Interview with Political Candidate

Obviously, you know, kind of my model in my personal life is to prepare, to pray, and then be a piece. And, you know, I think that having a job and having gone through the tornado, we've learned that there's a great deal of benefit to be prepared. And then as a Christian, I'm a man of beliefs and prayer, and so I pray, and then I'm still working on the part of having peace because you turn things over to those in authority and you turn things over to God. And you still want to try to do everything you can to try to help to make it better. We had, I did receive a lot of telephone calls from people asking me to put a stay-at-home order in place. I received, you know, I didn't keep the poll, I didn't write them all down. When you're in the middle of the battle, you kind of handle the situation as they come. But I would say that the number of calls that I received from places asking me not to put it in place was probably equal to the number of those requests. And, you know, as an elected official, my desire is to serve and represent the people that have put me in place for the last 18, 19 years.

And so I would, I think that very seriously. I had been meeting on a regular basis with our health director, and who had been meeting daily and sometimes more than once a day. And there was even some times that they spent all night long looking at what was going on and seeing what was happening in our community. And then they were feeding the information. And of course, I was getting information trying to keep the council up today. I may be the mayor, but the mayor is a spoke person for the council. So the council is involved as well, even though during this time, they're kind of operating, you know, distancing like everybody else. In fact, last Monday night, we had our first council meeting where the city manager was about 20 feet to my left and the city attorney with 20 feet to my right. And we, everybody else called in. So we, I just tried to compile all the information I could get.

We did get a couple of briefings, telephone briefings from the governor as to what he was doing and why he was doing some of the things he was doing. And I guess that Fred in the back of my mind, I boy, I took this very seriously. I was trying not to operate in fear, but to try to use wisdom and gain all the information I concerned that I could receive, you know, before making an invite to the rest of council is what direction I need to go. I visited quite regularly with the mayor of web city and the mayor of the show, we were talking together about what was best for our communities. And so we were trying to get all the information we could. And I guess one of the things that was in the back of my mind too, was that I didn't, I was trying to keep from creating another crisis while dealing with the current crisis. The crisis is the financial crisis of people that I shut down with closer business and that type of thing.

And not that that financial is more important than health because it certainly isn't. But certainly I was trying to see if there's a way that we that we could handle the health without affecting the financial end of it as much as possible. That was one of the reasons why we held off and when we finally got made the decision to do it. We had met early that morning and we did the governor hadn't we hadn't heard from the governor as to what his plans were or anything. I had visited like I said with a couple of the other mayors and we were all feeling that it was probably time that we needed to do something. And they were all both decided trying to decide what they were going to do. And so I met with staff and we decided that the conditions and gotten to the point where we'd best go ahead and put a stay at home longer in place trying to be proactive. Trying and feeling that if we took this particular action at this point, it would keep us get us ahead of things.

So far, we've been blessed. It has because we haven't had any additional cases in Joplin. I think Jesper County had one additional case yesterday, but we haven't had maybe the day before, but we haven't had any additional cases in Joplin now for three or four days.