Council holds Meeting Via Teleconference from Remote Locations

Information broadcast on LakeChelanNow through public notice by City of Chelan

On Tuesday night, the City of Chelan conducted their regularly scheduled Council meeting via a teleconference session in order to adhere to social distancing practices related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The meeting was live streamed to the community on LakeChelanNow and for those not able to listen last night the complete audio recording is linked in this story. The stream was interrupted early in the meeting, but was resumed within a few minutes for those listening live. The entirety of the meeting is included in the recording below.

The City Council meeting lasted just over two hours and some of highlights of the session with a time signature are noted below:

  • (1:44) Ben Williams, representing the Seven Acres Foundation, gives a presentation on the Community Center of Lake Chelan project.
  • (6:30) Council discusses and approves a number of resolutions generated by the current Coronavirus situation. Topics covered included deferred utility payments, waiving of cancellation fees at the RV Park, payment of city employee wages and benefits and more.
  • (1:20:30) This marks the beginning of mayor and council comments that again pertain to rammifications of COVID-19.In this portion of the meeting Erin McCardle discusses work being done by the communities Leadership Response Group, Ray Dobbs expresses concern over the promotion and advertising of short term rentals at a time the public is being told to stay at home. Ty Witt, councilman and physician, discusses serious economic issues being faced by hospitals and clinics in the region and the last topic in this comment portion of the meeting talks about keeping city parks open.

Regarding the livestream of the council meeting, there were 245 unique listeners over the course of the meeting with a peak of 139 at one point. To listen to the meeting in its entirety click on the link below. In addition, we have also posted individual (smaller) files on two separate topics of interest: the COVID-19 Resolutions and the Council/Mayor Comments.

Please note: these are very large mp3 files. Please allow plenty of time for them to load. The speed at which they load is dependent upon the strength of your WiFi connection. Also understand that you can only advance to the timestamp on the file where your device has stopped buffering and is ready to play. 

City Council Broadcast – March 24, 2020 – in its entirety

City Council Broadcast – March 24, 2020 – Resolutions Pertaining to COVID-19

City Council Broadcast – March 24, 2020 – Council / Mayor Comments

Following is a statement released by Mayor Bob Goedde following the Council Meeting

Mayor Bob Goedde’s statement on enforcing Governor Inslee’s Stay Home, Stay Healthy Order

I am in complete support of Governor Inslee’s Stay Home, Stay Healthy Order.  If we are going to contain and defeat this virus we must comply with this order as well as taking all the recommended personal protection measures.  The Governor was very clear that we should stay home except for essential personal and business travel and I strongly encourage all our citizens to do so.

Although the large majority of our citizens, both full and part time, are complying with this order, we have received reports of people ignoring this important directive.  Please know that while the City of Chelan will do all we can to ensure compliance, enforcement actions rest with the Chelan County Sheriff’s office. The Sheriff made it clear in a statement on his Facebook page that while their goal is compliance with the order, their primary action will be education first.  Keep in mind that if you contact City Hall we are not fully staffed, and you may have a difficult time reaching the right person.

On another note; although the City is manned with essential staff only, we are striving to maintain as many of our services to our citizens as possible.

Again, I sincerely ask every one of our Chelan residents to comply with the Governor’s order as well take all recommended actions to stay healthy.  By doing so and working together as a community, we will defeat this virus and our City and return to normal sooner rather than later.

THANKS!!

Mayor Bob Goedde