The Carthage City Council will meet in its second special session this week, and this time council members will be asked to vote on three controversial measures, mandatory masks in public, closing the parks to groups larger than 10 people and rolling the city’s reopening to phase 1 of the governor’s reopening plans.
The meeting will take place by video conference at 2 p.m. on Wednesday.
Carthage City Council Member David Armstrong said on his Facebook page on Thursday that asked for the meeting soon after the special meeting on June 25 which ended with 90 minutes of discussion among the 10 council members but no votes on any concrete action to respond to the increase in the numbers of people with the Covid-19 illness.
Numbers
As of Monday, the number of people who had been infected with the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, since March has grown to 583, according to the Jasper County Health Department.
Most of those cases have happened in the past month.
As of May 29, there were 24 confirmed cases of COVID-19. These numbers are for Jasper County outside Joplin. The city has its own health department which keeps the numbers inside the Joplin city limits.
One person who lives in Jasper County has died of the disease. Two people, both residents of the Spring River Christian Village residency complex in the north part of Joplin, have died from COVID-19 in Joplin.
The Jasper County Health Department has said much of the current outbreak is centered on Carthage.
Seeking action
City Administrator Tom Short said Council Members had placed three items on the agenda for Wednesday’s meeting that could require a vote if council members desire:
• Limiting gatherings in Carthage’s parks to groups of 10 people or fewer.
• Rolling the city back to phase 1 of the Governor’s plan to reopen Missouri’s economy.
• Requiring people older than six years old to wear masks in public in Carthage.
The agenda of last Thursday’s meeting was much more vague, it included no items requiring a vote and only said “consider and discuss the city’s response to COVID-19.”
Council Member David Armstrong said he felt the council’s mood was against taking any concrete action at last meeting after the first three speakers in the nearly-90-minute meeting.
“Prior to the meeting, there had been a lot of talk in kind of the sub-channels of the city council in which it was evident that the feeling was there that we needed to act,” Armstrong said. “When the meeting started, the mayor made his statement that made it clear that he was not in favor of taking action and the two city councilmen who followed that sort of immediately stated that they were not in favor of any real action. And at that point, I felt like the tide had definitely turned in favor of us taking limited to no action.”
He said because there were no items requiring a council vote on last week’s agenda, this second meeting would have been required to vote on anything concrete anyway.
Short said the requested mask ordinance was still being written as of Monday, but a draft of the ordinance would require anyone under six years old to wear a mask in public places where physical distancing is difficult or impossible. The ordinance exempts people with chronic diseases that would make it difficult to breathe in a mask.
Rolling back
The mask ordinance is the only new thing on the agenda, the other two items are actions the council took in March at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic that has gripped the nation since February, infecting 2.5 million people across the country and being blamed for the deaths of more than 125,000 people.
Jasper County was spared at the start of the outbreak in March, April and May, but cases have been multiplying in June.
Armstrong said the two actions he asked for, limiting the parks to groups of 10 people and going back to phase one of the governor’s plan, seemed reasonable to most people when they were taken in March.
“In March, everybody thought that was incredibly reasonable and it was the right thing to do, and we had no substantial outbreaks in our area within 100 miles,” Armstrong said. “Now, here we are and the substantial outbreak is in our own community, and all I’m asking is that we go back to what we agreed was reasonable in March. I’m not asking us to do something different than what we’ve already agreed was reasonable. Limiting the parks to groups of 10 people or less, we’ve already done that, and we agreed as a community that that was a reasonable thing to do to protect our out vulnerable. Entering phase 1 of the governor’s plan, we’ve already done that.
“All we’re doing now is recognizing that perhaps the governor, who was our guiding light at that time, may have jumped the gun for Missouri. Now that we’re here and we’re actually in the middle of the crisis, the governor has abandoned decision making to local authorities so it’s up to us to be the voice of reason who steps in and says we have to do something because the governor is no longer providing the leadership he did in March whenever this wasn’t a real crisis here.”
Jasper County Youth Fair
Two major events coming up on the calendar in the city’s parks are both in Municipal Park, the traditional Independence Day fireworks display on Saturday, July 4, and the Jasper County Youth Fair from July 14-18.
The Carthage Convention and Visitor’s Bureau announced last week plans to scale back festivities around the fireworks display, cancelling the food trucks that are normally parked near the swimming pool and cancelling any live musical performances in the park.
Organizers of the Jasper County Youth Fair say they’re working on major adjustments to that event to hopefully meet the city’s requests and emphasize safety and physical distancing.
“We have submitted our plan to the city council members for their consideration, but we won’t know what they’re going to accept until they meet,” said Roxanne Willard, a member of the Jasper County Youth Fair Board. “So we’ve modified some of our events or cancelled parts of them to accommodate their concerns and wishes. I think at this point, we want to have the fair and we think we can do it safely. We’ve all been dealing with this coronavirus thing for quite a while now and people are getting used to social distancing, they’re used to modifications, they’re used to change, they’re used to things being done differently.”
The Youth Fair Board met on Monday to finalize its plans pending the city council’s decisions on Wednesday.
Carthage News Online will be live streaming the audio from the council meeting on The Carthage Press Facebook page.
