Welcome to the City of Plantation's Podcast. In this Episode, Mayor Lynn Stoner and Deputy Chief Gordon, discuss the state of affairs within the City of Plantation. This Podcast is aimed at keeping the residents of Plantation informed regarding how the City and its various Departments are responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please subscribe to this podcast, as we will be producing new episodes on a regular basis.
Speaker: Mayor Lynn Stoner
Host: Deputy Chief Joel Gordon, PIO
Production: Division Chief Ezra Lubow
Music: Hall of Receptions - Cercles Nouvelles (licensed through Epidemic Sounds)
Cover Art: The City of Plantation
Welcome to the City of Plantation's Podcast. In this Episode, Mayor Lynn Stoner and Deputy Chief Gordon, discuss the state of affairs within the City of Plantation. This Podcast is aimed at keeping the residents of Plantation informed regarding how the City and its various Departments are responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please subscribe to this podcast, as we will be producing new episodes on a regular basis.
Speaker: Mayor Lynn Stoner
Host: Deputy Chief Joel Gordon, PIO
Production: Division Chief Ezra Lubow
Music: Hall of Receptions - Cercles Nouvelles (licensed through Epidemic Sounds)
Cover Art: The City of Plantation
[inaudible].
Speaker 2:My name is Joel Gordon, deputy chief of plantation fire department. You may remember me as dr Jay formerly from plantation information radio. Today we are here with our mayor Lyn stoner, and we're going to discuss how the city has been approaching the coven 19 outbreak and what we've been doing to try and keep everybody healthy and safe. A mayor. First of all, we'd like to thank you for being here and for taking the time. We know you've been really, really busy. It's been really hectic, but we really appreciate you spending a few minutes with us just to kind of bring our residents up to speed. So thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Thank you deputy chief Gordon. Thank you for finding me. It's all right.
Speaker 2:Uh, so maybe you can just sort of to start with, encapsulate, you know, where we've been so far, what we've been up to and what the city has done and we obviously, since this thing started awhile ago, we've been very, very busy doing a number of different things. And I know it's hard to kind of corral it all, but kind of an overview of where we've been, what we're looking at and you know, what are some of the major steps that we've taken to date to try and keep up to speed.
Speaker 3:We've been at this just about 30 days, maybe a tad more. We were following this well before the president did anything and, or governor DeSantis did anything. And during that time period we were trying to decide the appropriate steps to take for our city and to try to find a balance. So we implemented very slowly, uh, one was we closed part of the parks, but allowed passive parks to stay open. We then allowed, um, businesses to do, uh, take out and curbside service, uh, so that the small businesses could have, uh, time to adjust. And, um, and, and many of them made a wonderful adjustment and all that information is being fed, uh, shared on Facebook, on Twitter, all of our, uh, websites as well as the fire department's website and everything. But we sat down a couple times a day with, uh, fire police are, uh, public information components, our technical people to discuss what we really needed to do for the safety and welfare of our residents. And that was the utmost importance. How do we get the message to everyone that this is a serious situation that we've had? You're in globally. I mean, we've never seen such a thing in our lifetimes. So we're in unexplored waters and are trying to embrace all the information. And again, coming back to what we think is important to the city, which is where I think we are today. Of course, information changes daily. We don't have a crystal ball. We don't know what's going to happen. Um, the city continues to run as it always has because the city's here to provide services and the important services become fire, police, utilities, public works, finance. Quite a few of our staff have chosen to either be at home and, or work remotely. We were never, you're never heavy or overloaded with employees. So what we have is, is doing double the jobs. And one of the things that, um, I insisted on when I first came into office was that we needed to cross train everybody. And this is a situation where that cross training has been so invaluable for all of us.
Speaker 2:All right, that's great. So a lot of stuff going on as we talked about, um, a lot of decisions need to be made and we're going to get into those a little bit in, in a bit. And some of those decisions were, were rather painful I think, to, to have to get into and what we'll talk about that, but I wanna I want to start off with, you know, you said, and you're absolutely correct, this is new territory for us. Uh, certainly disasters in South Florida are something that we're used to. Big storms, hurricanes, floods, even tornadoes, you know, we've had a couple of tornadoes in the city itself. So we're not, we're not foreign to responding to disasters. What is it that makes this so different?
Speaker 3:We're waiting for the other shoe to drop, basically. Uh, we're all on, um, uh, on that nervous level of when is it coming? When is it over? Did I make it through it? Um, will my business make it through it? What do we, how do we help? Uh, you know, there's a, a true resiliency in the community to help and it's amazing what I've seen people reaching out to other people. Some people say, I'm inside, I can't get on side. Someone will say, let me know, I can come and get your groceries for you. I can help you. So we've always had a huge volunteer component to the community, but this is volunteer in another way of neighbors helping neighbors. So it's, that's it. And, and mental health, you know, we were in, we don't know. And, um, sometimes our minds get the best of us. You know, occasionally I'll tell people the worst place to be is inside my head. There's always so much going on. And, um,
Speaker 2:actually my head's got a lot of room in it, so I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't think so. But we do. We, we're, we w I'm a big whatever, what's gonna happen if this happens? And so, but part of everybody, um, that we meet with, that's their regular thought process. We have to think further ahead to the possibilities. And I think we were doing that very, very well.
Speaker 2:Terrific. So, you know, let, let's, let's spend a few minutes and talk about the community and the community spirit. I think here in plantation, we've always had that hometown sort of small town feeling, even though, even though we're a city that's under major growth and we're, we're looking down the road at even more growth, we still have that community spirit. And during this outbreak, we have really, really dug deep into asking our residents to do things that are way out of the ordinary for themselves. Uh, we, you know, we've talked about, um, you know, they ha they're shut in there, they're locked down. Um, you signed the, the safer at home order and you are one of the first ones, I think maybe the first one in Broward County to do it. How, what kind of feedback did you get from the community and how has the community really stepped up as a hometown community to embrace this situation?
Speaker 3:Well, it's interesting. Uh, when we first shut down the parks bill left the path soap and there was a component of our community that really didn't like that. They didn't think it was sufficient social distancing. But once the order went out and, um, you know, we previously had the news conference, I haven't had any pushback what so ever from not one person about starting to stay at home. I mean, they like that they can walk their dog or whatever, but I think they really absorb the message and everything I've heard says we're, we're making a lot of progress. Um, more people are paying attention. So,
Speaker 2:so that community spirit is just, it's something very special in plantation. So let's talk about the other one, one of the other audiences and one of the other, I guess, constituency groups. And this one I know is even harder when we talked about shutting down what we called nonessential businesses. And I think just from a third party objective view, how do you tell somebody their business is not essential? But you even said in the press conference, you mentioned that as a business owner in the city reaching that decision was painful. It was difficult. Um, you know, what went through your mind when you had to put that together? And I know there was a great amount of strain before we actually went forward with it. Um, you know, what were your thoughts? What, what do you think the impact was going to be and what are we seeing now coming forward with that?
Speaker 3:Well, I didn't define the definition of essential and uh, the County mayors were actually on a conference call with the County mayor or this, all the city mayors within the County. We're on a call with the County mayor and one of the things we said was, we think the order should come from you and or the governor, but in the meantime we're going to put this in place. So we said we want to define essential because that was so important. People were like, well, am I a am I or am I not? And we've had a couple businesses through, you know, everybody's hair salon and nail salon. And I know I ran very quickly to get my last pedicure for a while before all that was put in place. But um, uh, as a whole, I think the community has responded extremely well and I hope that part of that was a result of us giving them a little notice to prepare. I think a lot of small businesses are still have freshly in their mind, the recession and so many employers held on to employees for so long that they finally went broke themselves. And so this was a little different though in that on a national level, there has never been so much support available for small businesses and employee unemployment increased. You now have a stimulus check coming out. I mean this is unexplored ground, but thankfully the federal government has recognized how important this is. And so it's allowed some of the employers and employees to both move in a positive direction. So they're not just floundering. Landlords are looking to make some concessions on rents, mortgage companies, we'll work with you. I mean everybody wants to work because it is so global and certainly national. So was a lot of positive response and help.
Speaker 2:So what are, what are we as the city doing to help support that? You know, obviously the, the president has come out and signed the stimulus package and you know, it, it's going to help somewhat, but what, what are we actually doing in the city to make sure that the businesses know about it, to make sure that the, you know, the community knows that this is available. And are we helping foster it in any way?
Speaker 3:Well, I, I've been a huge Facebook proponent for a long time and uh, participate on their regularly. But as a result of, uh, we've all sort of come into a new communication component. So we're doing the podcasts, we're doing 10 and four advisories to the public. We also have our city clerk, a social media person putting out additional information. We are working with the chamber of commerce and I'm getting a lot of stuff out everywhere we can. Um, I know that we've, uh, talked and now we're trying to implement paper, the old fashioned paper, which I still love, but to put out to the seniors that don't necessarily do Facebook or they don't have a computer or they don't have a landline. I mean there are different components everywhere. So I'm including our own ever bridge that Mo I wish most people would sign up for, uh, that we can also do those, uh, advisory. So we're exploring new options including, uh, tomorrow night we're going to do our first city council meeting, uh, using zoom. So a is considered a workshop, so the public is not invited, but you would get an opportunity to certainly see us. If you have a question, submit it to the clerk by noon tomorrow. S slattery@plantation.org and your comment or question will certainly be included as part of that workshop
Speaker 2:and tomorrow will be Wednesday, the first April 1st. Great. All right, so let's, let's move to, I guess it'd be like the third constituency group, which is the city employees, right. Um, we, you mentioned earlier that we have, you know, probably on a daily basis minimum staffing. We have what we need to get the work done, but we don't have any frills, we don't have any fluff in our staff. So we've had to take the bold step. You had to take the bold step of releasing many employees to, to, to create that safe environment and to make sure we're not adding to the spread or flatten the curve as they're calling it. What again, what, what went through your mind? What were some of the decisions that were made and what rationale that we come up with to go ahead and take that step?
Speaker 3:Well, initially, remember we closed the doors to all city hall or all city buildings. So staff was still working, but the public could not come in. And, um, you know, we advised employees right from the beginning. If you have any of those, um, over 60 and those, uh, health components and you wanted to stay home, you are more than welcome to stay home. And in fact, the federal government came out and said that municipalities had to provide 80 hours worth of time off for this component that did not go against, um, their bank of leave time. So at this time we've, um, ramped up, we went to the directors, we said, can you go through your staff and take a look? So what we're doing is two weeks off for some staff and then they come back and a, and another set is off for two weeks. So right at this moment we've got a little over 200 people, um, that are not working at city hall that are, uh, from home. Some are remotely and some are, are not. We're so far, knock on wood, doing very, very well.
Speaker 2:And how much is the public in a see an impact from that,
Speaker 3:uh, from the staff component, right. I am hoping zero because our staff works really hard and they understand what's going on here and what's at stake and the safety of the employees. I, I don't really have concerns about that, but we always get something and we are always very quick to jump and address it.
Speaker 2:Terrific. All right, so I want to wrap up here. Like I said, we know you're busy. You've got to get back to, to run in the city. Um, last words for the residents. What, what message, you know, this is all gonna leave this as open ended as we can. What do you want to say to the residents and the businesses of plantation throughout all of this?
Speaker 3:I get that there are components of your day where you're just miserable. You can't believe this is happening. It's the Twilight zone. It's, it's a whole lot of things that we've never seen before. But I've always felt like I had, um, sort of guardian angel and so a positive component of how things are going to end up at the end of the day. And I honestly believe we are just so resilient and we are, we have faith and moving forward and how our businesses will be gangbusters at the end of this. And some new entrepreneurs will arise and, um, you know, I'll be looking forward to shaking their hands to all the new, uh, development is still coming into the city. We've got a great future here and I'm real excited about it.
Speaker 2:Terrific. Thank you so much again, mayor. Thank you for the time. Thank you for spending this with us and for giving us some insight into what the city is doing and how we're moving forward together as a team and as a community. Really, really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.