Senior Center (Nancy Ream Enabnit)
Kim Sabin concluded her internship in April. The health and wellness series she led concluded with a Heart Healthy lunch on the 16th. Nearly 40 people attended the meal and took home valuable hand-outs on nutrition.
The center hosted a “Bright Idea” planning meeting. All prior suggestions were compiled into a survey, and participants were asked to mark their favorite ideas for day trips, movies, center activities, dine-outs and hikes. People wrote in additional ideas, the results (close to 50 surveys) were tallied, and the valuable input will help shape future offerings at the center.
Parks
There was a tremendous turn-out for this year’s Solv-It in Sandy. The annual Earth Day event drew close to 200 volunteers to clean up local parks, Centennial Plaza, the bus shelters and sweep sidewalks. Tickle Creek Trail bridges were cleaned and the Clackamas River Basin Watershed Council hosted a work party for the Shade Our Streams project in Sandy Bluff Park. Dozens of people took advantage of the free shredder with over 6,000 pounds of sensitive documents processed.
Recreation (Sarah Richardson)
Recreation Department staff met with representatives from Camp Fire Columbia to develop a new day camp option for Sandy residents. During the month of July, a 3-day and 5-day camp experience will be available at Camp Namanu. Transportation will be provided to/from the Sandy Community/Senior Center. The program will feature all the traditional summer camp experiences including swimming, crafts, and songs. The day camp also focuses on preventing summer learning loss with 30 minutes of reading each day and theme-based learning modules that include astronomy, creative writing, science and much more. The cost of the program includes a 6:1 camper to counselor ratio, all activities, transportation, snacks and lunch.
In June and August the department will be partnering with the library to provide two day camps. They are modeled on the successful Saturday Kids’ Club at the library adding lunch in a local park and swimming at Olin Bignal pool, two popular activities from the Sandy Recreation day camps.
These new camps align with the department’s goal of engaging more community partners to provide cost-effective and broad based programs for area residents and families.
Transit (Julie Stephens)
Total ridership this month was 11,501. The ridership overall decrease was 11%; The SAM-Gresham decreased 12.2%; SAM-Estacada had a drop in use of 15.5%; STAR increased this month by 3.8%; and ED ridership decreased by 36.9%.
Sandy Transit staff and Advisory Committee members attended Transit Day at the Capitol April 8th. Julie Stephens, Andi Howell and Caren Topliff attended transportation hearings and discussed transportation needs with Representative Mark Johnson, Senator Chuck Thomsen’s staff and Governor Brown. As an Oregon Transportation Association board member, Julie Stephens stood with Governor Brown as she signed a Proclamation declaring April 8th as “Oregon Transit Day”.
On April 18th 300 people rode Sandy Transit services for free in conjunction with Sandy’s Solv-It activities to promote Earth Day.
Sandy Transit is scheduled for a triennial review by Oregon Department of Transportation in May. In preparation for this review, transit is collecting and sending a list of documents and materials as requested from the reviewing agency prior to the scheduled two-day visit.