While waiting to hear from the agencies investigating the dishonesty of the Senior Coordinator and corruption in the Police department, I have continued to receive disturbing reports from people attending the Senior Center.
It appears that there has been no improvement there. The problems caused by poor management, which gave rise to the situation which I have described on this website, appear to be continuing. Here are a couple of examples.
The central activity room looks out, in one direction, onto a small secluded area of the park which contains a bench. One evening, a senior patron noticed some local youths sitting there smoking what appeared to be crack or some similar drug using a contrivance fashioned from an empty soda can. He immediately called the front desk using his cell phone. He got no reply, only a recorded voice inviting him to leave a message. So he went in person to the lobby, and found the staff members sitting watching TV on the large screen there, having forwarded the phone to voice mail.
No big deal, you might say. But this same patron, at another time, approached a day staff member at the front desk and asked if they would turn on the TV so that he could follow the US Open Golf tournament. He was told that the center's policy was only to turn on the TV for important national events, in order to avoid disagreements among patrons about channel selection.
So the TV remains off most of the time, except when the evening staff want it on for their own entertainment, which takes priority over answering the telephone.
This is, of course, a petty issue unworthy of publication on the internet under normal circumstances. In an honest city, feedback about ways to improve services would be welcomed by the administration. But not in Mountain View. The needs and concerns of seniors here are ignored by the Recreation Department management, even as they pull down huge salaries on the pretext of providing senior services.
Patrons drive to the center and park their cars in a parking lot which is unsupervised and entirely open to public access. The center is situated in an area with a high incidence of opportunistic theft and robbery with violence. When the young, physically fit staff members working at the center act in a manner dismissive of the concerns of seniors, it confirms the city's indifference to the needs of the most vulnerable members of the population.
The most serious example, though, was brought to my attention by a lady who actually sought my help in publicizing the problem after being indecently assaulted at the Senior Center.
A complaint about the assault was made to Senior Center staff, but the person who had committed the assault was permitted to continue to attend the center. This caused mental anguish to the lady who had been the victim of the assault, since she was placed in a position where she felt that a repetition of the assault might occur. This directly mirrors the way in which the attack against myself back in February was treated with insufficient seriousness by the center management. I'm afraid that, so far, they appear to have learnt nothing about how to better address the needs of senior patrons at the center.
I guess I'll just have to keep the pressure on.
(I'm on vacation at present, but will publish another update mid-month. Please check back then, and if there have been any developments I shall report them at that time.)