Rearranging Joliet priorities with coronavirus

Just a little more than a week ago the biggest thing on the local news radar was the pending NorthPoint vote, and I thought I was forcing the issue a bit when I asked Joliet officials if the vote would be postponed by the growing coronavirus crisis.

The crisis kept growing fast, and here we are.

Now, we're not even supposed to leave our homes – except for essential functions.

As critical as the NorthPoint vote may have seemed a week ago, making plans for or against the Compass Business Park no longer seems like an essential function in life.

The Joliet City Council tabled a NorthPoint vote to its next regular meeting on April 7, but who can say whether that meeting even will be held?

As I write this column, the governor is reported to be preparing to order shelter-in-place procedures for Illinois.

Even emergency measures put in place by Joliet this week may be superseded by new developments.

Let's just look at the past week.

The Centers for Disease Control guidelines for public gatherings was a maximum of 250 when the NorthPoint public hearing was still scheduled to proceed. It was 50 when Joliet postponed the vote on Monday. It was down to 10 when the City Council met on Tuesday.

On Monday, the city also announced that late fees would be waived on water bills and extra fees on credit card payments would be applied to next month's bills to discourage people from coming to City Hall.

On Thursday, the city announced that City Hall would be closed to the public at the end of the week.

Also that day, the first death of a Will County resident attributed to coronavirus was announced.

The plan as of Thursday was for staff to continue coming to work at City Hall. So, people with city business can continue to call with questions.

But even staff working at City Hall was being deployed to avoid key employees and their potential replacements from contracting coronavirus.

"If one goes down, they all go down," Mayor Bob O'Dekirk said at a Thursday press conference when he announced the new working arrangements for certain groups of four among city staff.

"We do have some people working off-site for that reason," O'Dekirk said. "Some are working on-site. Some are working off-site. We don't have the in the same offices together. We don't have them working at the same time."

It's hard to see how a City Council meeting with a highly controversial issue could be convened under these circumstances.

Who knows what comes next?

I know I'm looking forward to the day when we can all fight with each other again in a crowded room at City Hall over whether or not NorthPoint should build the Compass Business Park.