The Kenai City Council voted Wednesday night to further extend the Disaster Emergency Declaration originally issued on March 18, 2020. While the city, state, and country move towards reopening business and resuming certain activities, the Council is expecting that the continued impact of COVID-19, including public health risks, travel restrictions, and economic impacts will be of a level that necessitates continuing the disaster declaration. The reason in choosing to continue the declaration is that the impacts will be of a severity and magnitude that’s beyond the authority and capacity of the city of Kenai to provide an effective response without assistance.
Before council could deliberate, Resolution 2021-34 was up for public comment where one woman said, “Everyone I know is completely finished and the people that aren’t finished are afraid. They look at you guys as authority figures making these decisions and they believe you when you extend this emergency order it causes fear.”
Councilwoman Teea Winger expressed similar sentiment, “Some of my issues with expanding this again, I said the last time that I wouldn’t be in favor of doing this and I did vote one last time to extend this till after school had gotten out. I’m not in favor of extending it any further. I understand it’s so that we would be eligible for financial compensation that would be coming down.”
City Manager Paul Ostrander told Council that extending the emergency declaration will extend the city moratorium on penalty and interest for water and sewer accounts and disconnect for non-payment for a period of 60 days after the expiration of the City’s Disaster Declaration. “Again, indications are, right now, that the city would not need an emergency declaration in place. I will tell you, I didn’t even include this in for consideration by council until the last minute because I felt pretty clearly that council was not going to extend it beyond the end of may, but because we were unable to tell council with absolute certainty that it wouldn’t jeopardize future federal funding, I wanted to put it out here for your consideration. It’s a really long way of answering that, at this point, I don’t think it jeopardizes any federal funding, but further guidance is coming, potentially additional stimulus is coming and I could not tell you with certainty that some sort of declaration wouldn’t be necessary for that.”
Resolution 2021-34 passes with 5 yea votes and 2 nay votes.
