 Good afternoon. You're tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn LeBae-Renault and today is Tuesday, May 12th, and this is episode 17 of this program. We are sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. And this show airs live at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays and repeats at 5 p.m. Both days and at noon on Sundays. And did you know you can listen online anytime at kdrt.org? My guest today is Davis City Councilmember Dan Carson, and we will get to that interview in just a few minutes. But first, you know, I'm speaking to you at a pivotal time as many states are beginning to reopen or partially reopen. There's confusion. There's pushback against remaining closed. And there's a lot of fear about what happens if we open too soon and get a boomerang effect. In short, there's a lot of unknown. Meanwhile, our government has canceled funding for a key COVID-19 researcher. And it was only yesterday, May 11th, that everyone in the White House was finally directed to wear masks. You can't make this stuff up. Here is where we stand with the numbers. And these are pulled from the CDC, the California Department of Public Health and Yolo Public Health websites, respectively. I don't like reading these every show, but I do feel like it's important to have a touchstone now and then. Nationally, total confirmed cases stand at 1,324,488. This is interesting. That's 23,792 new cases over the previous day. Some of that is, you know, we're testing more, and so the numbers are starting to reflect that. But some of that is just an alarming uptick in new cases. Yesterday, we topped 80,000 deaths nationwide, and the current rate of increase is approximately 1,000 deaths per day. In California, our numbers stand at 67,939 confirmed cases. In 2,770 deaths. And in Yolo County, we have 174 confirmed cases with 20 deaths countywide. And of course, many of that have happened in our elder care facilities. But for some perspective, here are New York's numbers. 334,640 cases and 26,923 deaths. There are a whole lot of factors at play there, including an early patient who was deemed a super spreader, the fact that they had considerably, you know, more transmission routes and their population density. You know, just call to mind an image of a packed subway car, and it's not hard to imagine how the virus spread like crazy through New York City's boroughs in particular. Here in California last week, Governor Newsom released new information about a staged approach to reopening. And this past week, additional businesses reopened, including curbside pickup for retail businesses, manufacturing and logistics and warehouse work. Next up will be stage two, but these are not open yet. They'll include destination retail, including shopping malls and swap meets, personal services limited to car washes, pet grooming, tanning and landscape gardening, office-based businesses, dining restaurants, schools and childcare, and outdoor museums and open gallery spaces. Stages three and four include many more kinds of businesses as well as public events, but those won't be considered for some time yet. Other news this week, California has become the first state to commit to automatically mailing all registered voters a ballot for the November election, and that's a significant move as states consider how to protect both voting rights and public health during the coronavirus pandemic. Newsom signed an executive order last Friday requiring election officials to send mail-in ballots to every registered voter ahead of the general election. Acknowledging that attempting traditional voting on a mass scale will likely still be too dangerous come November. And I'd like to get our county clerk or recorder assessor Jesse Salinas on to talk about that. Finally, a note to say there's some promising research coming out of UC Davis, including some COVID-19 vaccine trials and a drug developed in a UCD laboratory that may control the inflammatory response to the virus. That's something that researchers say is important, as important as antiviral therapies or a vaccine, working on getting someone on the show who can speak to this aspect of the crisis. And I believe we have our call coming in, so give me just a minute to transfer over here. Hi. So it's no secret that municipalities will be among those hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, as revenues from several major sources dry up or slow to a trickle. My guest today was elected to the Davis City Council in 2018 and is currently serving his first term. He ran on a platform of being pragmatic about finances and financial realities, and it's my pleasure today to welcome Davis City Council member Dan Carson. Thanks for joining us, Dan. Well, thank you for having me. How are you and your family doing? We're doing great, although I had the excitement of writing my last college tuition check for my last son in May. But now he's sheltering in place with us. And do you know 22-year-olds eat five square meals a day? So much for my own financial relief. Yes, I have 20-year-old twins and I have two young adults living at home. I do know this firsthand. So last Tuesday, Dan, I had, you know, our mayor, Brett Lee, on, and that was before the big council meeting where you got a presentation on fiscal realities and the meeting was all about money. And we're going to talk about money today, but of course money and how it impacts people in people's lives is intrinsically connected, so we'll make sure we talk about that too. Let's, if you will, kind of walk us through the causes and the extent of the structural deficit the city is facing. Not all of us are fiscal experts, and I'm hoping you can give the rest of us some context for what's going on. Sure, and it is pretty bad news for the city. We're looking at a $22 million deficit playing out over multiple years, using like as much as $7 million a year out of about a $60 million general fund bucket. So this is a big hit that we're staring at. The shelter-in-place orders that we're dutifully following has a big impact on our retail, on our hotels. So sales and hotel tax monies are the two areas we're clearly going to see the biggest hit. Property taxes, not so much is the way it looks at the present time. And then there are some impacts on things like our utilities because we've told folks, look, we understand our circumstances. If you need to, if you don't have the resources to pay your utility bill, you're still on the hook for paying it when you can, but we're not going to hit you with penalties. And then just this last week, City Council postponed a 10% rate hike in solid waste rates because we just knew this is not the right time to do that. Sure. So what kinds of things will be hardest hit? Do you have a sense yet? Well, of course, we've already had to put off and close down a number of our summer camps and children's activities. On the basic things like police and fire services, it's taking a great deal of work behind the scenes, but we've managed to deploy our folks in a way that we've maintained the critical services that make the city run. Besides our first responders, you know, you take it for granted that you turn on the tap and you can get your water service and the wastewater system is going to continue to work. But in these circumstances, it takes a lot of effort to make sure that no services are interrupted. So far we've been able to pull that off. Definitely, of course, people see in their parks, folks have had to focus on the critical things, and so in some places things look a bit rough around the edges. That's unfortunate, but that's kind of where we are right now. Well, I'm going to put my hat on here for just a second as Chair of the Arts Alliance, Davis, because that occupant transient tax helps fund a lot of, I mean, it funds a lot of things, but among them the public art we have here in Davis. So I'm assuming we're going to see some impacts to that program as well. We think that we could see easily a loss of a third to a half of our transit occupancy tax could get worse. At one point our hotels, which ordinarily run at something like a 70% occupancy rate, were down around 10 or 20%. I'm waiting to see, you know, what the new numbers look like. But that is money we count on in our general fund for a lot of basic programs along with sales tax. Sales and property are the two things that make our city run. Hotel taxes are definitely significant and have become more so in recent years. Yeah, and not only have we lost people going to the downtown businesses, we've lost the people who come to UC Davis for conferences or come to visit their kids or whatever, so I can see how those numbers are just going to be incredibly low even as we begin to reopen and move forward because it's looking increasingly likely that the students aren't going to be returning. Right, the words so far from the campus is they're definitely going to do remote teaching in the fall where we've yet to hear whether they have classes in person as well. But even if they do both, we suspect that we know there will be some students who will defer a year, you know, who would just otherwise be starting their freshman year and decide this isn't the right time for me. And there will be some folks who will prefer to get their classes remotely at least that first quarter. And, you know, our businesses are downtown especially are used to the students being away, but having them gone in the spring, summer and the fall, you know, obviously is going to be a hard thing for some folks to write out. So we're trying to do what we can within our resources to help our local businesses to continue to thrive. But, you know, not everybody is set up properly to do retailing, you know, at curbside and things like that. So these rules, even if they start to get relaxed, aren't going to work perfectly for everyone. There's going to be some trickle down into another sector too, and that's housing, you know. I mean, certainly as you know, we've got this incredibly low, almost zero availability rate for rental housing here in Davis. And with students gone, I think we may have an opposite problem there. And then, you know, that's going to affect landlords. Not only are we going to be losing renters from the marketplace, at least temporarily, but in addition, we are still working very hard to bring additional rental housing online in this town. But I, you know, the situation we'll see temporarily in the long term, I still think we have a serious affordable housing crisis to deal with. And I don't want us to take our foot off the gas pedal on that because I think it's important. Yeah. So you've all been working remotely, city staff, city council, you know, and I know that meetings are being, you know, they're being recorded and shared remotely. Do you foresee that continuing on in some capacity as we move forward? In other words, City Hall isn't just going to miraculously open fully one day, right? There's, you know, it seems to me there's going to have to be some kind of phased-in approach to reopening the city even. I think no different in a way than what you'll see for the private sector. And, you know, we won't, we don't get to tell the virus what to do. The virus will tell us what to do. And certainly our county public health officials, we're trying to follow very closely their guidance and direction on how to do this. We have an emergency operations center that's operating virtually right now. So we've shown we have the capability of acting fast on our feet to keep essential services going. And, of course, to keep our council meetings going, not without a little controversy. You know, there were folks who were saying we should just shut everything down, but this is a significant city. We have important things we have to continue to do to keep everybody safe and well. And some of those actions go beyond the coronavirus. What happens with the virtual meetings that we're doing? I think we all would love to return to in-person meetings when it's safe. But we're not going to rush it. We don't want to put anyone's health in danger. And I'll have to say, I think we're getting the hang of this after one sort of disastrous initial start. I think the process we've allowed for public input has been very productive, not perfect for everyone, but I think it's worked, you know, as well as can be expected under the circumstances. Sure. So I know going back to last Tuesday's city council meeting, there was direction for city staff to basically go away and then come back to the council with some projections, some recommendations. One of those things may involve city going back to the table with employee bargaining units. Can you speak to that? Yes. And it is a pig action on all fronts approach we're taking. And in fact, the city is not waiting around in these discussions. The city manager is already taking actions to curb spending wherever we can. But we have said, in addition to looking at post voting or maybe delaying indefinitely capital outlay projects that we would like to do, we've asked the various departments to go back and see what general fund savings that they could achieve. We definitely did endorse the proposal the city manager brought to us, of going back and talking to our labor partners and seeing what we could do. The logical things that every city in California is doing is looking at cost of living adjustments, the hit and schedule, furloughs, those are the classic things that we've done. And of course we did before after the financial meltdown after the great recession hit in 2008. So we will be going back to those sorts of actions and to see what we can work out. Did the city ever come back fully on staffing levels after 2008? I think that it didn't. It did not. In rough numbers, we reduced the number of city staff positions about 20%. We've hardly added any back. And as Bob Leland, who is our financial consultant, who's been a terrific help to us in the circumstances, pointed out publicly we're probably in a better position than some other California cities because we did not rebound our staffing levels as our fortunes rebounded after 2008. We took a hard line on adding additional bodies. And I think that's helped soften the blow, but it doesn't allow us to avoid problems with these kinds of numbers that we're staring at. Right. Well, it's a really hard picture we're looking at. And not just for the fiscal year that lies ahead, but for subsequent years too, I would imagine we're going to be dealing with this for some years. No question. And so with that in mind, you know, we're trying to be careful on what we do. We don't want to take actions that make things worse in the long run. So we'll see how the numbers play out, but we're doing everything we can, for example, to maintain the money we spend on maintaining our roads and bike path. Yeah. Because we know if you put that work off, it just becomes way more expensive than the long run. Sure. And so that's one of the assumptions that we have going forward right now. But that's based on a $22 million deficit or loss of revenues. The other thing that could play into all of this is we're really working with other cities and other local jurisdictions to ask Congress and our state capital to help us provide us some financial relief. You know, we're your frontline responders in this emergency. And one of the disheartening things was that Congress has an aid package that provided money to cities over 500,000 in population, but cities like us that are under that population, we don't think that's fair and it just makes no sense. Yeah, it's not just cities, it's county governments too, who are going to bear this brunt as well. A couple weeks ago, Dan, I had Congressman John Garamendi back on the show and we talked about this specifically. And he said that we talked about the four stimulus packages that had been passed. And he specifically mentioned, I think we need another one. I think we need another one for cities and counties because they're being so hard hit. So I'm, you know, I'll circle back with him at some point, but I will be watching to see if anything materializes there. And we did reach out to the Congressman as a city and we're very grateful that he endorsed specifically a co-authored legislation that would help those cities under 500,000 population. And he hears it, he's got a lot of cities in that same predicament in his district. Yeah. And he gets it. Our two state legislative representatives for Davis, Cecilia Aguero, Curry, and Oh God, also very responsive. They completely understand it in our conversations. We know they're looking out for us. We recognize, of course, the states also struggling, has some big projections they're facing. But we hope they'll pass through some of that federal money that went to them. Well, I do want to say anytime I've ever spoken with you or anyone on the current council, all of you say, you know, this isn't just about money. There are people attached to those dollars too. And I appreciate that lens as we move forward through this because I'm confident that, you know, things aren't going to be considered in any kind of willingly fashion and that there will be real thought to the impact this has across the board. Oh, and we know there's a human toll and, you know, we've been fortunate in this city. We seem to have done a good job of managing the health crisis, the help of the county. And, you know, the number of folks, you know, publicly confirmed as having the virus. And I'm not aware of a Davis death, although we'll see someday in the data, maybe there was something happened that we didn't know about. But we're trying to help people with their bills. We're trying to provide, we did provide, you know, protection from eviction because we didn't want to turn a health crisis into a homelessness crisis too. We've provided money for the coronavirus relief fund in our county, helped our Davis Downtown Business Association, help our small businesses, you know, we're working on all the fronts we have within our authority because we know it's not just money. As you said, it's also people. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for taking the time. You've provided a lot of information and answered a lot of my questions and just, you know, thanks for your work on the council for being accessible and making time to call in. Appreciate it. Oh, you're most welcome. Appreciate the opportunity. All right, best to you and Maureen. Take care. Take care. Bye bye. That was Davis City Council Member Dan Carson. And I want to say the city also launched a COVID-19 response page and you can, it's highlighted on the front page at cityofdavis.org. I do have a couple more announcements I want to share today. And starting speaking of the city, the city of Davis announced yesterday that based on current state and county health orders, sports courts, the city operates have reopened as of May 4 for limited public use under continued social distancing restrictions. However, playground equipment, exercise equipment, pools and athletic fields remain closed until further notice. And following that announcement from the city, the Davis Joint Unified School District announced that all their tennis courts and basketball basketball courts have been reopened to the public this week. And again, people must adhere to requirements for public use of the school facilities. And at this time, campus buildings, athletic fields, exercise equipment and so on remain closed. Last week, DJUSD Superintendent John Bose said it is the district's goal to work toward a safe and secure opening of the school year and they are planning for several different possible first day of school scenarios. These include a traditional in-person school day model and different distance learning models. It is a toss-up at this point which way we'll end up going. We just, they don't know, we don't know. Bose said at this time all scenarios however include an opening of school on August 26. Legislative action, budget realities, guidance from the California Department of Education and the status of shelter-in-place orders and related restrictions will all inform the district's planning. So please watch out for more information on this in the coming weeks. And I want to give a shout out again to some of the KDRT programmers that have been working really hard to learn how to be radio programmers from home. You know, I come in here, our facility is mostly empty, mostly shuttered, and I come in here and I do this show, so I'm sitting here in the KDRT studio. But we have folks at home who are learning how to program using iPads, using Zoom, using, some of them are editing, you know, using tools like Audacity or GarageBand and some of them are just having a Zoom call and having a chat with someone. A particular example of this is Bill Buchanan on Davisville did a great interview with Davis Food Co-op staff this week about what it is like to be considered essential workers and on the front lines of grocery stores. And it's a really fascinating conversation. I've thought long and often about those who work in that capacity and how they've been there through all the toilet paper hoarding, all the supplies, all the empty shelves, and so we send out our thanks. You can get more information about Davisville and all the other KDRT shows, and there are a whole bunch of them coming online at KDRT.org. I think I am out of steam today, and I am going to leave you with a little bit of music. Really grateful to Dan Carson for his time. Grateful to you for tuning in. And I will be back on Friday when my guests are Yolo County Supervisor, Gary Sandy and Wendy Kunta with Progress Ranch. From the KDRT studio, I'm Autumn Labbe-Reno, and this has been the COVID-19 Community Report.