Mayors of cities up and down the Mississippi River urged Congress to pass a federal stimulus package Tuesday to aid them in the worsening COVID-19 crisis.
Mayors of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative (MRCTI) described “challenging” situations in their cities Tuesday. Testing supplies were stretched. Testing times were long. Personal protective equipment (PPE) was running low. Hits to their cities’ budgets have been worse than the financial crisis of the late 2000s.
For all of this, the mayors asked the House and Senate for expediency in passing a stimulus package that includes revenue replacement for local governments, resources for testing, additional PPE assistance for schools, intense heat response, and hurricane preparations in the face of the ongoing coronavirus surge.
The MRCTI mayors banded together in March to pool resources for a region-wide response to the COVID-19 crisis. The move “paid off,” according to Bettendorf, Iowa, Mayor Bob Gallagher.
“We’ve now accumulated over 75,000 units of PPE, equipping our cities with masks, body coverings, and now thermometers,” he said in a statement. “We’ve also partnered with technical experts to better access federal resources.
“As a region we can better respond to the pandemic than individually. But, this fight can’t go on forever without national assistance.”
City revenues from the 10-state, Mississippi-River corridor are down between 10 percent to 30 percent, leaving fewer resources to deliver basic services and respond to the crisis.
[pullquote-1-center] “We are working to contain the contagion, but our depleted revenue complicates our efforts,” said Lacrosse, Wisconsin, Mayor Tim Kabat. “Also, if we are going to get our economy fully reopened, we need to have the capacity to test the healthy, not just the exposed and symptomatic.”
“My state originally peaked on May 28th with 646 new cases reported that day. We more than doubled that on July 24th alone.”
The new surge is raging across the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana and Mississippi. New virus rates are topping the worst levels seen in April by several hundred cases all in the midst of a very active hurricane season, according to the MRCTI.
“Here in Mississippi, we’re seeing cases rise to past double what we were seeing in April, May, or June,” said Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mayor George Flaggs. “It didn’t take long to climb from 400 cases a day to 1,600 and it is the western side of the state seeing the fastest rise in newly reported cases.
[pullquote-2-center] “In fact, I just placed a new order with MRCTI for additional masks and thermometers to assist my city with response. We got ahead of this before and think we can again, but now cases are rising much faster and we’ve been fighting the pandemic longer with a greater toll.”
“If we’re expected to open schools in the fall, have capacity in place for a major hurricane, and lift it all with a third less revenue, then we need action on this stimulus now and it has to get funds to Main Street,” she said. “We only had one city along the entire Mississippi River qualify for direct funding from the CARES Act.”
