,000 in Orange County--the commutes are shorter and the air is cleaner.

Why Orange County?

“If you’re launching a pilot effort, which this is, you want to go into an area where there’s vulnerability,” Arnhym said. “And in Orange County you’ve got housing problems, traffic problems, unhappy employees.”

Some people like Palm Springs just fine the way it is, Arnhym conceded, and not everybody is wild about the city growing a lot faster or attracting a lot of new businesses.

It was only last summer, for instance, that the city finally developed what Arnhym calls “a year-round economy.” Last summer was the first in which all the big hotels stayed open through the torrid summer months, and most of the restaurants did too.

“Now we’re trying to get them to stay open at night,” Arnhym said. “That’s the next big struggle.”

As for the mayor himself, the press of city business kept him from being interviewed Thursday.