City Manager Paul Ostrander provided an update regarding the City of Kenai’s response to the COVID-19 public health emergency during their Wednesday night city council meeting.
Ostrander offered updates on the positive case rates in the area: “So as you recall last meeting, the 14-day case rate was at 2.5% for the central peninsula which is in the green. Our current 14-day case rate is 4.4%, which is still in the green: however, our 7-day case rate is 5.8%. We’re seeing a trend upwards from 2.5 at the last meeting now to 5.8 for the last 7-day case rate. Hospitalizations in the central peninsula, actually at Central Peninsula Hospital, there was one patient that was in the hospital [from COVID] from September 17th to the 25th. I’m not sure if that’s one patient or multiple patients and they just happened to have one bed occupied by a COVID positive patient during that period.”
Ostrander also discussed an extension he has requested for an extension of an emergency declaration. He said the emergency declaration is set to expire on November 15.
“For it to be extended actually requires legislative action to extend it. The interesting part of this is if the emergency declaration expires on the 15th of November, all of the mandates that the state currently has in place go away with it because the power with which the state has applied those mandates is under the emergency declaration. Some of the city policies, actually, specifically the city’s policy on return to work and interstate travel for our employees. Which is one of the policies, that we have that is incredibly difficult to navigate because of the requirements the mandate requires so much testing before they can come back, has been really difficult to work through. If that state travel mandate goes away, we’ll have to look again if there’s some type of policy that allows return to work for employees that have traveled out of state. If this comes into play, we’ll be working on that.”
In regards to the extension, City of Kenai Mayor Brian Gabriel asked, “Wouldn’t that require a special session for legislative action?”
Ostrander said, “Yes it would.”
Gabriel asked, “And Kenai doesn’t have representation till January?”
Ostrander replied, “The discussion on the call today was they (state legislature) were going to wait until after November and there was an additional follow-up question– how does that work time-wise? The state epidemiology team wasn’t able to answer that question.”
Council Member Jim Glendening questioned Ostrander regarding whether application information for residents of Kenai is clearly provided. The City Manager said that changes are made to the website as-needed, and that all current programs are represented on the City of Kenai’s website currently.