First responders are getting the COVID vaccine, but not much information is coming from the state on next round scheduling. And Lienhoop says the state legislature shouldn't limit the Governor's emergency powers.
On this week’s installment of Ask The Mayor, Columbus Mayor Jim Lienhoop addresses these issues and more. Listen to the full conversation with Indiana Newsdesk anchor Joe Hren by clicking on the play button above, or read some of the questions and answers below. A portion of this segment airs 6:45 and 8:45 a.m. Wednesday on WFIU.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
Hren: Let's begin with what we ended the year with, COVID-19... now after two holidays, what's the latest?
Lienhoop: We had seen a little bit of a decline, right before New Year's Day. But the report I got today indicated that, the hospitalizations and the positive cases are starting to tick up just a tad. We'll see where it goes. But, what we've learned has been that following any kind of a holiday, we get a bit of a surge. And now we're concerned about Christmas and New Year. So, we'll just ride it as best we can over the next week to 10 days. And hopefully it doesn't surge on top of our surge.
We've got some vaccines here in Columbus, we've made them available to the frontline responders again, we'll see how those are received and distributed. But it's still gonna take several months for us to get to the point where sufficient numbers of our community have had access to the vaccine.
To get herd immunity, they're talking 70 to 85% of the population needs to be vaccinated. That's 85% of 80,000 people in Bartholomew county, you're talking 68,000 people, something like that. So it's, going to take a long time for us to do that. I mean, several months.
READ MORE: COVID-19 Vaccines Could Expand To More Hoosiers Next Week
Hren: We're getting and I'm sure you are, too, a lot of questions daily into our newsroom, from those over 65 with certain conditions asking, Are they going to be contacted? Do they have to contact the the local hospital? Can you give any guidance to those who are older?
Lienhoop: Do what I'm doing. I mean, I'm older. I fit the bill for somebody over 65. And, you know, with a couple of what I guess you could call pre existing conditions or what have you, and so at this point, we're waiting for the state of Indiana to tell us what kind of distribution process they want to follow. And whether that's going to be whether we need to look through to the pharmacies, Walgreens and CVS, for example, or whether we'll find, distributions through the health department or through the hospital. And we just don't know yet, we're waiting for them to give us some guidance.
Hren: Where do you feel you're at in terms of restrictions? Because earlier you talked about the surge upon a surge? Are you thinking about changing that at all?
Lienhoop: Not right now. I think that the issue that I'm being told is that, as best health care professionals can tell most of the infections come from what they call private gatherings. And, those are, again, back to the holidays, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Christmas family meetings, weddings, funerals, those kinds of activities. And those are ones that are incredibly difficult for us to try to monitor, number one, and then number two, to try to enforce any kind of compliance with either mask wearing worse or physical distancing. If you've got a bunch of people over to your home, it's as a private activity and we're not going to get in the middle of that.
We have had a pretty good response from the faith community here in Columbus. We met shortly before Thanksgiving, with about 30 ministers, and received a pretty warm response to our request that in person worship be curtailed, severely limited, 50% of capacity or 50 people, whichever you got to first. And in general, the response that we received, as I said, was pretty favorable.
Hren: We've been covering Bloomington Mayor Hamilton limiting camping overnight in city parks, which was targeting people experiencing homelessness, and I read a report a couple days ago, Indianapolis doing the same downtown and on the circle, is this a concern in Columbus?
Lienhoop: We talk pretty regularly with the folks who run our homeless shelter, they have the closest contact to the homeless population that we have here. And they're telling us that, there's really not been that much stress on that population. And, granted, it's a difficult thing to measure. I mean, this a population that can be difficult to communicate with, and certainly to gauge their health, but we've not had many reports of folks camping out in our parks. And we have room at the homeless shelter. And the folks who run it have a way to handle folks who have tested positive or need to be quarantined in some other way.
Hren: The General Assembly is underway in Indianapolis, many items on the agenda. Anything in particular you're following for Columbus?
Lienhoop: Always pay attention to the TIF legislation that comes around, it seems to always be directed to trying to curtail what we do in TIF and that's the process by which we grow the economy of our community. And I think you know, there was an article in some of the media here recently about efforts to curtail the governor's emergency powers. I would be very concerned about that. I think that we've done a pretty decent job today in Indiana, and I really don't see that there's a whole lot that needs to be fixed with that. My sense would be that the legislature wants to exert a voice into all that decision making. That's to be expected. But you'd have to ask yourself, what better information they would have than what the governor would have? And, would we get a scientific response or a political one?
Hren: The Republic reported the city is close to getting a downtown grocery development. We've been talking about that since this was part of the conference center development. So is there a site for that and what's been the progress?
Lienhoop: If you go back a year, maybe a little further, we had one project to bring forward a mixed use development and a hotel Conference Center, the mixed use development would be about 200 apartments, a little bit of retail, and a urban grocery. When COVID hit, we decided to split those two pieces of that one project. And the relevance of that is that the hotel conference center is going to have to wait for a while - the lenders that would provide the financing for that kind of project are just skittish about investing in hospitality.
We are able to, however, to go forward with the mixed use development. This is a project that will be built south of Second Street and east of the jail, about 200 apartments. That will also include an urban grocer that will be pretty well situated at the corner of Second and Lafayette.
We will also as part of that project be building a new Court Services Building that will be behind the jail directly south of the jail, south of First Street and west of Lafayette in anticipation that we'll someday move on the hotel Conference Center site. So we should be able to see some earthmoving equipment here within a couple of months, as we first move on the Court Services Building, that they'll tear down the existing structure at 555 First Street and begin work on a parking lot over on the road east of Lafayette Street. And then we anticipate you'd be breaking ground in about a year on the apartment complex and the grocery. So it's moving forward. It's just too slow. And that's frustrating. But that's just the way it is.
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