 You're tuned in to the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT, 95.7 FM in Davis, California. Low power, high impact radio. I'm Autumn Lebe Renaud and today is Friday, May 15th. We are sharing local news and resources, focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. The show airs live at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays and repeats at 5pm both days and at noon on Sundays. You can also check in anytime online at kdrt.org. My guests today are Yolo County Supervisor for District 3, Gary Sandy, and Wendy Kunta, who is the Executive Director of Progress Ranch, a nonprofit that runs two group homes in Davis. And we will get to those interviews in just a couple of minutes. Well, it's been a week that's brought a little bit of clarity, but even more confusion about the process of reopening, plus continued troubling economic and political news and for many of us too much time in front of a computer. I literally ran outside yesterday morning when I heard neighbors chatting in their front yards. I knew I'd be on Zoom for the next four hours and I just wanted that in-person contact from an appropriate distance, of course. I felt like a complete dork, but bless my sweet neighbors. They laughed with me and not at me. My social media feeds are full of that yearning for connection as well, and the conundrum of course is how to cultivate that in ways that keep us safe. So I've mentioned this before, but there are a million stories out there about how that yearning and connection and just what gets us through our days, and we really want to hear yours. Take a look at davismedia.org slash diary to learn about our life in the time of COVID, the Yolo County Community Diary Project, and then upload your very brief video to help us paint a picture of our local communities during this time. It's easy. It can be silly or serious. You don't even need to be on camera. You can take a picture of your garden, and it does not have to be anything approaching perfection. Check it out. And our listener Lois wrote in with a few more tips on the lighter side. She reminded me about the great teddy bear hunt that continues throughout Yolo County, everything that started back in April, basically people are placing their teddy bears in visible places in their homes or parked cars so that kids can find them on scavenger hunts. And they're having all kinds of fun with this. The bears can be moved from week to week to up the challenge. Want to learn more? Check out Yolo County Teddy Bear Hunt on Facebook. And with face coverings required, a number of neighbors throughout the county are making them. In need of handmade masks or if you are making masks, there is a Facebook group Yolo County Mask Making for COVID-19. And you can also find offers for them for free on the next door app. One local non-profit, Davis Phoenix Coalition, has been making rainbow and batik masks and selling them as a fundraiser at Davis Farmers Market. Many other folks, including some of my neighbors and friends, are making them and just giving them away as a labor of love and we thank you for that. And while our usual gathering places are closed, some creative leaders have figured out ways to share using Zoom and other online methods. For example, Debbie Erniece, and ironically that's my guess Wendy's mom, managed to get almost 100 Fit for Life exercises zooming and they've been going since April. The Davis Genealogy Club will be offering its first ever online presentation on May 26th about DNA genetic genealogy research and the Davis Senior Center is hosting regular social chats to help keep folks connected. You can learn more about these last three items I mentioned via the Davis Senior Center. Call them at 530-757-5696 or email senior services at cityofdavis.org. And finally, if you haven't already checked it out, the Folk Brothers are back on the air Wednesday mornings. Bill Wagman and Peter Schiffman are working from home producing their show that includes traditional folk of the British Isles and the United States, contemporary singer-songwriters on both sides of the Atlantic, and American Roots music and some of its lesser known offshoots. It's a great show. Listen live Wednesdays at 10 a.m. or catch the archive on KDRT.org. And we're going to take just a minute for music before our first call. He served as a member of the Woodland City Council from 1989 to 1996, including two years as its mayor, and he has a storied resume of other community service plus work as a state legislative staffer and various posts at UC Davis. In 2018 he was elected to the Yolo County Board of Supervisors for District 3 and currently serves as the board's chair. My first guest today is Gary Sandy. Hi there, Gary. Welcome. Good afternoon. So how are things in your world during the pandemic, you and your family doing okay? Are you there? Yes. Can you hear me? Hello. Gary, can you hear me? Okay folks, can you hear me? We're having a technical difficulty. Hang on. Gary, can you hear me? Okay. Okay, folks, we're going to go back to the music and see if we can get him on the air again. Okay, we're going to try this again, Gary. Can you hear me? I can. All right. Hopefully you heard the nice introduction I gave you there a few minutes ago. Good. Well, so I've been talking to a lot of people, you know, over the last couple of months from the county, your Board of Supervisors colleagues, many people from public health. So we've talked a lot about the impacts of the pandemic, you know, kind of through the county lens. But last week, the state announced it would allow for regional variation, essentially an opportunity for counties to move further into phase two and reopen additional services or businesses, but they have to meet criteria and they have to have a readiness plan. So two questions to start off. How is Yolo County responding to this and what is our level of readiness? Well, we said in our, what's called our letter of adaptation yesterday to the state, which basically says we want to enter into this and begin moving ahead. And so we now have to wait and see whether they will approve that. And as you may know, or may remember, one of the problems is that they want counties to have gone 14 days without his death and due to the presence of long-term care or skilled nursing facilities in the county, that's a tougher threshold than me because the incidence of death is just much higher associated with those facilities. So that sets us back some. But we'll wait and see what happens. Right. In terms of other, let's talk about the contact tracers for a minute. I know there's a threshold there, a certain number a county needs to have. I think it was 30 for Yolo County, but we're training more, is that correct? That's exactly correct. We have 37 trained at the moment. We're trying to reach a threshold, an upper threshold of 60 so that we can give us greater mobility, but actually the tracing and the testing are the two key elements of moving forward in a manner that safeguards public health. So we're finally there. Right. Right. Well, this week brought some more items have opened up and I'm just going to read that list, child care for those outside of the essential workforce, that's a big deal. It is a huge deal. Yeah. Limited services including car washes, pet grooming, landscape gardening, appliance repair, residential and janitorial cleaning and plumbing, outdoor museums and open gallery spaces. So we are gradually starting to see those things open up where we can still have some reasonable assurance of distance. But we don't really know when we're going to get to stage three, do we? That's a question people have been asking me. We do not. Stage three is really going to be the big stage at this point. We're still dealing with things where we can pretty, whether people have limited contact with others that stage two contains a lot of outdoor activities that we've been trying to work on. But stage three will be the biggie. Stage three just incorporates the so much of the other elements, higher risk businesses including a nail and hair salon, where people are very close to each other, gyms, gyms I think are a major hurdle, movie theaters and sports with live audiences and of course in person religious services, which has been another significant barrier await us in stage three. Yeah. And then of course there's the concern that we could pass through stage three, reopen a bunch of things and then deal with a seasonal outbreak again in the fall. We don't know but that's one of the potentials. So that's one of the reasons that I've been more of a fan of moving ahead at this point when the relative level of contact between people is better spaced. People are outside, they're moving around, they're maintaining an active lifestyle. And I wanted us to learn our lessons now than wait until the fall when people begin to go inside and they're enclosed, contain spaces where the spread of the virus can happen more quickly. And so I've been rather anxious to get us out there and so we can start learning our own best practices in anticipation of changed habits in the fall. Well more and more it does seem that the number one practice we'll have to continue is wearing masks. So I just read a piece about all the different places you can find them in Yolo County. Let's talk about the budgetary impact on the county, Gary. So I checked in with yesterday's May budget advice from the state and it had a lot of hits for education but we know the news going forward for municipalities is going to be pretty dire too. So how will the county approach those challenges and where will it hit hardest? Well the county is currently staring down the barrel of a $13.1 million shortfall so it is not insignificant that the fiscal challenges are really going to color a lot of the conversation well into the fall here. They post major, obviously major barriers to us moving forward but we will try to do our best to balance those, we're discussing where we can cut now and what we can do in the interim and taking this time to sort of look at things from a strategic viewpoint. We did receive some welcome news from the May revise which is that we received a $22 million COVID response payment and so that will help moving forward in a COVID related cost but it's going to be a very, very tough year budgetary and there's no question about it. As I've been talking with people from the city we're hearing about things like hiring freezes, not filling positions, having to go back with collective bargaining units so as the county will be looking at similar things as well. We will be looking at the full revenue of potential cuts and ways that we can best manage our workforce without obviously cutting our workforce. We're going to do everything it's impossible to maintain it but it is going to be a difficult time with difficult decisions. I want to thank you, I've thanked other supervisors too but for your work in steering the opening of the Yolo County relief fund for nonprofits that's as I sit here you know I manage this nonprofit that's been a big deal for all of us to help shine a light on that so I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for that. Good we're looking at a partnership there with Travis Federal Credit Union that may increase our year-to-day total upward of 800,000. We have about 400,000 in the bank and they've agreed to match it so we may be nearing a million dollars at this point. That's good news. I also wanted to ask you how Woodland is faring. You're a long, long time resident of Woodland and former mayor and deeply involved and I haven't really had a chance to kind of touch in on any with anyone from Woodland yet so how's your community doing? One of the most fascinating aspects of being on the board and having that someone who lived in Davis for several years and then moved to Woodland has been just noting the cultural differences on the board and how the different supervisors approach to use how they are pressured by the public etc. Woodland is keenly feeling the pressure of the shutdown in ways that I'm not sure the other communities are principal because it has such a large and vibrant business sector and many of those are mom and pop shops for which the shutdown has been very severe and is now threatening their businesses they've obviously laid off employees so there's a lot of very evident and vocal in their credit sharing of the way that this all impacted those businesses and so there's been just a big push from Woodland in that regard let's reopen let's get people moving again and so that's really been I think a different aspect from the other supervisors. Yeah I'm just visualizing Main Street in downtown Woodland and you know I've I go out before the shutdown I go out there frequently and you know avail of different services out there state theater and some restaurants and things like that and I've really noticed over the last couple years there's been like this renewed vigor in downtown Woodland and it's become this really kind of cool place so not only are you talking about those businesses so you're talking about Woodland has a lot of light industry and warehouse facilities and things that you're right Davis doesn't really have those so the business sector I have often said that in very many ways that Woodland serves as the marketplace for Davis and I would say if you don't believe me visit Target on the Saturday morning half of Davis is there but it has been it's a shame that at a time when what was sort of finally regaining its stride that it lost perhaps in the 50s and 60s around economic vitality downtown now this has given it a whammy and this this looming development of nice new restaurants and entertainment venues downtown much of which is still in the planning stages may now never come to fruition and that's that's heartbreaking yeah so how do we begin to help businesses rebuild rebuild is maybe the wrong word because what you just said indicates that some of them simply won't survive this you know there's going to be a lot of collateral damage but how does a community come together and start addressing that for example what role is your Chamber of Commerce playing there and so on they're playing an active role in providing leadership I think the operative word is sort of reinvention that will be more more operative than rebuild and I think a lot of businesses are going to have to read envision how they how they reinvent themselves and I hope that local consumers will give a disproportionate emphasis to mom and pop shops maintaining the core of their own community because you have to remember that in many ways the terms of the shutdown were very unfair which is to say that if you were a mom and pop shop selling tapestries on main street and Target sells the same tapestries Target was able to remain open through the entire time because they also felt groceries right so they deemed essential while you were being non-essential and so there's been a number of egregiously unfair aspects of the situation that have impacted them disproportionately so I would hope that local consumers would remember that I know my wife and I have made a practice of ordering out local restaurants we've received excellent meals but it's a way of keeping the community dollars in the community and dealing with those people who provide support for the local academic and athletic teams etc and it's a way of reinvesting in the community and I hope people will will really put into good practice definitely I think we're also looking at a time moving ahead where more business is just done online so we are out of time but I really want to thank you for making time I know you're busy man to call in and to talk about these issues and I'd love to have you back in in a month or two so we can kind of see where we are with the county budget and all of that time always passes too quickly I know thanks all right thanks so much Gary take care all right bye bye we are awaiting our second call and I just want to say a word while we're waiting for that a bit more about the KDRT programmers I've been mentioning this the last couple of weeks but I really want people to know that it's taken a lot of work on their part to learn how to use new tools and and really whole new skill sets to produce remotely radio shows remotely from home using their computers and it's not the same as doing what I'm doing which is strolling in and flipping a switch and talking into a microphone so just hats off this community radio at its best and we have our call coming in so operating since 1976 progress ranch is an intensive treatment program providing high quality mental health services to boys ages 6 to 14 who as a result of dysfunctional family relationships can't function in a normal home environment progress ranch has two homes with six beds each located in residential neighborhoods in Davis California and my guest is their executive director Wendy Cunta hi there Wendy how you doing I'm good thank you thanks for having me you bet nice to hear your voice so I just read your mission statement but tell us a bit more about progress ranch how do boys get referred to you and what kind of care and services do you provide so the boys are referred to us through their local counties and most of our boys are in the foster care system for many years and have not been successful in the family environment and need more services and mental health services and structured environment to help them and then our goal is to get them back either with their family or with a foster family mm-hmm so there are a lot of parents out there who are dealing with teaching one or several kids at home during this time of distance learning but you've got that in in volume so how are you how are you managing all the intricacies of that right now yeah that's been very very difficult with six boys in each house and the majority of my staff are young adults who aren't parents and so this is like a crash course becoming a parent and we're lucky enough that we have you know para educators from Davis Joint Unified who work with us they're not you know so they understand the system and they're able to help you know during this time you know because they're working they're not able to work through Davis Joint Unified but they're also progress ranch employees so it's been kind of a good relationship in that way but you know on top of all the distant learning schedules we're also managing all the boys have costa workers get you know visit family visits therapy visits county worker visits so we're spending a lot of time on zoom a lot of time on you know scheduling visits right which doesn't do a lot to help I I don't know your current crop of boys but I've met a lot of them in the past and they are you know bouncing off the walls energy so sitting in front of a computer is I imagine is not a good match there no it's been extremely difficult and you know we've gotten creative with you know trying to find things for them to fidget with in their hands and putting them in different spaces in the house or even in the backyard you know with headphones on you know I think you know one benefit is that you know my staff is they're very creative in in trying to find you know the best resources and working things out the best they can yeah so a number of people this week have been bringing up the the topics of stress and anxiety among our kids and our youth so I imagine that's an extra burden as well definitely you know all my boys come already right you know so much stress and anxiety and a background of trauma and you know having that that brain you know system that has had so much trauma that you know they don't deal with stress and anxiety very well already so this just increases it and you know they're and they're also kids you know the my youngest is seven and my oldest right now 13 they don't understand what's going on there or understand why they can't see their family in person or why staff come in wearing masks and you know so trying to make it you know I think fun and bringing in lots of activities which I think a lot of families and Davis are doing you know you know having this stuffed animal in the window and doing the chalk art out front and you know just trying to be feel like part of the community and that we're all in this together it's been really helpful yeah so I've said this a lot on this show we all know that right now all nonprofits need financial support and but I know that progress ranch you have a long list on your website of specific needs but but let's talk about how people can support you in in different ways right now well I think some you know in the beginning it's been so great the babies community has always been amazing for us you know I can put something on Facebook like we need new DVD movies and people are dropping it off and and we've seen the same here you know with as soon as the first week hit I had puzzles and board games and you know lots of outdoor activities so you know all that is still needed because our boys run through it you know a monopoly game turned into it was dropped off few weeks ago I guarantee doesn't have all pieces well let's hopefully a Rosenberg is listening yeah great with you actually we just talked today about dropping Legos off to one of the houses of course yes he's definitely good about that and you know so for us you know I have a you know Amazon wish list that includes a lot of those things but a lot of people don't have to buy things new you know you have we have a lot of families that kids are growing out of you know their skateboards or their bicycles and those are all things that we can use because I started a garden and we had some local you know neighbors drop off some starters you know and I think that we try to keep up on Facebook so you know I'm constantly putting things that we're looking for that we need we had a couple families go to donut go get donuts and drop them off on a Friday morning and again it just adds to the kids feeling like they haven't been forgotten you know that they're the community wants to be there for them even in this time yeah yeah sometimes it's all about the small kindnesses well I've I've always thought this about you here you're a bit of an angel with the work that you do and the work that your staff does and how you support the boys so tell us so you're on Facebook and also your website is let's let people know about that it's it's progress ranch.com so www progress ranch.com and you know I definitely need to say that you know that the angels right now are my staff because they didn't miss a beat as soon as the shelter in place you know when it came down they still show up for work and we're talking about young adults who are making minimum wage and you know go there every day so you know I I feel a lot for them because they they're putting in a lot of work right now with those boys. Alright well thanks so much for calling in Wendy. Sure. Alright take care. Okay and thank you for tuning in I will be back next Tuesday keeping this up Tuesdays and Fridays through the end of the month and then going to Tuesdays only in June from the KDRT studio I'm Autumn Lab Arano and this has been the COVID-19 community report.