The Kenai City Council voted to extend the city’s Emergency Disaster Declaration, originally issued due to the COVID-19 public health emergency. The first declaration was issued on March 18 of last year, and has been extended with a current expiation date of January 31.
City Manager Paul Ostrander issued a memo to the council, requesting an extension to the declaration until February 28 of this year. In speaking to KSRM, Ostrander said, “The Council did extend the declaration, it was supposed to expire December 31st, they extended one month to January 31st. Council just wanted to have the conversation once a month to determine whether or not it was justified to continue to extend it. Rather than extending it for like a 3 month or 4 month period, they wanted to have the conversation every month to assess the need, look at the numbers at where COVID was at and then determine whether or not an extension was necessary.”
Vice Mayor Bob Molloy clarified what extending the declaration would mean, “Extending the emergency declaration extends our city’s ability to provide temporary leave to employees to address COVID-19 related illness, emergency closures of facilities and transmission reduction for employees for that and our city moratorium on penalty and interest for water and sewer counts so that will still pend not doing any collection and our city moratorium on water and sewer disconnect for nonpayment. It allows us to, perhaps, accept additional funds that maybe coming from the federal government through the program that was passed in the fall that hasn’t been dispersed yet.”
According to Resolution 2021-02, while the city, state and nation moves towards reopening businesses and resuming activities, the City Council expects that the continued impact of COVID-19, including public health risks, restrictions on travel and economic impacts will be of a severity and a magnitude that is beyond the authority and capacity of the City to provide an effective response without assistance.
The resolution passed with unanimous consent.
