Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 25
Director Kates
| can talk about the library. So regarding those other buildings that we don’t have direct control over,
we have asked them to take the same measures and the library is particularly concerning. They
provide an essential service to the community, particularly for those that are vulnerable. They are also
a location where, unfortunately due to the circumstances, people might not be at work, they are not in
school, so you would think “Oh this will be a great opportunity to go to the library and use those
resources. But when you think of the library, there’s lot of interaction, it’s sort of, it is really the
opposite of what we want people to do right now. So we have asked them to take the same measures
and we will continue to work with them over the next week to see if we can provide any assistance to
them in trying to meet those same types of goals.
Alderman Klee
When you say “take the same measures” are you talking about the essential / non-essential, maybe
not have the Children’s Reading Program or something of that nature.
Director Kates
Yeah so in the case of the library so when we went through the exercise to identify what the essential
functions of the community were, the library had many that we were able to defer after the emergency.
One of the big ones that we were looking at was access to the internet, because we are trying to
ensure that people can get information about what’s going on right now but we still really want to try to
prevent people from going inside of buildings and sitting down, touching things, getting in close contact
with other people. So in that case, going back to those Task Forces that we had talked about, we may
look to identify an alternative to that same mission. So can we set up Wi-Fi hot spots? Can we direct
people to the services of Comcast which opened up their Wi-Fi for free during the crisis? So there are
other ways that we are trying to get that same level of functionality in the community without having
people go into situations where they might be able to contaminate other people or objects without us to
be able to keep control of it.
Alderman Klee
And just can | put one more question in, I’m not sure you can answer this, this may be the Mayor and
so on. | know when the Mayor spoke at the beginning he mentioned something to the effect of that
those employees might not be charged leave and | guess that’s my concern about our City Employees
that are essential have to be here and how are we going to be dealing with their leave if they don’t
have enough leave and they’ve been quarantined, | have some grave concerns about that.
Mayor Donchess
Ok so in the policy that we have presented to you ...
Alderman Klee
That was your second page?
