DAPHNE – City officials hope to have renovations completed in time for City Hall and other facilities to reopen soon, Mayor Dane Haygood said.
Daphne closed City Hall and other buildings to the public on March 20 in an effort to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Since then, city operations have continued, but residents have not been allowed into the buildings.
Haygood said Daphne employees have been working since March on renovations to the building and safety measures to protect visitors and workers.
“We’re targeting May 15 for reopening all our facilities to the public,” Haygood told City Council members on May 4. “We’re doing a couple of things with that. One, we’re trying to complete some of the renovations we have here but also looking at adding some additional safety precautions in these couple of weeks that we have – particularly what we call face shields. There may be a better term, but some plexiglass barriers.”
He said that while some work will not be complete, the buildings should soon be ready for opening.
“We anticipate having the majority of that done in two weeks,” Haygood said on May 4. “There will still be some doors that won’t be delivered, but we’ll still have some cased openings in the meantime. We’ll certainly be in a much better safety and precautionary position with the revisions to the reception area once we reopen for business. Also, the senior center roof project was completed so we’re excited to have that completed.”
He said the Daphne Public Library has also continued operations. Library employees set up a system in which patrons can order books online or by phone. When residents arrive to pick up the order, the books are placed inside the first set of double doors at the entrance to be retrieved without contact between employees and patrons.
“The library is going to have by the end of this week, a shield installed at their counter service and we’ve continued to have our library serve the public, just doing so in a contactless delivery so if anybody’s looking for library books, you can indeed check those out online on our daphnepubliclibrary.org website or call the library and pick those up,” Haygood said.
