City council to keep meeting virtually

Councilors rejected an attempt to establish a hybrid model allowing both in-person and virtual participation. Councilors argued the decision should wait until a new council is seated in January.

The Laramie City Council has met virtually since the outset of the pandemic. It’s likely to keep doing so until at least the new year.

That’s despite a few public commenters arguing Tuesday the current set-up contributes to a lack of transparency and prohibits some older people from taking part. The comments came during a push by one councilor, Bryan Shuster, to reopen council chambers to the public.

The majority of councilors rejected Shuster’s suggestion and defended the decision to meet exclusively through Zoom. They argued virtual meetings have allowed a wider range of people to participate and that hybrid meetings are exceptionally difficult to host and navigate.

Councilor Sharon Cumbie is a registered nurse and the council’s liaison to the local health board. She added no one knows yet if Albany County will experience another COVID-19 winter spike.

“We don’t know quite yet if it’s over,” Cumbie said. “We’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned how to mitigate it. We’ve learned some very sensible ways, such as increased ventilation and vaccination, which are two key ways we can prevent serious illness.”

But Albany County residents are still getting sick and occasionally dying. In Wyoming, 279 people have died this year, eight of them from Albany County. But transmission is low right now and the county is averaging just five new cases a day.

After half an hour of discussion and input, the council voted down Shuster’s proposal, crushing it with a 7-2 vote. Councilors Shuster and Pat Gabriel were the only two to vote in favor of the hybrid model.

Shuster: There are people outside “tapping on the window”

Councilor Shuster introduced Resolution 2022-56 during the council’s meeting Tuesday. The resolution would have rescinded the council’s earlier decision to meet virtually, originally passed in 2020, and replaced it with a hybrid meeting model, allowing both councilors and members of the public to choose whether they attend in-person or by Zoom or telephone.

As usual, Shuster attended the virtual council meeting by Zooming in from his seat in the council chambers.

“I’ve been in favor of restoring the meetings,” he said. “There are people outside right now and they were tapping on the window and everything, so I said I would try to get this moved. I talked to the city attorney, I’ve talked to the city clerk, I’ve talked to several people, and we thought that probably the only thing that would stand a chance of passing was doing a hybrid meeting.”

A handful of public commenters backed up Shuster’s resolution.

“I’ve seen a growing mistrust of government amongst the population,” said Tom Mattimore, a member of the Laramie Planning Commission. “A return to regular order at city hall would go a long way to restoring confidence in city government. And the public feels that new plans and things just appear at the last minute without any public input.”

He added that virtual meetings require a level of technological proficiency to attend.

“The other problem is too many older citizens have major difficulties with Zoom, call it cultural or electronic or whatever,” Mattimore said. “It’s difficult for some people to deal with Zoom and all the electronic 21st century stuff.”

Pearce: Hybrid model less efficient, more expensive than “one or the other”

Moving to a hybrid model, as Shuster’s resolution proposes, could be seen as a compromise, allowing those who wish to use Zoom the option to keep doing so, but opening up council chambers for those who wish to give public comment in person.

But Councilor Erin O’Doherty said this would require city staff to be present in the chambers — denying them the choice to work virtually.

And Vice-Mayor Jayne Pearce, who works in online and distance education for the University of Wyoming, said hybrid models are difficult to get right.

“The research is suggesting — and folks have been researching this, obviously, the last couple of years now — that either meetings should be conducted on Zoom, all in the same format, like we’re doing now, or in-person,” Pearce said. “One or the other.”

Instituting an effective hybrid model would have budgetary implications, she added.

“If you opt to have a hybrid meeting, you need to have the appropriate equipment and possibly a facilitator,” Pearce said. “Because you need to have somebody watching to make sure that questions from the public, from the councilors, aren’t being missed because now they’re in multiple locations.”

If the council were to choose just one model, Mayor Paul Weaver added, it’s not clear that one or the other would be more transparent or more accessible. Virtual meetings might preclude those without a phone or internet connection, but they also allow a wider range of people to take part.

“There are certainly individuals in this community who don’t have the work schedules or car to attend regular meetings in-person,” Weaver said. “No matter which way we go, we’re going to be excluding someone at this point in our council business.”

He added the council’s virtual meetings adhere to the state’s public records law, and further that there is no shortage of opportunity to offer public input.

“We provide three minutes per item for agenda items on the regular agenda,” Weaver said. “We provide that speaking time at least twice, and usually three times, so that’s really a total of nearly ten minutes of speaking time for any interested member of the public that wants to weigh in on the issue.”

Councilor Fred Schmechel agreed, saying he was comfortable with the access afforded by virtual meetings.

“I get a lot of the points and arguments here,” he said. “But I don’t buy that the technology is a challenge. It might exclude certain people, but I also feel like that’s a choice of theirs — that they don’t want to call in or Zoom in — just like it’s a choice for a person to not drive down to a council meeting. I would rather have more people engaged with a technology like this.”

Cumbie: Winter pandemic spike still possible

Coronavirus transmission — the original justification for going virtual — is still happening throughout the community. Councilor Cumbie said transmission rates have let up through the summer, thanks in part to the community’s adherence to preventive measures.

“As a community, we’ve done reasonably well,” Cumbie said. “We’re below the national average related to vaccines, but we are high for the state of Wyoming. We have 64 percent with one dose, 57 percent with two, and 29 percent who have chosen to get boosters.”

Albany County is now monitoring COVID transmission by sampling the community’s wastewater. With home tests now readily available, previously reliable official measures — like reported cases and positivity rates — tell public health officials less and less about the state of the pandemic.

For most of the summer, Albany County enjoyed a “green” — or low — transmission level.

“We had a spike two weeks after graduation,” Cumbie said. “We had an additional spike in July after Jubilee Days. So where there’s a large gathering, we’ve experienced spikes where we’ve gone into the yellow and red, and then we come right back down to green. So we’ve done a reasonably good job.”

But the wastewater measures suggest another spike could be coming, Cumbie said. And with weather growing colder and events moving indoors, the risk of another widespread, dangerous or deadly spike increases.

The most recent COVID-19 variants have proved more transmissible, but less deadly. Officials are hoping that, in the event of another spike, the county’s current death toll of 52 doesn’t rise precipitously.

But death is far from the only possible result of a COVID infection.

“Long COVID is becoming an increasing health issue that is occurring among individuals who have had serious, mild and sometimes no symptoms after having a COVID infection,” Cumbie said. “The CDC currently is estimating about one in five people will develop symptoms of long COVID, for weeks, months or sometimes years.”

Individuals can suffer from difficulty breathing and other symptoms long after their infection, decreasing their quality of life and leading to knock-on effects in their work performance and the health of the local economy.

So Cumbie advocated waiting to reopen the council chambers — especially since plans are underway to rearrange the chambers’ layout and upgrade its ventilation system.

“We’ll have a better sense of (the state of the pandemic) in November and December,” Cumbie said. “So I think some of these decisions may be appropriate toward the end of the year when we do have the ventilation system, the reworking of chambers, and a better sense of where we stand with infection.”

Councilor Brian Harrington agreed, adding that a meeting model shake-up this close to the seating of a new council in January would slow down the current council’s final months together.

“It’s going to make us less efficient in the last three months,” he said. “It’s going to make everything considerably slower, far less engaging, and we’re just going to be fumbling through. I’ll be here two more years, but I think there are some other councilors who have some things they would like to work on.”