Recommendation to direct City Manager and Health Department to provide a receive and file update on the latest changes to the state and local health orders, the status of our vaccine rollout and ER/ICU capacity, and how residents and businesses may be impacted.
Thank you. And item 18, please. And I think I am 18. Oh, no, that's different. Now, I know we probably heard a lot of that in the study session, but it is a separate item. So can we just hear that item? And then Councilman Mango, if you want to make a motion on that. Communication from Councilwoman Mango Councilwoman Price Recommendation, direct city manager and Health Department to provide an update on the latest changes to the state and local health orders, the status of our vaccine rollout, and how residents and businesses may be impacted. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Do I have anything else on that? No. I just wanted to say that I really appreciate. As I mentioned earlier tonight, I brought forward this item before the city staff agenda as the vaccination rollout. I think that the information was valuable. All our colleagues have an opportunity to pose their questions and bring forward questions from the community. And I want you to know how important that has been. But we've really crossed a couple of great barriers in the last year in terms of being able to look at and understand how we can communicate better with the community. As a lot of families have cut the cord, we hadn't had the opportunity to. Reach. Those individuals through Channel 13, through a council meeting. But now with council meetings on YouTube, it makes it for a wide range of people to see and play back what has happened at city council meetings. And so I feel that it's really important to have presentations like the one we had tonight. So with that, I'm comfortable with this item as it is moving forward without any additional staff presentation, but I hope that we will have regular briefings so that we won't have to consolidate so much information in a two hour presentation, but perhaps more regular short updates as changes occur. Thank you. There's a second by Councilwoman Price to everything. Councilman Price I did just want to acknowledge one thing that wasn't covered in the study session earlier, and that is when the governor lifted the regional stay at home order, the city had the opportunity to prepare its own health orders, and I wanted to acknowledge that our city did that. It made its very specific health orders very swiftly and did so independently, of course, in collaboration and consultation with other cities and health jurisdictions in the county. But I really appreciate that we made it our own and that we followed the state. I thought that really showed a lot of independence as a city with our own health jurisdiction. And I thought it really showed that our health department was listening and trying very, very hard to do the difficult balance of maintaining the public health concerns at the forefront of their health orders, but also acknowledging some of the small business impacts and job impacts that residents were facing. So I just wanted to acknowledge that it's not lost on me that our health department acted swiftly and did so independently while still collaborating with other jurisdictions in the region. So thank you for that. Councilman Mongo. Thank you. And then I just had I know that a lot of businesses have reached out to the Forbes line to provide some feedback and some suggestions related to some recent updates that they've had some challenges with either being able to implement and or needing support. Do you anticipate that any adjustments will be made in the next week or two weeks? What is that timeline looking like in terms of being able to receive the feedback from the community and for the Health Department to take into consideration these additional ideas that have come forward? Mr. Modica. Yeah. So health orders don't really have a time. We don't update them like every week or so we update them as the need persists. So if we do have tweaks that need to be done to our health order, our attorney helps to draft those and put those out. We are looking right now about how to get information out to businesses about how to do Superbowl safely, for example. So we'll be communicating on that to make sure that we've got as few crowds and gatherings as possible. We have established in contact with the Restaurant Association and are in discussions with them about just how to make sure that we have the appropriate distance between people and any kind of nuances there that we can do within the state to to implement that. But we do need to follow state state guidance. We can't be any less permissive than what the state allows. And do we still have a direct communication with the state? So for example, I know there was some discussions related to, okay, six feet apart tables versus eight feet apart tables and what other things could be valued like partitions that wouldn't make eight feet apart, tables necessary floor to ceiling, glass or plastic, things like that that have come forward. Are those being considered and what is the the strategy on communicating that back to the community? Yeah, so we do have the ability to ask questions of the state. They have also changed some of their own regulations. So where before they had said plexiglass was, you know, allowed, especially indoors as a suitable barrier, they don't say that anymore. And as we did the research, we are not finding that they have the but we do have the ability to use plexiglass as a alternative to the six feet. The eight foot is our way to ensure that we're meeting the six feet. We often see tables that are six feet apart, but when you put chairs on either side, then that makes it four feet apart because you push your take your chair away two feet. So that is our own local interpretation of achieving that six foot distance if there's different ways to phrase it or work on that. What we're really trying to accomplish is keeping people the minimum six feet away from other tables and other people, just as we do in every other industry. That's great. And then my last question also comes from the community related to waivers for school reopening. Is there been any progress or update on that? So Kelly covered this. She would do it better than I would. But we I believe in the presentation. It says we do not have any more waivers. So in purple. The waivers go away, but you have to be below 25 per thousand in order to open up school. So it is now that program has ended. We now you have to get down to 25 cases per hundred thousand for five consecutive days and then school districts can submit that safety plan and it goes through both local and state approval and it's only for K through six where you can still have the Cohorting and all those different guidances as well. That still remains. I appreciate that. I know you and I have talked about that one on one. There's a concentration of schools and church based schools in my district, and I really appreciate you providing that. And we will, of course, provide a link to this information in our newsletter, as always. Thank you so much. Roll call. Vote, please. District one. District two i. District three. I. District four. I. District five. I. District six. I. District seven. I. District eight. I. District nine. Motion carries. Okay. Thank you. That concludes the meeting. We do have, I think maybe two members that have a closing comment, Councilor Murray, Ringo.