Home Care In Desert Hot Springs, CA

DESERT HOT SPRINGS, Calif. (KESQ) - Desert Hot Springs, long known as a hub for cannabis in the Coachella Valley, is making a dramatic move to help struggling dispensaries - cutting the city’s cannabis tax from 10% to 5%.

"They struggle as every business does, you know, up and down," Mayor Matas explained. "But for the most part, it stays strong. And, we have 5 or 6 that have been in business since day one, and they continue to be in business. And we want to make sure that we're there to support them."

At Tuesday's city council meeting, Council members had the first reading of the ordinance that outlines the proposed tax cut. The Council voted unanimously to pass the ordinance pending a second reading and final adoption of the ordinance on May 6.

Cannabis dispensaries as whole are experiencing a bit of an industry lull, multiple cities across the Coachella Valley have recently taken steps to support the industry.

"I mean, you you you always look at your region and you always look at the competitiveness between the cities. And most of the cities are lowering their rates right now," Mayor Matas said.

Mayor Matas says competition is fierce in the industry right now, with new dispensaries opening up shop across the Golden State, and it's the perfect time to take a hard look at things.

"You have a lot of dispensaries opening across the state of California," he explained. "You have the local tribes that are getting involved in it. So it's time for us to take a hard look. See, desert Hot Springs was really fortunate to pass a 1% sales tax in the last, election cycle. And so we were able to take in anywhere from would be an average, anywhere between 2 and 3 extra million dollars a year. So this is a perfect time for us to look at this in our budget cycle, and to be able to cut back if necessary."

Mayor Matas and Desert Hot Springs are looked upon as trailblazers in the cannabis industry. Desert Hot Springs was the first city to open up a legalized operation in the state of California, said Mayor Matas.

But business owners say they’re paying nearly 40% in combined taxes between the city, county and state.

“You have to remember, we have a sales tax that we pay to Riverside County, said Abrahim Robbin, co-owner of the Inland Valley Therapeutic Healing Center, IVTHC, in Desert Hot Springs. "It's 8.75%. Then you have an excise tax to the state of California, which is 15%. So when you add it all up, it's a pretty significant amount."

Robbin says taxes coupled with the inability to compete with dispensaries on tribal reservations and the success of the illicit market are taking a toll on their ability to thrive.

“The state promised a lot of enforcement," Robbin said. "If anything, all they've done is regulated our businesses that are legal and legitimate… and the people in the illicit markets have just been able to get slaps on the wrist. They close down shop. They reopen a couple of weeks later like nothing even happened.”

"I think the city council is very supportive and unanimous in the fact that we should reduce it to 5%," Mayor Matas explained. "I don't think there's going to be an issue passing this going forward."

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Occasionally, I have the fantasy of running my own inn. Somewhere in southern California, maybe in Ojai, I’ll find a rustic spot the owners are looking to sell, where I can spend my days greeting guests, pouring coffee, drawing maps of favorite hikes. Maybe it’s a common dream among travelers. For me, it’s certainly an unrealistic one—I couldn’t handle the headaches, the bills, or the laundry. I definitely don’t picture myself in this scenario, essentially becoming the town mayor.

Melissa Strukel, an interior designer from San Diego, didn’t see those things for herself, either. In 2020, she and her boyfriend were on a road trip along California’s Old Highway 80. Up in the mountains near the Mexican border, they passed a rundown motel. Something about it caught her eye: a pink façade that looked both antique and like something from the 1990s, plus the presence of natural hot springs. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I couldn’t stop talking about it,” she told me. “I knew there was something bigger happening, and that it was a part of my life in some way.”

A few months later, Strukel heard the property was for sale and made an offer. The purchase, though, came with an unexpected provision: she wouldn’t be buying just the motel but also a dilapidated gas station, several homes and storefronts, a funky bathhouse with no roof, and a dried-up lake. When she told me the backstory, it reminded me of the 2011 family movie "We Bought a Zoo." Maybe Hollywood should make a sequel, I thought, and call it "We Bought a Town."

Jacumba Hot Springs, population just shy of 900, lies about 70 miles east of San Diego. Strukel and her friends turned business partners—Corbin Winters, an interior designer, and Jeff Osborne, a real estate investor—invited me to visit last October to see what they had created. My drive from Los Angeles took me past the Pacific Ocean, before I headed east toward the rugged Imperial Valley, up into the high desert. Traffic fell away. There were pockets of trees, their autumn leaves turning golden. The mountains resembled heaps of reddish rock.

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When I drove into town, I almost passed right through and out the other side. There’s no stoplight, just a few shops and weathered ranch-style homes. It looked like a gold-mining village from the Old West. But a groovy sign that read restaurant. bar. mineral pools. enter the vortex—not to mention a pair of Land Rovers parked outside—suggested that I had arrived at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.

A nouveau-hippie mood pervades: reception is housed in a vintage Argosy trailer; thatched umbrellas line the swimming pools; wicker lampshades hover inside rustic pergolas. I met the three owners for a mezcal Old-Fashioned on the restaurant’s shady terrace. As they told it, the story of Jacumba is equal parts real estate saga and desert dream.

The roadside resort was built in the 1920s, back when auto travel was trendy and drives were more leisurely, owing to the slower vehicles and rougher roads of the time. Families would drive for days on end, and finding a nice stopover was a big deal. Jacumba was advertised as a wellness outpost, designed to compete with places like Palm Springs.

Soon the hotel and its mineral waters became a popular getaway for Hollywood stars like Marlene Dietrich and Clark Gable. During Prohibition, its proximity to the Mexican border didn’t hurt, either. But that all changed in the 1960s, when Interstate 8 was constructed, bypassing the town. Tourism dried up, and by the turn of the 21st century, Jacumba had fallen on hard times.

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In 2020, shortly after the three friends acquired the property—and everything that came with it—they moved to Jacumba to become a part of the community. They may have started out as hoteliers, but they ended up becoming small-town planners. “We’re all sort of risk takers, fearless, and not out for capitalistic gain,” Strukel said. “We’re in this for the adventure and the process.”

The hotel’s adobe-style buildings are interconnected, with paths weaving between the rooms, a moody saloon, and the breezy restaurant. The main attractions are two large outdoor pools fed by mineral-rich springs. When I arrived that Saturday afternoon, the Ritual pool, which is kept between 98 and 101 degrees, was filled with day-trippers from San Diego who were drinking cocktails and hanging out in cabanas. The rectangular Solstice pool was slightly cooler and more subdued; it’s reserved for guests staying in one of the hotel’s 20 rooms or its five nearby guesthouses (which include a lodge that can sleep 16). Indoors, there’s a smaller pool named Echo, which is kept at 102 degrees.

I checked in to my suite, which, like the rest of the property, was decorated with handcrafted objects—African stools, Turkish pillows, antique Chinese doors—that felt very of-the-moment southern California. After I had settled in, the four of us took a walk through the village. The trio—Strukel, Winters, and Osborne—did not just redo a hotel; they revitalized a town. The lake is now full of water, landscaped, and open to the public. Across the street, Strukel’s boyfriend, David Lampley, runs a vintage-clothing store, called Impossible Railroad Trading Post, where he also cuts records for musicians on a 1938 machine.

That night—after a terrific rib eye at Jacumba’s restaurant—I joined 30 other people at an old bathhouse, a short walk from the hotel, for a bluegrass concert. A fire in the 1970s had left the arched, pink-walled structure a roofless ruin. But the town’s patrons had festooned it with candles, rugs, heat lamps, and a bar. Free concerts are held there most weekends. The crowd was a mix of locals and visitors, including 30- and 40-somethings in wide-brimmed felt hats, enjoying live music under the stars.

The next morning, I took the owners’ suggestion and visited the Jacumba Community Center down the street, which has a small restaurant that caters mostly to locals. Winters, one of Jacumba’s co-owners, volunteers as a waitress. The center’s manager told me prices were kept low—two bucks for coffee, six for a plate of pancakes and eggs—to appeal to the whole community.

Two dozen people—young families, retirees, and veterans among them—were eating and chatting, and, whenever I asked, praising the hotel owners for their stewardship of the town. An older man told me he lived in one of the houses that were sold along with the hotel—and though the new owners refurbished it, they didn’t raise the rent. Another guy, very voluble, said he’d lived in town for 45 years, and that Strukel and her friends were “the best thing that’s ever happened here,” citing new visitors and job opportunities. “It’s amazing what they’ve done,” he added. (About 70 percent of the hotel employees live nearby, the owners said.)

The three friends from San Diego have plans for more: new restaurants, new stores, maybe a recording studio. “We love the people of this community,” Strukel told me. “They’re like family now. We want everybody to feel really good and welcomed.”

A version of this story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Bubbling Over.”

The best things to do in Palm Springs bring sunshine, serenity and exploration together, with the occasional dinosaur

Friday April 4 2025

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Editor, Los Angeles & Western USA

Easily the most jet-setting desert oasis around, Palm Springs sprouted into a resort destination in the early 20th century. Ever since, the California city has been beckoning visitors with its arid landscape, golf courses, handsome mid-century vacation homes and increasingly excellent restaurant scene.

While many will devote their entire stay to simply lounging by hotel pools (make no mistake, we encourage doing plenty of that), there are indeed other things to do in Palm Springs. The area also caters to the adventurous and energetic, especially winter and springtime hikers looking for opportunities to get up into the mountains or explore craggy desert rock formations.

Seasonally, it becomes the epicenter of cool during Coachella and hosts highlights like the design-focused Modernism Week. The scorching heat keeps things pretty quiet in the summer, but no matter the time of year you can embark on historic home tours, visit botanical gardens and maybe even see some snow on a one-of-a-kind tram ride.

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DESERT HOT SPRINGS, Calif. (KESQ) - The City of Desert Hot Springs is breaking ground on a road improvement project along Hacienda Avenue, a main road that crosses through the center of the city.

City officials say the improvement project, which is set to continue through March 2026, will bring new bike lanes, better street lighting, landscaped sidewalks, striped crosswalks, and ADA ramps to improve accessibility.

The goal: improve safety on the city's roads.

"This is one of many roads when I became mayor nine years ago that we really wanted to focus on and make safe for our community," says Scott Matas, the mayor of Desert Hot Springs.

Along with the Hacienda project, Matas also says improvements made on Palm Drive have reduced pedestrian casualties in the city — a metric that he says the city was one of the leaders in ten years ago.

The city says the portion of Hacienda Avenue being improved extends from West Drive to Tamar Drive, which is a 1.3-mile stretch of the road that runs through the center of the city.

Mayor Scott Matas says those residents should wait for the project's second phase: "We heard our residents loud and clear. When we actually received a grant for this first phase, we went immediately back out looking for grant funding and we received that not long after that. Unfortunately, the process with the state of California sometimes lingers. And so this phase next phase will start in about a year."

The second phase of the project will stretch from Tamar Drive to Long Canyon Road, which is the remainder of Hacienda Avenue.

Deputy City Manager Daniel Porras says these improvements are what residents have been asking for. "The feedback has been missing improvements. We don't have any infrastructure, so we have no sidewalks, no curb and gutter, no streetlights, some missing bike lanes. So the feedback has been we're... they’re excited to actually see some infrastructure come into play."

City officials hope to do more in the future, too.

"Beyond this project, we hope to continue. We’re gonna continue on other arterials, such as Two Bunch, Dillon, Little Morongo, Pierson. So we do want to continue this type of project in other areas of the city as well," Porras hints.

There were several remarks made at the Desert X 2025 Exhibition Preview March 7, but none hit home quite like Supervisor V. Manuel Perez's.

"No matter who you are are or where you live in the Coachella Valley … wherever you're coming from, you have access," Perez said of the Desert X installations, which are all free to view. "A lot of folks, I'll tell you — they live in Thermal, North Shore, Thousand Palms, Sky Valley, Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs — don't have the money to go to a real nice museum. But you know what? They're able to go to Desert X."

The public has been able to view nine Desert X installations since March 8, and after a few more opened later in March, all 11 are now open and will be on display through May 11. The map is available on Desert X's website, app and social media pages.

Here's your first look at all the 2025 Desert X exhibits throughout the Coachella Valley.

'Unsui' ('Mirror')

Artist: Sanford Biggers

Location: James O. Jesse Desert Highland Unity Center, 480 W. Tramview Road, Palm Springs

New York City-based interdisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers wants you to look at the two tall pole structures — with sparkling clouds atop them — that make up "Unsui" and think about place and time. "'Unsui (Mirror)' is an opportunity to slow down and reflect on what it means to drift like clouds and flow like water," he told the Desert X team. That was certainly the case for viewers on Friday, who were lucky enough to watch the piece sway in the wind and catch the light in a way that made it truly sparkle against its backdrop of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.

'Plotting Rest'

Artist: Kapwani Kiwanga

Location: North of the Palm Springs Visitor Center at Tramway Road, Palm Springs

"Plotting Rest" is one of the last few Desert X pieces to be open to the public. Kiwanga brings to life a pavilion-like structure that features columns made of different shapes and materials (triangles, spheres and palm fronds). Architecture is a big part of Palm Springs' identity, though this structure offers very little protection from the elements, as there are no walls or closed ceilings to keep nature out. Instead, as the sun hits the piece throughout the day, ever-changing shadows are cast on the ground, animating the piece even further.

'The Living Pyramid'

Artist: Agnes Denes

Location: Sunnylands Center & Gardens, 37-977 Bob Hope Drive, Rancho Mirage

"The Living Pyramid" by 94-year-old Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes stands as a tall monument to architecture and the environment at Sunnylands. The pyramid will go through a few iterations while it's on display, and it is currently covered in live vegetation that is native to the area and was planted a couple months ago. The structure will be brought to life by the plants' life cycles that will showcase their growth, transformation and eventual death, reminding us all of the beauty and preciousness of life.

'The act of being together'

Artist: Jose Da?vila

Location: Worsley Road between Pierson Boulevard & Painted Hills Road, Desert Hot Springs

Mexican multidisciplinary artist Jose Da?vila told the Desert X team a simple message he'd like to convey to those viewing "The act of being together": "Look beyond what you see, and feel the silence between the objects." To fully appreciate Da?vila's rock formations, it's best to approach them from various angles. Get up close to enjoy the views of Desert Hot Springs and the windmills, and explore the different perspectives that the installation provides. Although it may appear simple at first glance, there is much more to discover than meets the eye.

'G.H.O.S.T. Ride'

Artist: Cannupa Hanska Luger

Location: Pierson Boulevard between Foxdale Drive & Miracle Hill Road, Desert Hot Springs

Those who visit Hanska Luger's "G.H.O.S.T. Ride" in Desert Hot Springs should be prepared for a journey just under a mile into the canyons of Desert Hot Springs from the parking lot off Pierson Boulevard. Upon first glance, the artwork speaks to the modern culture of "van life" and sustainability in rural areas, those parking and camping on Bureau of Land Management land and the open desert. The retro van features some accents that speak to his Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota ancestry and the setting.

'Five things you can’t wear on TV'

Artist: Raphael Hefti

Location: Homme Adams Park, 72-500 Thrush Road, Palm Desert

If it appears as though there's a long, shiny line stretching from one side of Homme Adams Park to the other, your eyes aren't playing tricks on you. "Five things you can’t wear on TV" by Zurich-based artist Raphael Hefti utilizes a black woven polymer fiber — originally designed for light, durable fire hoses — that is coated on one side with a reflective surface to form, essentially, a horizon. When wind passes through the area, the line begins to oscillate, and you might even hear a gentle vibration nearby too.

'To Breathe – Coachella Valley'

Artist: Kimsooja

Location: Pierson Boulevard between Foxdale Drive & Miracle Hill Road, Desert Hot Springs

Another installation featured at Desert X AlUla in 2024 and now in the Coachella Valley is "To Breathe," a circular structure with glass walls coated in a special film that makes the landscape of Desert Hot Springs seem to fade away. As you walk towards its center, the sounds of your footsteps begin to echo louder. The experience of being outdoors in the desert changes throughout your journey in and out of the structure, including the view of people on the other side of the walls as they pass by.

'Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams'

Artist: Sarah Meyohas

Location: 74-184 Portola Road, Palm Desert

Sarah Meyohas’ sprawling "Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams" showcases "caustics," or light patterns formed by the refraction or reflection of light through curved surfaces. Visitors are greeted by a white pathway on the side of the road that leads them to the ribbon-like installation. As you go to each stop, words from the art piece's name are projected onto the white walls, which visitors can manipulate. Waves and other patterns (we promise they're not mirages) are seen projected as well.

'Adobe Oasis'

Artist: Ronald Rael

Location: 1555 S. Palm Canyon Drive, Palm Springs

"Adobe Oasis" took about seven weeks to make, and it was assembled entirely by a 3D printer. Berkeley-based artist Ronald Rael told viewers on Friday that he wanted to create something out of adobe because it's a tactile material — which can be recycled if the piece, which was designed to be temporary, is destroyed — that we as humans are deeply connected to via heritage and genetics. "I see an adobe house the same way I see ancestors and grandparents. As they get older, we love their wrinkles ... we appreciate how they age," he said. "This is the skin of our future ancestors."

'Soul Service Station'

Artist: Alison Saar

Location: Pierson Boulevard between North Indian Canyon Drive & Desert Terrace Way, Desert Hot Springs

A mysterious gas station, located off Pierson Boulevard in Desert Hot Springs, features several signs welcoming customers to the full-service experience that was once common at gas stations. Its small and rustic design blends seamlessly with the surrounding landscape. However, if you look closely, you'll notice a peculiar figure standing behind the glass inside. If you pick up one of the conch shells attached to the single gas pump, you’ll hear her recite a poem.

'What Remains'

Artist: Muhannad Shono

Location: Avenue 38 off Varner Road, Thousand Palms

When there is no place left that you can call home, that you can return to and settle upon, what remains? Muhannad Shono's "What Remains" imagines what would be left behind in a sandy plot after a big windstorm. Long strips of fabric covered in sand are positioned throughout a field, appearing as if they've been mangled in bushes and are swaying in the wind. It's a staggering visual both on the ground and from a higher elevation, which uses the land to its advantage as it takes on the shape of nature.

Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment for the Desert Sun. He can be reached at [email protected]. Ema Sasic covers entertainment and health in the Coachella Valley. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @ema_sasic.