UPDATE ON COVID-19 FROM MAYOR TO GRAND FORKS CITY COUNCIL

GRAND FORKS, ND (trfnews.i234.me) A COVIID-19 update from Grand Forks Mayor, Brandon Bochenski.
we’ll start with that and what we’ve been doing at administration uh we’ve been engaged the governor and senior staff throughout the process of moving ground forks uh to yellow and moderate risk level last week uh i’ve engaged with bar and restaurants owners on moving to yellow and the reduced guideline of 50 capacity um sent a letter out to include the north dakota smart research guidelines in an email and i want to thank councilmember dockler for your engagement uh and on the importance of community with communicating with community members on these guidelines and them being enforced i’m even having a meeting with them tomorrow at three o’clock uh to to talk about their concerns uh and looking at that 11 pm shutdown along with the 50 capacity and figuring out a way forward i think it’s important that they get to talk directly to me and i can hear things firsthand and they can hear my thoughts first hand on top of that i went on a police ride-along on friday night to check on enforcement of that 11 pm closure time and i think it worked pretty well you know i saw everything clear out we got to go around i think it it is working it’s uh it’s not the perfect thing but it was targeted at uh where the problems were happening where we think we were seeing the problems happening so that was great to see um i went to monitor testing events both at the alaris center and at the high performance center on friday even got tested and i wanted to check the the turnaround time and i got my results back within about 30 hours in that friday event it was it was great to see public health department working hard and also i got to see four of our firefighters and actually got tested by one of our firefighters chief lorenz and president armacos also joined me at the event and uh another thing you know bringing up the fire department there was a fire there at 310 cherry uh just yesterday and that was that was tough to see that you know families that got displaced by that but uh one thing that i was pretty excited i missed amidst all this and kovid within hours on facebook i saw fundraising efforts to try to help that family so that was really pretty uh pretty great uh we put pen to paper on our uh city-owned building safety plan and policies i also want to thank council member dhaka for helping out with that this week as well i followed up and got status updates from a lot of the senior living facilities including valley senior living memory care and edgewood i’ve been engaging with subject matter experts at und state and federal experts including the white house coronavirus task force uh myself and todd also toured altru this week including the covid wing and we’re in constant communications with ultra’s upper management and i want to thank dr weiser and mr mullman for the tour and bringing us in there we’ve also been on tours with uh manufacturing companies including ellen windpower philadelphia macaroni and ps industries as well as other manufacturers to see how they’re managing covet in their workplace i’ve also met with numerous church leaders and seeing how they’re handling their coveted response we’re meeting weekly with institutional partners including all true und grand forks public school air force base in the county as well uh you know this one i can benefit to my kids but uh you know going to soccer practices and hockey tournaments and sporting events and engaging uh the benefits uh you know as far as weighing uh having sports in the community i think that’s a really important thing to continue and i think it’s great to see the you know children to be able to go out and still experience that uh despite all this i want to thank mr webber for uh you know certainly all of his work that he’s done both in assembling the expert panel as well as the work that his interns have done on the mass study and helping to move forward with the health officers dashboard you know looking at the past and where we’re headed i think so far through it all we’ve done a pretty good job we had a spike when students came back that’s troubling we’ve responded with targeted and reasonable actions to create sustainable balance to not just include physical but mental emotional and economic health and that’s a lot of those could be equally as important this is a pandemic and no plan is going to be perfect we’re doing the best we can we need to stay positive on our future and on the future of this community but at the same time we need to buckle down as we’re getting past this expected spike in college students and we’re starting to see numbers come back down so we’re hoping that trend continues