DAPHNE – Efforts to deal with the COVID 19 outbreak have gone well so far in Daphne, but city officials are preparing for the next phase if state officials issue a stay-at-home order or other restrictions, Mayor Dane Haygood said.
In a conference call with three City Council members on Friday, March 27, Haygood said municipal operations are continuing even though City Hall and other facilities were closed to the public at the start of the week.
“We implemented those at the end of last week to close City Hall,” Haygood said. “We had closed the library and the Senior Center to everything but curbside delivery back on Thursday. That’s all gone well. We kind of pushed really hard to implement some card not present transactions so that community development, finance, revenue could still continue to process cards without people being present. We got all that done by the end of the day on Friday.”
Daphne officials also placed a drop-box outside City Hall so that residents can leave papers, such as building forms, without making person-to-person contact.
The next step is preparing for additional restrictions if those are ordered by Gov. Kay Ivey, Haygood said. The mayor said that as more tests are done for COVID 19 cases in Baldwin County and across Alabama, the number of positive reports will rise and officials should be prepared for more state action.
“We spent a lot of time in the early part of this week preparing for if the governor does take further steps and sort of clamps down on movement even further and sort of modeling it after other states,” Haygood said. “The thought being is that if she does that it would probably be a stay-at-home order and just exempt a few particular industries, particularly health care and grocery stores and only allow movement to and from those places.”
The city plan is to designate essential personnel, such as police, fire and sanitation workers, who will continue to report to work in person.
Some services could be cut back if the number of employees reporting to work is reduced. Haygood said garbage collection could be limited to household garbage and that recyclables and yard trash would not be collected.
Other employees, such as some workers in human resources, information technology, finance, administration and other departments, will continue to work from home.
The mayor said the Daphne Fire Department responded to three or four potential COVID 19 cases during the week.
Haygood said that in addition to the effect on health care, city officials are also preparing for the impact that the disease is having on the local economy.
“A lot of our small businesses, retailers, restaurants are certainly going to be hurting. We’re going to have an economic downturn on the backside of this. There’s just no doubt about this,” Haygood said. “Some have chosen to close their doors and I think that a lot of them are going to be forced to deal with that hard decision as they move forward. A lot of concern about how they make payroll.”
The mayor said the city is in a good financial position at the moment. City revenue is up by about $2 million from the same time last year.
“We still have our $8-million plus reserve, and this is the reasons you have reserves for these unexpected occurrences that hit your community hard,” Haygood said. “We do have some really bright spots in the economy, Walmart, our grocery stores, Sam’s Club, those big-box retailers with groceries are having extremely high volumes and so that is very much a positive that’s going to cause the sales tax drop that we’re going to have to be offset a little bit.”
Haygood said city parks remain open but organized recreational activities have been cancelled. Signs have been posted at all parks directing visitors to maintain social distances and take other precautions.
