 You're tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn LaBea Renault and today is Tuesday, August 11, 2020. We are sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. My goal with this show is to help provide a narrative for how individuals, organizations, and cultural groups around Yolo County are weathering the COVID-19 pandemic. I believe the more we can share diverse perspectives and solid local information, the better prepared we are to create community that's based on understanding and inclusion. Since March, we've recorded 30 episodes and today marks interview number 50. I want to say thank you to all who have participated and listened. I did an informal poll on my Facebook page last week and received a ton of feedback, much of which skewed towards the desire to hear more from everyday people about their experiences during this time. So I'll be doing my best to bring those ideas forward in future interviews as well as continuing to speak with local leaders who share important information about our institutions, schools, and businesses. And I'll remind you, you can listen to this or any KDRT show anytime online at kdrt.org. Today we'll check in with our neighbors in West Sacramento via a conversation with West Sacramento City Councilmember Martha Guerrero, and then we'll speak with Sarah Marsh Crowder, who is the literary manager and company dramaturg for Bike City Theater Company here in Davis. So last week, the number of confirmed COVID-19 infections passed 15 million globally with around 650,000 deaths. Lockdowns are easing in many countries, leading some people to assume that the pandemic is ending, but really the pandemic is not playing out in the same way from place to place. Countries such as China, New Zealand, and Rwanda have reached a low level of cases after lockdowns of varying lengths and are able to ease restrictions while watching for flare-ups. But elsewhere, such as here in the United States and in Brazil, cases are rising fast after governments lift at lockdowns quickly or never activate at them nationwide. And I think that's really our problem here. Right here at home, Dr. Sonia Angel, the former head of California's Public Health Department, resigned late Sunday, days after officials revealed a backlog of hundreds of thousands of coronavirus records that Governor Gavin Newsom said were never reported to his administration. And that news broke yesterday. Last week, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Marth Golly disclosed that as many as 300,000 records hadn't been processed, leaving county health officials with critical gaps in data on the virus's transmission. Golly attributed the problem to a computer server outage late last month and a failure to renew a certificate for Quest Diagnostics, a commercial lab that tests for coronavirus. Newsom has ordered a full investigation into the incident. In related news, Yolo County posted 75 new cases yesterday. And I do believe that is related to the backlog, bringing the county's total cases to 1,834. YoloCounty.org remains your site for all county-related public health info and for general questions about COVID-19. And the county offers a COVID-19 response operations center line for those general questions. And the number is 833-965-6268. And finally, if COVID-19 has you feeling stressed, anxious or lonely, the CalHOPE warm line has free resources to manage stress and a call line to talk about your struggles. And the number is 833-317-4673. It is free and confidential. And let's take a moment for music, and we will be right back with our first interview. Okay, Martha Guerrero was elected to the West Sacramento City Council in 2018 after having previously served on the city's planning commission for a number of years. And she is running for mayor in the current election cycle. As Los Angeles' county legislative representative in Sacramento, she's dedicated over 19 years to public service, covering legislative strategy and advocacy, public administration, strategic planning, and legislative and budget analysis. Also, a licensed clinical social worker, if you can believe that, Martha has received accommodation from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for her legislative leadership and dedication to foster children. And I reached out to her because she's also been a leading source for information about West Sacramento on the COVID-19 Yolo Response Facebook page. Welcome, Martha. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me today. So West Sacramento is an incredibly multicultural, diverse community. It's a hub for food production. It's a gateway to the Delta. It's really different than all the other communities in Yolo County in many ways. And like other areas in the county, it's been dealing with a surge in COVID cases with 26 new cases reported just yesterday. So I'm hoping today that we'll be able to hear about what some of the particular challenges are in your community. And then we can talk about the ways that the community is rising to meet those. Thank you. Okay. And yes, we have been experiencing an increased caseload of COVID cases. And I think it's also due to the ability to do more testing in our city. And we're continuing to increase testing as we move forward so that we can capture who are positive and make sure that they are isolating themselves trying to get the testing results back sooner. And I'm working with our Sacramento Metro Chamber partners to provide PPE to our businesses so that they can pass them out to their customers. Right. I saw you had posted a picture of a delivery of PPE to frontline workers at a grocery store there. Yes, Arteaga is one of our, mainly served by Latino community. And that's where our biggest surge. We're experiencing an increase of the Latino community who are providing support for those out of, you know, the grocery stores. They clean our hospitals and our businesses. And they come home and they have families where they live in small environments. And they also want to take care of their elders. So they go in and visit with them, teaching them what they can do to prevent the spread, educating them on how it happens quickly if they're not wearing a mask and providing them with the PPE so they can continue to use it and not have to hold on to it. We've been seeing that they're trying to scrub them clean and reuse them where we're thinking, you know, that's not a good idea. Right. Toss those and use a new one. And so that teaching the farm workers as well what their rights are, if they feel sick to let their employer know that they're not feeling well, and they might have come in contact with somebody who's COVID positive so they can stay home and not contaminate their fellow workers. Yeah, it's so important to get that communicated in multiple languages. And you know, I know West Sacramento has a fairly large Hmong population, a fairly large Russian population, as I said, it is a very, very diverse community. So what else are you hearing from your constituents about the the kinds of help that's needed right now? I'm hearing concerns from individuals who are going to businesses with people and not wearing masks. Their concern is catching it. So trying to educate the businesses to enforce the use of masks and also have them on hand. And there's some businesses who are ahead of the game who are actually have door greeters such as the Nugget and Target and Walmart have done a lot of improving in that area. And handing out a mask if somebody's not coming in with the appropriate protection and trying to enforce that even while they're in the store. So people will go in and take it off and not want to use it, but just continuing to enforce the use of masks and cleaning their hands and sanitizing all the public, you know, things that people are using, whether it be at the cash register to go on shopping cars and other things that people are coming in contact with frequently. Restaurants trying to enforce making sure that there's no indoor seating. And if somebody comes indoors, it's going to be to go and pick up your food and then leave. But outdoor seating is permitted. We haven't seen a case where an outdoor seating has affected infected other people. It could be an employee who comes back from a family or an event where they do come and contaminate it. So our businesses are very good at closing immediately if they find out that one of their employees did come in sick and then they try to decontaminate the site. And that's in an area I think that our businesses are very good at. Let's talk about food scarcity for a moment because another thing you have shared, I know you've been working with Yolo Food Bank during this time to help make sure that food gets to citizens in West Sacramento who need it. So how is that playing out? How many more people do you know are getting delivery in West Sacramento and how have you been a part of that? We have had to bolster enhanced food bank and meals on wheels support because initially had through a Yolo Food Bank home delivered meals. So they scaled back and I'm working with the county and initially we had the Great Plates program that the state rolled out and I tried to get the city involved. They said that the workload, the administrative requirements were excessive and so I reached out to Yolo County and they did participate. So that gave us the infrastructure so that we can do something new beyond the Great Plates program which expired and with the coronavirus relief funding we've enhanced access to in-home meals for our most vulnerable populations and even those that are COVID positive through our meals and wheels program. And Yolo Food Bank has increased to two additional sites in the local church and in another area here the Children's Alliance program here in the Broderick and Bride area. So we have about four distribution sites now weekly where initially we used to have St. Vincent DePaul and Trinity and our Mercy Coalition who would do daily meals to our population who are homeless and so that they scaled back to their retirees and so Yolo Food Bank has stepped up tremendously. They have they have done Yeoman's work during this pandemic. Because you mentioned the homeless let's talk for a minute about Project Room Key and for listeners that's the program Governor Newsom launched at the start of the pandemic where the state has secured thousands of isolation rooms and hotels and motels for basically extremely vulnerable individuals experiencing homelessness and all that was done to help flatten the curve and of course preserve hospital capacity but what I wanted to say Martha is for anyone who's been around for a while for years there was a giant billboard on I-80 West between West Sac and Davis that advertised thousands of motel rooms in West Sacramento. It's since been changed but that memory tells me that West Sacramento has had a real role to play here so could you speak to that program and its importance for local jurisdictions? Yes it has been a benefit to have when we had our billboard of 10,000 motel rooms and all focused on West Capital Avenue and the motel did step up and offer the motel use so that we can have our unsheltered guests come in and provide shelter to prevent the spread of COVID out on the streets and so we had above a hundred people who are participating since then we've gone down to about 70 and it's because we found housing permanent housing for them so to provide stability for someone who is you know most of them have some level of challenges whether they have a history of rental evictions or just not being able to cover the first and last month's rent, not having the financial support, being able to stabilize their medical needs so they can get on Social Security insurance and you need to have a medical history in order to qualify for that and just providing the additional resources to support so that they can become stable and a little bit healthier in order to be able to find housing and support so all of that has been done through Project Moonkey and I've been advocating with the Homeless Coalition for it to become Project Homekey which West Sacramento is aggressively pursuing to be a recipient of we're looking at between two million to six million dollars in funding for about two to four motels. Very interesting development there yeah because you know you have a pandemic on top of homelessness, on top of food scarcity you're just basically layering one one problem on top of another so it's been it's been quite a time. Before we run out of time I when we were chatting back and forth before this interview I mentioned that I've really come to be aware of West Sacramento as kind of a food hub and I'm thinking here of Dollar General's recent announcement that it's moving it's all its cold storage facility to West Sacramento so West Sacramento has a lot going on in that area. What does that mean or how does it impact those types of businesses struggling to stay open and and how might it inform economic recovery in West Sacramento? Well I'm very grateful that Dollar General is coming in and you know providing an additional opportunity for people to be employed and looking forward to see what we can do to provide the additional support for them so that they can sustain their business and doing that for all of our businesses and some of the ways we can do that through programs and providing subsidized employment if they're financially struggling. We have the Cowork program which provides for individuals who have our family members parents mom or dad and we can subsidize in those that employment we can provide internships through our home run program and Workforce Investment Act has additional subsidized employment jobs for some people who are on the cusp of you know homelessness and yet they lack some of the skills but we can teach them the skills and we have an employer ready and I think that helped bridging those resources together and working with the chamber to ensure that they have the additional funding that they need either federal funding or relief in whatever way we can provide economic relief to do some subsidized grant here in West Sacramento and the coronavirus relief funds have provided the flexibility for us to use that funding to support our businesses so that that would be my goal. This is going to inform every community's work for years to come there there's just no way around that we're going to be feeling this impact for a long time. Martha it's been a pleasure to speak with you. How can people get more information about you if they are curious? Well thank you Adam. You can reach me at www.marthaburrero.com and all my contact information is in there so you can look in my background and then also send me an email if you have any questions. Great thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to let us know how the folks in West Sacramento are faring we appreciate it. Thank you all right you too. All right we're going to be back with our second interview in just a moment and I want to say that this lovely person was scheduled last week we had some technical difficulties so we are going to get her on today we'll be back in just a moment. We have some some weird mystical obstacle between Miss Sarah and and myself.