Board of Aldermen 12-22-2020 Page 28
One of things I’ve done a ton of the digging into the studies as well and one of the ones that | read today
was talking about it’s not just about curbing, it’s also timing is really critical and so the fact that we are going
into a long week and maybe most people have two weeks off, our two of the top ten going out holidays are
there is really heavy on my mind. If everyone has looked up the number of COVID cases since
Thanksgiving they will see why and | think we are going to be going into a very hard month coming up.
There’s light at the end of the tunnel, there is a vaccine, this is a short-term solution here. We are not
saying this is going to happen forever, but | have to support our Board of Health and the Scientists and the
Epidemiologists who are telling us that this is the right way to go.
President Wilshire
Anyone else? Alderman Laws?
Alderman Laws
Alright, | wrote down some notes but | am not good at reading notes. | do appreciate and I’ve said this
before and | am sorry for being redundant, but | appreciate what everyone has said. | appreciate that we
have public comment. | appreciate everybody who has emailed, everyone | have talked to on the phone in
the last week. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone talking to people about this. | certainly
appreciate the opinion of my colleagues and | know for me it is a conflict, not doing exactly what the Board
of Health recommends that we do. But for me it is also personal and | am not a health expert, but | have
been a bartender for 20 years so | would consider myself an expert in how that industry works.
This is not going to do anything positive. Now | appreciate Ernest Jette saying that the numbers have gone
down or flattened in Massachusetts since the curfew was implemented and perhaps they have but
correlation isn’t causation, | mean we don’t know that that’s because of the curfew. Certainly | know at the
bar | work at just off the top of my head, there’s probably another 10 restaurants or bars that people —
employees from those places come to see me when they get out of work. If they can’t come see me, they
are going to go somewhere else. They are either going to go to another town, they are going to party in
their houses, because that’s what people do. People who are in this industry, they like to drink, you know.
So | don’t think it’s going to do anything to stop that.
| don’t disagree that the idea of telling people that they should be wearing a mask all the time and be
distancing from each other, but if they are sitting down in a restaurant they can take their mask off and eat
and drink, | don’t disagree it’s ridiculous and you are not going to find much argument from me about
whether or not we should shut down restaurants entirely. | mean | would say that would be appropriate in a
situation like this. But there’s this word that keeps getting tossed around whenever people are talking
about this, pro or against it and that word is “arbitrary” and this 9:30 curfew is just an arbitrary measure and
| don’t think that we should be basing the way that we make public policy off of something that is arbitrary. It
doesn’t affect any of the restaurants that are open for lunch, it doesn’t affect breakfast spots, it doesn’t
affect churches were people are jam packed together.
There are just so many places where people are just by nature not intentionally necessarily by nature
violating these ordinances or violating what public health is telling us to do. For some reason we are
focusing at bars that are open after 9:30 p.m. It just doesn’t make any sense to me at all. And | don’t see
any information and I’ve been looking, I’m hoping for it. I’m a very open-minded person, | want to be
convinced, | want to feel good about this. | haven’t seen any information that says that a 9:30 curfew makes
any sense at all. And until | do, | definitely can’t support that. Now I’m kind of losing my train of thought
here. | don’t know. That’s it for now. | am getting a little, | am taking it too personally and | apologize for
that. Thank you.
President Wilshire
No need. Anyone else? Alderman Clemons?
