Board of Aldermen 09-22-2020 Page 3
Alderman Cleaver
rm here and | am practicing social distancing, my daughter is with me.
Alderman Harriott-Gathright
| am present, | am in this room alone, |am practicing social distancing and | can hear you.
President Wilshire
| am here, |am alone and! am practicing social distancing. Also with us this evening is — fm sorry Madam
Clerk, | didn’t mean to interrupt.
Susan Lovering, City Clerk
You have 15 in attendance.
President Wilshire
Thank you very much.
Ms. Lovering
You're very welcome.
President Wilshire
Also in attendance this evening is Mayor Donchess and Corporation Counsel Steve Bolton. Does the
Mayor wish to address the Board this evening?
REMARKS BY THE MAYOR
Mayor Donchess
Yes, thank you Madam President. Of course we have a number of items on tonight’s agenda. | am going
to mention a few of them which | think are definitely important. But before | get to that | wanted to report to
you regarding the Coronavirus. As you know tested positive, but fortunately | had not a serious case. |
went through 10 days of isolation and am nowreceived so | am back to sort of regular COVID life. But as
part of the developments with COVID, six people including myself in City Hall have contractedcases. They
are varying degrees of severity; a couple of people have recovered but others are still working on that. So
as a result of that outbreak working with Public Health, Bobbie Bagley, Director of Public Health and other
medical professionals, we decided that the best thing to do to prevent any further spread within City Hall or
to members of the public was to close City Hall again as we did back in March. That will take place for two
weeks. It’s like a two-week quarantine period for everyone who works in City Hall. People will continue to
work remotely mostly, although we do have some people in City Hall such as automobile registration
people who are handling automobile registration via mail, via e-mail and via a delivery service at the back
of City Hall. | visited there today, people are wearing their masks, are socially distanced, we are trying to
make sure that there is no further outbreak, no further spread of the disease, but those were steps we
thought we needed to take in the interest of safety of the public and, of course, of our employees.
On the Agenda tonight are a fewitems that as | said | would mention, Madam President. First, we have
one Resolution that would apply $4.5 million dollars of surplus to the taxrate. That will help us, that is what
we projected at the beginning of the year and this will help us keep the tax rate to the lowest we possibly
can getit. This is consistent with the amount of surplus that we have applied to the tax rate in prior years.
