Portion of $1.5M in CARES Act funds helps sanitize courthouse
As chair of the Gilmer County Commission, Charlie Paris is thankful for federal funds that have arrived through the CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security) Act. However, he is troubled that some local residents still are not taking the COVID-19 pandemic seriously.
“I’m still concerned about the number of cases we have,” he said on Friday of last week when the county’s 14th COVID-related death was reported by Georgia Network News. “Cases are down a little bit, but it’s still a very serious situation. My point is, I just have a feeling that there are a lot of people who are not taking this seriously.”
Paris pointed to the area’s demographics as evidence for his unease.
“In Gilmer County, we have a high senior population,” he said. “You keep hearing there’s less than 2 percent deaths if you get this. And overall, I suppose that’s true. But if you look at a breakdown on that, if you’re over 65 and get this, it’s more like 10 percent chance of dying, and if you have (health) complications, it goes up from there … depending on the age and population you’re in, you can’t take comfort from that 2 percent.”
As part of the just over $1.5 million received via the CARES Act, a total of $7,000 has been allocated for the public’s safety when entering the courthouse.
“We did the deep cleaning on the courthouse,” he noted. “We shut everything down one weekend and had an outfit come in and spray and wipe it down before it was opened back up. Once that was completed, we started opening various sections of the courthouse … (but the commission) did not specify for any of the elected officials that they had to close or that they had to open. Our job was to make sure the courthouse was sanitized so they could do what they needed to do.”
Paris said the court system has plans to get back to adjudicating cases — cautiously.
“There are going to be some court sessions, but one of the things we’re using this money for is remote conferencing, I think they call it, where the judge can be there and the folks that are on trial will be in another location, and it will be a closed-circuit TV sort of thing,” he said. “Initially, the court sessions will be held that way. The equipment for that is going to be around $25,000, and that’s part of that $1.5 million.”
A grand jury session planned for mid-October has been postponed while more virus safeguards are implemented.
“The grand jury, rather than be held in that room where they usually are, will be moving to the jury assembly room because they need a larger space so that they can social distance,” Paris said. “What that $7,000 purchases are air purifiers to clean the air and UV (ultraviolent) light stations to kill the viruses. So we’re trying to get those in place before the grand jury meets.”
He added that as part of the $1.5 million reimbursement, “We’ve already ordered a lot of COVID-related items that we really needed and didn’t have any other means of getting. Because this stuff is pretty expensive.”
Ambulance fleet affected
Paris was asked if the commission had to do some “budget dipping” before the federal coronavirus funds became available.
“We did a little bit, but it wasn’t a tremendous amount,” he replied. “We could’ve handled that without having these funds come through. The things we dipped in for were things we just absolutely had to have — the protective equipment for ambulance folks, for instance — and things we need to have that we couldn’t have if these funds didn’t come through, like a laryngoscope kit to help you breathe, and a Stryker Power stretcher kit that we’ll be using to transport people.”
Paris explained, “We needed another ambulance, because all the COVID calls were taking our ambulances so much we were having a problem maintaining enough ambulances to serve the non-COVID calls. We will be getting another one with this money. Otherwise, we would have just tried to carry on with what we’ve got.
“This is letting us get things we really, really need, but couldn’t necessarily have gotten because we couldn’t up front (spend) that kind of money. So it’s very helpful for us in that regard.”
How the CARES Act funds were received
Gilmer Commission Chair Charlie Paris explained how the CARES Act funds were received thusly:
“There is no match the county has to provide for these funds. The way it works is we’re given an allotment based on our population. The state was allotted a certain amount of money from the feds as part of the CARES Act, and then the state, in turn, kinda passed it down. They didn’t have to, so we’re fortunate that they decided to share with the counties.
“Based on our population, the amount we qualified for was just a hair over $1.5 million. Now there’s a difference between qualifying and actually getting the money. We qualified based on our population, but then we had to justify the amount. Basically, we topped out at a million-five, provided we could justify it as being COVID-related expenditures.
“They made it pretty easy on us, though. They said that any salary — any public-safety salary that was dedicated to COVID — could be counted with that allocation. Then they came back and said, for the sake of argument, that any public-safety salary between March and the first of October could be assumed to be COVID-related. So that opened it up to where any salary we paid to public-safety personnel (during that time) qualified as a COVID expenditure with the exception of management — it had to be the front-line people.
“We actually were able to justify our entire $1.5 million allocation based on salaries alone. It made it a lot easier, because if we had to itemize — spend this much money on this and this much on that — it would have been a whole lot longer and cumbersome process, because each individual item we listed would have had to be approved on its own … we turned it in and got approved very quickly.”