COBB— The Cobb Area Council discussed, at its board meeting Thursday, live streamed through Zoom and Facebook, fire season and drought condition updates, as well as the possibility of in person events resuming,
“I’d like to welcome Kent Romney, who is with the community mitigation assistance team, helping us in Lake County,” said CAC Secretary Cindy Leonard, who added Romney is a firefighter from Oregon. “They’re learning about all of our different groups, working on wildfire mitigation, preparedness, all of our different agencies. He wanted to attend our meetings to help gather information for his team.”
“All members from the East Coast, Central States Mountain States and myself, plus one other team member are here on the West Coast. I’m working as a wildfire safety commissioner, with the city of Ashland. We’re looking forward to gather lots of information speaking to community members and organizations in terms of structures”, said Romney.
“I’m just so hoping that we can get back to that time again where we can come together as a community and really prepare short term and long term for fire season and fire mitigation. The Risk Reduction Authority has already had a virtual town hall on basics, which was about an hour and a half, and we had four speakers. We had about 80 people logged in on Zoom, and I think the reach on Facebook was maybe 1,500 to 2,000, and a few watches on the YouTube channel. If anybody is interested in watching that, it is on the County Facebook page. It’s also on the County YouTube channel”, said District 5 Supervisor Jessica Pyska.
“We have an emergency drought declaration in place that happened last week. Sheriff Martin brought that to the board. When we talk about droughts as a disaster, we talk about that as a very slow moving, slow rolling disaster. We put that (declaration) in place, so we can start to access funding and get the resources that we need as we move along through this. Our lake is at very low levels. We’re asking everybody to voluntarily start conserving water. This is just the beginning,” she said.
The item about when to return to “in-person” meetings concluded the virtual discussion. Council member Chris Nettles brought up what the supervisor said about the state’s COVID tier system pulling back on June 15 and asked: “If we pull back on the tier system, does that mean that we’ll be able to have in person meetings again? Reasonably sized gatherings ones?”
According Pyska, the answer is yes: “if anybody has been following along, you understand the guidance is confusing. And given that it is going to be summer, I think it is a good opportunity to maybe meet outdoors at Little Red Schoolhouse, in the patio area, and start with that through the summer months. It’ll be light long, and maybe we can start at 6 pm or a little earlier. It’s getting dark now, so that would be a reasonable time to end the meeting.
Pyska added that she was not sure about the indoor guidelines in terms of who is vaccinated, who is not vaccinated; people masking, not masking. “I really value that – to be able to have people calling in virtually,” she said.
A poll taken among the CAC members indicated that in person events will resume starting with the advisory board’s July meeting. Cobb Council meetings take place on the third Thursday of the month at 6 p.m. traditionally at Little Red School House 15780 Bottle Rock Rd. and via zoom and Facebook. More information can be found online at https://cobbareacouncil.org/
