Calling the project “an asset of tremendous value, “Gov. Pete Wilson on Saturday afternoon laid the cornerstone of the Desert Valley Health Education Center, planned to help the community help itself stay healthy.
The 4,000-square-foot building will join the nearly completed Desert Valley Road and Second Avenue.
Inside the health center will be books and videos for all ages, conference rooms, computers and a dietary lab, all dedicated to health education and free to the community. It’s a project of the non-profit Desert Valley Charitable Foundation.
Wilson was in Barstow in the morning to lay the cornerstone for a new veterans home. In Victorville hours later, he told an invitation – only crowd of about 150 that it was “a great treat“ to do the honors twice in one day in the high desert.
Wilson, visiting with his wife, Gayle, said the center will help people here “take care of themselves and take care of each other.”
“Obviously it is going to be an asset of tremendous value for all the people in the high desert,” the governor said.
Dr. Prem Reddy, the cardiologist who founded the medical group and the foundation, said the health center is a long cherished dream he hopes will become a community resource.
Reddy, who got the foundation off the ground in 1991 with a $1 million donation, also contributed 1 acre of land with an estimated value of $900,000, for the health center.
The foundation has the $400,000 in hand needed to build the health center, which should be open by September, according to Patricia Mason, a foundation director and assistant administrator of the medical group.
Visitors will be able to access health information confidentially by computer, learn how to prepare food for special diets and read to their young children about doctor visits “so they won't be scared,” Mason said.
The 77-bed acute care hospital, a $30 million project, is slated to open in August.
After the cornerstone laying, Apple Valley High School student Emily Lazane was presented a $5,000 scholarship by the foundation, its first, for her college education in physical therapy.
Following the ceremony, Wilson was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser at the home of Reddy, who is active in GOP politics, before returning to Sacramento, according to spokesman Sean Walsh. Wilson’s last visit here was during his successful campaign in 1990.