 You're tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT, 95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn Lab-A-Reno, and today is Tuesday, May 26th. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. This show airs live Tuesdays at noon, and you can catch the replays or listen online as well at kdrt.org. My guests today are Ryan Collins, homeless outreach coordinator for the city of Davis, and Sebastian Oñate, editor of the Davis Enterprise. And we'll get to our first interview in just a few minutes. Probably the most important topic this week is reopening. It's on everyone's minds, and I know here at Davis Media Access, we're working to figure it out all too. How to reopen, but still keep people safe. Today's Yolo County Supervisors Meeting, happening this very morning, will see that governing body deal with this question writ large. Under the state's health order, Yolo County now has permission to open restaurants for dine-in service and retail shops to customers who want more than curbside or delivery. And the board is expected to make some decisions today on how and when to begin opening up more of the local economy, including permitting restaurants and non-essential retail stores to welcome customers inside. Having met all of the public health metrics required by the state to allow those activities, supervisors will now weigh how to do so without compromising the success made locally in containing the spread of this virus. Even as testing locally has increased dramatically in the last two weeks, there's not been a significant rise in confirmed cases. So the challenge becomes how to keep those case numbers low while allowing the local economy to begin to recover. Their discussion will also focus on how much of a role county officials should play in reopening decisions going forward. There's some disagreement between the supervisors, so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out. The California State PTA invites you to join them for an interactive networking session on distance learning and the challenges of parenting during this pandemic. They seek to learn from parents and guardians what is working and what is the most challenging and to share resources and best practices and learn from each other. President-elect Carol Green will host this virtual listening session, and I want to say it will also be joined by, among the panelists, is Leah Dara. She's the vice president for the State PTA education arm, the parent of a high school student and a Davis resident. And there are others participating. There's no cost. The webinar takes place this Thursday, May 28th, from 4.30 to 5.30 p.m., and you can learn more at captacapta.org. Finally, although Davis Pride had to be canceled this year due to the virus, the Davis Phoenix Coalition, which organizes Davis Pride, is getting creative with June is Pride Month, celebrating virtually and visually. Watch for rainbows all around Davis in June on flags, rocks, masks, and more. Follow Davis Pride on Facebook, where residents are invited to share their rainbows and win prizes. And as restrictions lift, look for a rainbow bike ride. Area residents are asked to make rainbows to hang in their windows, decorate their driveways and sideways with chalk rainbows, and share images on social media with the hashtag Davis Pride 2020. And of course, this isn't just about aesthetics, this is about inclusion. They ask us to note that while everyone is experiencing hardships during this pandemic, the LGBTQ plus community is especially susceptible because they're often in front-line jobs struggling with unemployment and access to health care. The Davis LGBTQ plus youth and yellow rainbow families in person support groups like everything else has been canceled, but the Davis Phoenix Coalition is offering frequent virtual meetings to check in and connect. Learn more about that and a whole lot more at DavisPhoenixCo.org. And now let's take a brief break for music before our first call. All right. Ryan Collins is the Homeless Services Coordinator for the City of Davis and the Chair of the Homeless and Poverty Action Coalition, H-P-A-C, which is the homeless continuum of care for Yolo County. Ryan has worked for the city since 2018 and is embedded at the Davis Police Department. He does field-based social work responding directly to calls for service related to individuals living in homelessness in Davis. And systems level work to advocate for effective policies to solve homelessness and its attendant negative impacts on people living in homelessness and society at large. Thanks so much for joining us today. Hey, you're welcome. Happy to be here. Yeah, you and I haven't met, but I've heard you described as that amazing Ryan Collins more times than I can count. So I think one thing the pandemic has done is certainly highlighted those who are already on the edge, you know, whether that's poverty, lack of health care, lack of access to fresh food or something else that others them or puts them at a disadvantage. So I'm curious what you've been seeing as we've moved through the last couple of months and I'm hoping you'll help us tell their stories. I'd be happy to share what I've observed and I appreciate the invitation to the conversation. So thanks, Autumn. I think that you're right that on a larger level that during the pandemic that we've seen many of the impacts fall upon people who are otherized or experience kind of structural disadvantages. And I can think of no sort of group of people as a population that are maybe at a greater structural disadvantage overall in the United States than people experiencing chronic homelessness. Those who have been deprived of quite a toll on your health and the longer that you are in that state of separation from mainstream society and from having your basic needs met, the worst that it becomes, it kind of snowballs. So during the pandemic, California at least has this initiative called Project Room Key where we've been trying to identify the people who are older or most medically vulnerable to at least for the time being, try to fill that unmet need in the form of getting people inside into hotels that have been masterly by local government with help from the statewide initiative and some backing from FEMA dollars in the long term. But it's been quite a push locally in Yolo County. I think we've been hovering around 290-ish people inside. I think in Davis, there's currently 96 people. So those are all individuals who are age 65 or older or those with pre-existing health conditions that put them at risk for mortality from COVID. So pulmonary conditions, cardiac conditions, people who are immune compromised, things like that, where just their chances of survival would be far less if they were to get sick and they would also act as people who are unable to shelter in place. So there's a risk for spread there as well. And just as a population in the United States, people living in chronic homelessness. So if you've been outside in a place not meant for human habitation for a year or longer or three out of the last four years, I think it's the definition that the feds used. It reduces your life expectancy by about 30 years, just in general. So that's we're at a baseline prior to pandemic. So I haven't seen obviously any like longitudinal analysis of the impacts of COVID on the people living in homelessness at large because we're still going through it. But I think that there will be a story to tell about the impact that that had on those folks in communities that weren't able to marshal an effort like we have locally. Compared to what we're trying to do. Yeah, I you mentioned project room key and that was one of my questions. That's the the state's massive effort to address homelessness during the COVID crisis. And I'm aware that the county, the city of Davis, other cities in in in Yolo have all worked together. My impression is that the the coordination of resources not only to get these folks at least into some shelter, but to feed them. The the coordination of services between agencies has to be mind boggling at this point. There are a lot of moving parts. I think that there are the efforts to shelter people. There are the efforts to feed people. There are efforts for primary care delivered to their their new temporary places that they're living like home visits for people without homes. So we have doctors and medical assistants and nurses doing house calls to both confirm that they they are, you know, within a population of higher risk, but also just to provide them on the spot health care diagnosis, treatment, prescribed medication, that kind of thing. And it also it's been an effort not just with the units of local government, but with the nonprofit providers and our continuum of care. We in the city of Davis have contracted with Communicare Health Centers. It's the same agency that helps us to run the rest of the center over on fifth and elf for case management, for sort of runner tasks for connection for behavioral health care needs. In addition to all the primary care stuff in in addition to everything, there's been a lot of probably daily calls with the hospital system for when they're looking for places to more communication, even with other jurisdictions outside of Yolo. Word on the street gets out and I have been receiving a lot of phone calls from neighbors living in homelessness in Suano, where I'm not, you know, able to serve them really, unless they're, you know, in Davis on the ground, but I still want to be able to help them. So it's required kind of an expansion to my understanding of what regionally we're doing and, you know, there's some way we can help get them closer to what they need. So you've been here in Davis for a couple of years now. I think you came in 2018 to this position. Can you walk us through a typical day in your in your work life when we're not in the middle of a pandemic? I'm interested in getting at, you know, who you talk to, how you how you help people and what you've learned while you're here. Sure. I think that I spend my time kind of divided between talking with people with unmet needs and talking with people that might help them to meet those needs and often sort of being there together with a person they need and sort of an advocacy role. But it sort of begins case by case, person by person with meeting them where they are literally and sort of figuratively metaphorically in line to get a sense of what their story is, what is sort of missing, what they would like to help with. Sometimes what they don't realize that they might need. But through the development of a trusting relationship, they can gain insight into what help they might need. But it's always person-centered case by case, developing a sort of plan for care for, you know, that's primarily as a really key determinant of everything going better in their lives compared to where they're at now. So I might get a call from a member of the community saying, hey, there's a person that's been camping outside my fence and I'm worried about them or, hey, I, you know, I run a business downtown and there's this guy here. And I think he's kind of scary. Can you go talk to him? Or I might get a referral from a provider that says we had a person in a shelter, we lost contact with them. We think that they're on the streets in Davis. Can you help us find them? Or from an officer saying, hey, I've got this person. What can we do where they're not looking for like a law enforcement intervention as much as like social services or health care kind of solution? But from that or word of mouth from a person that I'm currently working with or have helped before that said, hey, you really should help my friend, too. That's kind of the beginning of it. And there's generally an element of finding the person. Some people are easier to find. They have a regular place where you can kind of visit them. Others kind of move around a little bit more or might be more secluded in a place where they kind of want to be left alone. And it's a matter of finding that person and trying to connect with them, trying to let them know that really no matter what has brought them to where they are, that kind of no matter what's happened, if they would like some help in turning that around a little bit, I am there as a resource for them. And I would like to try to open up whatever doors that the system might have to be able to help them, whether that's a safe place to stay, whether it's access to benefits, help trying to get some form of income, finding, you know, reconnection with a health care provider or treatment of something that's not gone treated. And there's work that's done on this day to day, but it's never solved overnight. It is generally kind of years often like a trauma history that leads a person to pretty dire straits where we can do expressively leads them to a better setting. But I generally see a timetable of something like, you know, a year being a reasonable expectation for someone going from living on the streets, kind of, you know, at the worst time in their life to something that's better. And it's hard to get someone sometimes from where they are to see that better life that they could kind of get back to or move forward to because they're caught in a cycle of day to day desperation of just trying to get the next meal, just trying to get the next dollar just trying to find a safe place to be left alone. But if we can break them out of that cycle, and I think the most important place is giving someone a safe place to sleep and make a lot of progress. Right. There's no panacea to this, but it sounds like just the day to day work and becoming a known person among the homeless population so that, you know, people will say, he's a good guy. He's he's safe. You should talk to him. You can trust him. Yeah. So if I'm a community member who, as you said, I have, you know, homeless individuals sleeping against my fence and I'm worried about them, how would I get in touch with you? They could call me directly. I think a lot of people in the community have my cell phone number. We do publish a health and social services resource guide. We have like a wallet size and a pamphlet person that we try to get out there in the community. They could email me. There is a homeless outreach services coordination form, I think, on the city website. OK, they could call the non-emergency dispatch number for Davis PD. And if they see a person and they think that they are in, you know, really bad shape, they could call 911. Sometimes the person does, you know, need to get to the hospital kind of speedily and days matter, especially during the COVID pandemic. But so we want to be kind of no wrong door. Once we resume regular on the ground activity and, you know, kind of have every place open for business on Tuesdays downtown, I host walking in the office hours at the Hunt Border House on 2nd and E, which is where my office is based so people can just drop in to. Great. Thank you so much. We I need to move on to our next call. But I really appreciate the the compassion and the humanity bring to the work you're doing. We all benefit from that. Thanks so much for calling in. OK, bye bye. All right, take care. All right, I heard I hear our second call coming through. So we're going to move right into that. And our caller now is Mr. Sebastian Onyate, who's the editor of the Davis Enterprise. Hi, Sebastian. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for being on. So I'm one of several dozen community columnists for our local newspaper, the Davis Enterprise, and Sebastian is my editor. And I've been writing that column about media issues, especially the perils of media consolidation and stuff for more than 20 years, if you can believe that. And I always take care to point out the value of a local newspaper. We it's just essential to community life. So before I go any further, I want to say thank you to you for carrying on the legacy when you stepped up as editor a couple years ago. And I want to say thank you to all the ways you help nonprofits and community groups get the word out. You are essential. I just want you to know that. All right, I appreciate that. We we we try our best. Yeah, so the enterprise is unusual in that it is part of a small family owned chain that that alone is unusual and that you're you're still going and and still publishing. But I want to know I know that the the situation with advertising and subscriptions and everything was hard before the pandemic. Where are you now with things? Well, like any newspaper, we depend on local advertising. We we we live and breathe with the local with the local businesses. And if they don't have money to spend, then then we we feel that. And that's something that's really affected the whole industry. Yeah, you know, we're a we're a small reflection of of a problem that's really been around since 2008 when the housing crisis hit. That's sort of set off this long term decline in advertising revenue and it's just affecting papers all over the country. There are other problems to the transition to digital the the increased cost of printing on paper. The fact that people aren't reading paper newspapers as much. So, you know, the last couple of years when Debbie Davis was editor and I would talk with her, she would just her mantra was subscribe, subscribe, place an ad. And I don't know that that's enough anymore. So what are we looking at down down the barrel here? I think advertising is going to is it's sort of out of our hands at this point. You know, we can only ask them for so much. And if they're hurting, we're hurting in terms of subscriptions. You know, it's it's that's our that's our growth model. That's that's our way out is to get more online subscriptions, especially, but print to and get those that that revenue, which is which has, you know, it's sort of flipping the traditional model around where where subscriptions were the gateway to advertising. Now they're going to be now they're more and more something for their own sake. And something the one silver lining here has been that by making the coronavirus stories more accessible online, that's actually driven an increase in online subscriptions over the last couple of weeks. Yeah, I want to tell you how much I appreciate I subscribe both in paper format, but I love the daily digest. I get online because it triggers me to go and and read, you know, and and learn. So thank you for that. Something else I'm wondering about. I've heard a lot of things come up during this one. I enter during the pandemic when I interviewed Congressman Garamendi. He even said we have to help our newspapers, you know, they're not going to survive this without our help. And so we're going to be looking at additional stimulus funds down the road. I've heard other people say we need to step in and save journalism in this country. We need to talk about making newspapers non-profits so they can fundraise in a in a different way. How do you feel about wholesale model changes like that? Oh, that's that's big picture stuff. Um, it's not something, you know, we've really looked at. We want to make it work as we want to be a viable business. We don't want to be a charity case. Yeah. And I think the at this point anyway, it's we're we're still looking at making it go as as a commodity as we are. We are providing a service and we are going to try to make that work as a as a business exchange. And that's, um, you know, that's that's what we've always done. And, you know, there's there's a way of doing it. It's the money's there. It's just a matter of tapping into it, you know. Let's talk about your team during the pandemic, because we really have some stellar local reporting going on here. And I want to acknowledge it and I want to give you a chance to give your team a shout out. Yeah, sure. We got we have Anturnus Bellamy is our county and city be writer. So she's she's on the front lines of that. She's she's just done marvelous work on there. And then Lauren King does King, I should say, not King is is the she'll see those cops and she's been hitting it from from the legal side and from how it's affecting courts, how it's affecting law enforcement. Caleb Hampton does UC Davis and he's also brought in his area of interest here and is he's been covering the nursing home breakouts and in some business stories and how Corona is affecting that. And Jeff Hudson is our school reporter and he obviously is doing how it is affecting our schools and how it's impacting students and teachers and all that stuff. So everybody's really stepped up and done some done some great work on that behalf. Yeah, and the the work that Jeff does with the schools, that'll be an evolving story as they figure out the what reopening in in August looks like. You know, I know we're still kind of waiting on some news to trickle down out of UC Davis as to what that's going to look like there, DJUSD, what that's going to look like there. And speaking of UC Davis students, you know, the enterprise always does this welcome to Davis, these this massive set of special publications every fall when the students return, I'm going to take a guess that that's going to look different this year. Yeah, really looking different and that will certainly be impacted. We still there's still going to be I still believe there's going to be some students here. I don't know how many. Yeah. Um, but even if they go to online learning, you still got to do lab work. You even see a few is looking at doing lab work. Um, so somebody's going to be here. It's just I think it's just a question of how many and where and when. And I think we can still try to do an outreach there up to those students. Yeah. And finally, you sent out an email to I mentioned at the top of the interview that I'm one of many, one of dozens of community columnists, and you sent an email to us recently and said, you know, we're going to have to go digital with this content. So is that something you think that we're going to see more of in the year, more migration to digital only? Um, as little as possible. Um, so what it is, again, this is the this is the lack of advertising and are the number of pages we print is directly in tied to how many ads we get. Sure. So it's fallen to the point where, where, um, I just don't have the room to put everything in. And so a lot of the feature content is getting placed online that I hope is temporary. And, um, you know, we're trying to blow it out. We're trying to, to, to, you know, highlight it online to get people to read it because it's great stuff. And it's just, it's just a question of, um, once businesses are back on their feet again. And, and, you know, we can, we can, we can print a few more pages and we can get that stuff back, back onto the page and, you know, onto people the driveways. Well, Sebastian, you have a difficult job at an essential time. I, I, uh, I sometimes miss working in a newsroom, but I really don't envy you right now, but I do. Thank you. And thanks for calling in and sharing a little bit of what the enterprise has been dealing with during this time. You're saying thanks for having me. All right. You take care. Bye. All right. Thanks for tuning in. I want to mention again, this show is now transitioning to once a week, so I'll be back next Tuesday. And my guest then is Dr. Cindy Pickett, who is the outgoing board president for the Davis Joint Unified Board of Trustees, speaking of the school district. Hope we'll get a little bit more info about how things are progressing with their planning for the fall. We're going to go out on some music today, but from the KDRT studio, I'm Autumn LeBae Renaud, and this has been the COVID-19 community report.