It could be ‘late spring, early summer’ before Columbia City Council meets in-person
It’s been nearly nine months since Columbia City Council has held an in-person meeting.
When that streak could end remains uncertain.
Because of COVID-19, City Council has been conducting its meetings virtually since March. Citizens have been able to watch meetings via the city’s YouTube channel and offer public input via email and telephone.
But some council members say they’re interested in getting back to meeting in-person, with safety protocols and social distancing in place. But with cases of the novel coronavirus continuing to rise, they admit the timeline for doing so remains fuzzy.
As it stands, normal operating procedures for city council remain suspended until at least early January after council voted Nov. 5 to extend its emergency ordinance another two months.
Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin says it could be well into 2021 before council starts meeting face-to-face again. The mayor noted council’s primary focus in hosting virtual meetings has been safety for the public, staff and council members.
“In the role we have as leaders, we should be modeling the importance of physical distancing while the virus now is at its most (dangerous) levels,” Benjamin said. “With that being said, I’m optimistic, with all the good news surrounding the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, and the prospective roll out of it to significant parts of the population, that hopefully — and we’ll discuss this at council — (in-person meetings) would resume in the late spring or early summer.
“But, it won’t be in the immediate future. It’s too early to move back to in-person meetings.”
Pfizer on Nov. 20 applied to the federal Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization of a coronavirus vaccine. Moderna, meanwhile, was set to apply for authorization on Monday.
New COVID-19 cases have been on the rise in South Carolina, with more than 1,000 new cases per day being the norm in the last few weeks. As of Nov. 29, there had been more than 202,000 coronavirus cases in the state since March, and more than 4,000 South Carolinians have been killed by COVID-19.
Local government bodies in the Midlands have varied in how they have handled meetings amid COVID-19. Richland County Council, like Columbia City Council, has been meeting virtually. Meanwhile, Lexington County Council, for instance, has continued to hold meetings in-person.
District 4 Columbia City Councilman Daniel Rickenmann thinks some of the typical interplay between the seven council members gets lost in a virtual meeting. But he also recognizes the challenges of carrying on with an in-person meeting amid the pandemic.
“I do think that we don’t have the same interaction and discussion and problem-solving that you do face-to-face,” Rickenmann said. “But, I think at this point that we have some higher risk council members based on age and so forth, so I think it is a little bit of a challenge. There hasn’t been much discussion about (resuming in-person meetings) between now and the end of the year. I think a lot of it will be more focused as we look at the next round of where we are at the end of this (current emergency ordinance).”
At-large Councilman Howard Duvall said there have been some conversations about the possibility of in-person council meetings at the Columbia Convention Center or at the city’s multi-use Busby Street facility, both of which could provide large spaces to spread out. However, those discussions haven’t advanced past preliminary stages.
Duvall, who is on his second term on the Columbia City Council and is the former mayor of Cheraw and a former longtime director of the state Municipal Association, admitted there have been challenges in meeting virtually for the last nine months.
“It’s different for the public and it’s especially different for the council members,” Duvall said. “We can’t have conversations during the breaks — the ‘how’s your family doing?’ type of things — and you can’t read the body language in a meeting to know whether you’ve got four votes that would be willing to support you on a particular matter.
“It’s an entirely different environment when you are trying to do it virtually, and I’d much prefer finding some safe way we could get together in-person.”
At-large Councilwoman Tameika Isaac Devine generally shares Benjamin’s outlook on when city council could meet face-to-face again, noting she is hopeful it could be in the spring.
She thinks the virtual meetings the last nine months have been productive.
“We really have plenty of engagement in Zoom,” Devine said, referring to the ubiquitous virtual teleconference system. “We’ve actually probably been more efficient when we are not physically together, which I don’t know what that says about us. We’ve talked about the Busby Center and if there is a way we could do things socially distanced, and we may do that next year. I think for right now we are going to continue the way we are.”
