I believe that no senior should be hungry, homeless or lonely, or go without health care. Desert Hot Springs is lucky to be able to provide extensive assistance to the senior members of our community. Our Senior Center, located at the Carl May facility on West Drive, gives DHS seniors a cool and friendly facility to attend for a variety of services and benefits, including food, recreation, and physical activity, friendship, field trips, and social events. Our Senior Center also partners with local organizations to provide health screenings such as blood pressure and glucose levels and educates seniors on health care resources. The Center assists seniors with issues regarding Social Security Retirement Benefits, Disability benefits, Medicare, In-Home support services, and Veterans Benefits.
Desert Hot Springs has thousands of new residents. Because of an increase in the number of seniors visiting our Senior Center, we had to expand! Building the new City Hall suddenly made a lot of extra space available for our Senior Center. Renovations have been completed in the old City Council Chamber, which is now an extension of the Senior Center. This much larger space will allow for additional programming, fitness classes and a room for other enriching programs and clinics for seniors. In fact, fitness equipment from the Health and Wellness Center will be brought over to this location to allow Seniors the opportunity to further utilize the space.
Management of the Senior Center would like to have an outdoors park-like sitting area near the Center so that users can congregate outdoors and participate in programs on cool days. And, they need a bus or large van for day trips. The van they are using now is shared, and it only holds about 7 people. A larger van would benefit more participants. These are reasonable requests and I will work with the Senior Center to explore them.
Our Senior Center is highly regarded by our residents, and I will make sure that it continues to receive adequate resources from the City of Desert Hot Springs so that all senior residents of Desert Hot Springs have a worthwhile home-away-from-home that they can continue to look forward to visiting.