Feb 21, 2022 City Council on 2022-02-21 4:00 PM (SPECIAL CALLED MEETING)

Good afternoon, and welcome to this meeting of the Denton City Council, where a minute is so early, so I'll let that expire in a few seconds, probably, and then we'll call the first item for this special call meeting, and then we will go directly into closed session. Then we'll return after the closed session for staff presentation. So it is now four o'clock. We do have a quorum, so I'll call the meeting to order. There's only one item on today's special call meeting, that is ID 22443, consultation with attorneys on the Texas Government Code 551.071, consultation, discussion, deliberation, and receipt of information from the city's attorney involving legal issues relating to the disaster declaration and related to, related to order pertaining to the COVID-19 emergency and provide city attorneys with direction where a public discussion of these legal matters would clearly conflict with the duty of city attorneys. Okay, so at four o'clock, we'll go to the individual station setup for, and so I'll convene the closed session at four o'clock, and we will then just get started straightway once everyone's on the screen. Thank you. And welcome back to this special call meeting of the Denton City Council's 503. We're back in open session. We have a presentation to go in with the item I've already called, so I'll turn it over to you, Ron. There it is. Mayor and Councilor Ryan Adams, Chief of Staff, we have prepared a brief presentation for a COVID update for the council. It touches on a lot of the things that you've seen before, so this shouldn't be too much new for the council. It's good to see all of you. To just give a bit of background, we do have, or we have done a number of these prior. This will be our 40 or 41st, depending on how you're counting. The last one was on January 25th, where we gave a brief presentation. Just laying out the statistics, the transmission status of COVID-19, that was when we were a little bit more into the Omicron peak. We also, on that date, extended our order of council, or I should say adopted a new order of council that extended our mask wearing provisions through the end of March. For today, we are going to give again a brief COVID update, and there would be an opportunity for direction to be given to staff, although council can just receive the update. Where we are today, cases and hospitalizations have reduced significantly from our early 2022 peak in that December, January timeframe. Omicron is still the primary variant, and of course, with that, it does have higher transmissibility, but a lower death rate than Delta. We did want to provide an update with city staff, and I'm going to update this number because we've got new information today. We have had approximately 25 positive cases since February 1, and that's actually a significant reduction from the number of cases we had in the late December and early January timeframe. Testing is still available for those in the community. It occurs four times per week through the county, and of course, you have all your numerous private providers, such as your own personal physicians. You can still get free tests available at every household from covidtest.gov. I got mine earlier this week. Vaccines are still available for anyone who is 16 and up, and you can do that with 12 and up for Pfizer and Moderna. Pfizer vaccines are approved for ages 5 through 11, and boosters are approved for anyone in that age group that is immunocompromised. Vaccines still widely available, tests still available. Now, we do have – pardon me – just a quick snapshot of where cases are, as you can see in the graph below. We did hit that Omicron peak in mid to late January, and it has since come down significantly. This is just your cases reported by date, and this is county-wide information. We've also seen a similar decrease in the number of inpatient beds that are devoted to Omicron, so all those beds in a hospital that have a person in them, the percentage that are covid-related has dropped significantly from a high in this particular Omicron peak of around 30 percent down to – I believe it was 14 percent. Additionally, in keeping with the Omicron variant signature of being highly transmissible, low death rate, we have seen just not much of a peak at all in our deaths in Denton County. This little peak that is – I don't know if you can see my cursor – that is when school started, but of course it went down after that and really did not rise too much through the Omicron variant. We do have some specific information for the city of Denton in terms of where our cases look not for the county but for the city. As you can see, similar to the county, we have seen a really drastic reduction in the number of cases. The graph on the top is from the entirety of the pandemic with a close-up there on the bottom, and we have dropped back down to almost our pre-Omicron levels. So I do want to hit on, like we do with each of these presentations on the CDC guidelines for masking, they are still using the transmissibility metric for when to recommend that a county have universal indoor masking. As you can see, the red is the high level, and most of the counties in the United States are at that level, and it would take a pretty considerable change from where we are at right now to get down to the moderate level where they would not recommend masking. Now I'll note to the council, and this would be news to the public, maybe they've seen it, but the CDC has indicated they are changing their advice related to masking. That change could come as early as this week. We don't know the nature of that change, but it has been reported in news outlets that it may be more based on hospitalizations rather than transmissibility. So just to give a little bit information on the implementation of the 19th order. So our current disaster declaration extends through March 31st, as does our 19th order, that requires masking in all indoor areas in city buildings, K-12 schools, daycares, and certain commercial buildings. For the city, we are still providing N95 masks at our city facilities by request, so anyone can ask for one if they walk into a city facility. And again, this order has had mixed response from the public due in part to conflicts or perceived conflicts with state and county positions. And then news from last week, we did receive a letter from the attorney general notifying the city that they believe we are in conflict with Governor Abbott's order, GA38. I did place a relevant text for that order where the order does restrict an entity such as the city of Denton from requiring a person to wear a face covering. There are some exceptions to that, such as hospitals and jails. And then GA38 further stipulates that their law, that order, supersedes any conflicting local order. So in that letter, the city was notified that the attorney general felt that we were in conflict with GA38, and they requested the city of Denton rescind our order, 19th order, by noon tomorrow, February 22nd. So I will happily take any direction from the council or answer any questions that the council may have. Mayor Pro Temelter. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mayor. This council has pretty consistently referenced the CDC as our guiding authority on public health measures. And knowing that it's very likely to change soon, I think is very significant, the fact that you said they might shift to a focus on hospitalization kind of makes sense, given Omicron being extremely transmissible, but not very, you know, as a percentage, not driving one of hospitalizations, and it's so great to see the cases plummeting. So my direction is, and I hope to hear from other council members if they agree, is that once that new guidance comes out, if it differs significantly from what has driven our current policy, I'd like to, as quickly as possible, do an emergency session and reconsider so that we align with the, you know, whatever the current guidance is. Thank you. Okay. Councilmember Amateur. Yeah, I concur with that direction. I'll just add, I'm not sure that necessarily we need to be in an emergency meeting, it depends on how close to a Tuesday, you know, that news comes out. So if that news comes out on Friday, I'm fine, on a Friday, I'm fine waiting till late Tuesday, but at the very least at the next possible, added to that next possible, the next possible meeting. Councilmember Guara. Thank you. I concur with Councilmember Amateur. I think that if there's time within, you know, to get this item on the agenda for the March 1st meeting, you know, and still be in compliance with TOMA, then we should do that. But if there's not time, then yes, I would be, I would like to, to hold an emergency meeting. Councilmember Bet. I'll just duplicate what you heard Councilmember Guara say. Anyone else? Councilmember Bird. Yeah, I think that it's very important that we be mindful of the science, continue to be mindful of the science, have great respect for those folks who are doing that hard work out there for us. I am in agreement with what all the other Councillors have recommended. Okay. Anyone else? Seeing none, I'll just say, you know, I've consistently voted against the, the mandate and I'm going to maintain that posture and I'm going to consistently be fiscally conservative with respect to the taxpayer money. And so always that's going to guide decisions as well as the medical side of things. But I think it is unfortunate that we continue to go at this alone. I don't think that is the correct posture to take. And so I would ask that staff poll the Council if there's segments or some milestone that some number that are at CDC would provide that they'd give you advanced direction to that so that you could modify, bring it back at that point, right? Otherwise you're given direction for arbitrary number that the situation has not changed, the accounting for the number, for the situation changes and somehow that would trigger a different response. That, that's confusing to me, but if there's, if there's a number out there or something then that's great. If not, then we'll just take it up as you bring your update. So with that, it's 5.13 and I'll conclude today's meeting. Thank you. Thank you.