Village Board Considers Alternate Format For Next Meeting

PLAINFIELD, IL — The next Plainfield village board meeting is scheduled for Monday, April 6, and Village Administrator Brian Murphy said it would likely look very different from the last one. In response to the ongoing coronavirus crisis, Murphy - who has become something of the village's Plague Tsar - said that future meetings will attempt to make use of telecommunications and e-conference technology. It will still be open to the public, but in ways that some normal attendees of the meetings are unused to.

"It will be live, it may be streaming only on cable," Murphy said. "It may be that we just have a conference call right here in [Village Hall] and people can listen in."

At the last village meeting on March 16, Murphy explained that the village had developed a multi-tier plan for responding to the spread of COVID-19, with different actions to be taken at as the level of infection in the area spreads. The highest tier of response, necessitating the most drastic action, Murphy said, would be infection among the village board itself. At that point, emergency actions would be put in place to ensure that local governance is not compromised.

"As this virus finds its way through the Chicagoland area... we have differing levels of action plans," Murphy said. "They run from it being just a federal and state issue - we know it's that already. As of this afternoon it has moved into being a regional issue... The next two levels are when there cases that make it into Plainfield and then finally... if we have cases within the [village government] itself."

Despite Murphy's warning of drastic action, the meeting on Monday did not even fulfill the steps laid out in the least dire of the multi-tier plan: general social distancing. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the state government have both advocated for keeping all social interactions to a minimum and for maintaining at least six feet between individuals at those times when social interactions are unavoidable. Yet at the village board meeting, members of the village government were sitting at their stations less than two feet apart, while in the audience people sat directly next to each other and fraternized directly, some even shaking hands.

Not worth a second glance during normal times, perhaps, but these are not normal times. Especially considering that several members of the village Board of Trustees and most meeting attendees are part of age groups considered most vulnerable to the coronavirus. Murphy acknowledged this, but said that it was only after Governor Pritzker's executive order on Monday prohibiting gatherings of more than 50 people, along with the announcement of the first confirmed case of coronavirus in Will County on the same day, that elevated the board's immediate need for action.

The village has not yet said exactly what form the next meeting will take, though Murphy said that was a topic under discussion. Besides that precaution, the village also closed all municipal buildings at 6 p.m. on Thursday and has canceled most public meetings and events through the first two weeks of April. Mayor Michael Collins also declared a State of Emergency for the village on Monday, allowing Plainfield to receive state and possibly federal FEMA funds to assist residents in need of aid. This declaration is set to to expire Monday, March 23, but Collins told Patch that it was likely he would renew it.

In the meantime, all residents of Plainfield - including members of village government - are urged to practice social distancing, wash their hands often, and help those who are most vulnerable to infection, such as elderly neighbors.

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