Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 11
This weekend we finalized all of those plans with the Division Directors, regarding what types of
functions they would be able to continue, whether it be at a facility like the Waste Water Plant or
providing services out in the community that are essential like Fire or Law Enforcement all the way
through what types of services can continue but may be able to continue from somebody’s home. As
you can imagine, it is very challenging to enable somebody to work from home when that is not a
policy that we currently within the City. We are not like the Federal Government where many workers
can work from home; we are not like the private sector where many workers can work from home. So
trying to make something like that work on the fly is remarkable. It is remarkable the work that the
Administrative Services Division has done, and IT to make this a reality. And we still are working
through the final steps and we will get there. But just the progress that we have made has been
unbelievable and | can just say we wouldn’t have done it unless there was a crisis of this magnitude.
So as | mentioned, we have been working on this for a number of weeks. Over the weekend, | worked
with Bobbie to really determine what our future organizational structure is. While Public Health has
been the lead up to this point, one of the things that we did over the weekend was we established a
unified command. And the reason for that is because there are going to be a number of major issues,
major problems that we are going to be dealing with in the coming weeks, coming months. Everything
ranging from the distribution of medications and food all the way through economic recovery and how
we are going to deal with the fallout from today’s action, which was necessary, to ensure that
community organizations, businesses, have the resources that they need to reopen after this crisis.
So one of the things that we did was establish that Unified Command, we also tasked five Task Forces
that we are working to try and build out and develop a plan for. Two of them have been things that we
have been working on for the past few weeks, the first being the Municipal Continuity Task Force.
That Task Force is focused around keeping our City Services up and running. The second Task Force
is the one that Bobbie has been leading for the past few weeks which is the Public Health Response
Task Force and that is focused around current issues, which is you know the contact tracing, the
testing that is going to be done all the way through future actions that are expected hopefully through
maybe vaccinations and those types of activities; so all of that is within that Task Force. And three
others that we recently added; the first one being school issues; so we have worked to integrate the
School Department's efforts into the City response. We had a call with Dr. Mosley this morning so that
we have a direct contact with the School District to enable us to share resources with them and then
identify when they have concerns, can we request those things through the State Emergency
Operations Center.
The fourth Task Force is Economic Recovery. So there have been some efforts to provide services to
business, the Small Business Administration as an example has authorized economic injury loans for
businesses similar to what we would find after a natural disaster or something like that. But there are
likely to be more programs and initiatives that are going to come out of this to assist businesses larger
and small. We need to have our game plan as to how those types of services will be continued. That
Task Force will also be responsible for looking at supply chain issues. So one of our concerns is
around Supermarkets, Pharmacies and enabling them to get back up and running if possible, that is
something that we need to be planning for now even though grocery stores and pharmacies are
completely open. We need to be thinking in the future rather than thinking about what is going to
happen tomorrow.
The last one that we’ve identified as a Task Force is Community Distribution. And so in this case we
are looking at what types of efforts would need to be done by the City to partner with some of the work
that is being done with the United Way right now around the distribution of supplies and other
necessary things within the community. So we work to identify who might be a resource in that case
and we’ve also talked to Community Development about leading that Task Force even though that’s
not something they do day-to-day, they don’t distribute supplies in the community. But they do have
