County wants COVID tests at rodeo
Virtual commission meeting hears ideas on safety precautions
In a historic first, Bexar County commissioners met in video conference as a precaution against the coronavirus even as they discussed concerns that the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo could become a super-spreader event.
“We don’t want the county to be having the egg on our face that the Canelo fight had with the Alamodome,” County Commissioner Tommy Calvert said, referring to the Dec. 19 boxing match between Canelo Alvarez and Callum Smith.
That event drew 11,500 people to the Alamodome, prompting criticism across social media when videos were posted showing many not wearing masks and bunching together near the fighters.
“I know people who got positive (for the virus) at the Alamodome,” Calvert said. “I don’t want that to happen at a county facility.”
A scaled-down version of the rodeo is set for Feb. 11-28, with rodeo performances planned in the county-owned Freeman Coliseum. They’re expecting up to 4,000 people at the rodeo events, about half the capacity. Events normally are held next door at the larger AT&T Center.
Rodeo officials have formed a health advisory committee and plan to use social distancing, face-covering requirements and temperature screening to protect everyone from the spread of the virus. The carnival was canceled.
Tuesday, Calvert suggested the county help pay for setting up tents for rapid-testing stations outside the coliseum as an extra precaution, perhaps by taking some of the $1.4 million that had been proposed for increasing the county’s grant program for bars
and restaurants adversely affected by the pandemic.
Fellow commissioners were leaning toward the idea, but the issue was the source of the money.
Commissioner Trish Deberry agreed on a need for rapid testing at the rodeo, but said she didn’t want to divert money from small businesses that have been financially devastated by the virus.
“I have a big concern about taking money away from this, because it means, although we’re trying to provide safety out at the rodeo, we’re taking money away from small business,” Deberry said.
In the end, the county leaders committed to taking steps to ensure the rodeo doesn’t become a COVID-19 spreader event but opted to decide on the details at the next Commissioners Court meeting, set for Feb. 9.
Calvert was critical of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District, as he has been in the past, saying health inspectors left the fight early, and were not ensuring cleanliness as required, according to accounts from food vendors who were there.
Commissioner Rebeca Clay-flores, who recently resigned her post as special projects manager at Metro Health, where she worked for five years, alluded to problems at the agency, which provides services throughout the county.
“There’s incompetent leadership at Metro Health, which of course dwindles down. But I think that’s a whole other level of conversation that we need to have,” Clay-flores said.
Clay-flores has declined to discuss the problems she has said exist at Metro Health.
Tuesday’s virtual meeting was the first time commissioners have had a meeting by remote. While other government entities have stopped meeting in person in favor of safe remote proceedings, the Commissioners Court continued to hold its regular meetings in the Doubleheight Courtroom throughout the pandemic, using face-covering requirements, social distancing and other precautions.
Calvert tested positive for COVID-19 on Jan. 15, but appeared healthy on the screen Tuesday. A staff member said Calvert recently tested negative for COVID and is “doing well on the mend.”
Monica Ramos, public information officer with the county, said the virtual meeting was held as a precautionary measure.
“It really hit home,” she said, when Calvert tested positive three days after the court’s first meeting of 2021.
Commissioners will continue meeting online until public health data related to COVID-19 shows significant improvement, Ramos said.
In other action Tuesday, commissioners approved the $1.4 million increase in the grant program. Administered through nonprofit Liftfund, the program has grown from its original $4 million to $6.4 million after Tuesday’s vote.
Commissioners also approved, as alternatives to incarceration in jail, a $2.2 million contract with the Center for Health Care Services for mental health and support services, and a $1.3 million agreement with San Antonio Lifetime Recovery, which runs a 60-bed substance abuse facility on county land on the South Side.
The allocation to CHCS was similar to previous budgeted amounts in fiscal 2019 and 2020 for the county’s community reintegration program, mental health court and assisted outpatient program. The three programs served 254 individuals in 2019 and 274 in 2020.
Commissioners, each noting encampments of homeless people in their precincts, said they hope the ongoing mental health programs, combined with economic development and affordable housing strategies, will help to reduce homelessness and human trafficking.
“I think we do have to think of a new approach to how we address these issues. We know that a significant number of our homeless suffer from some kind of mental illness,” Rodriguez said. “We’re not going to criminalize homelessness…but there’s a gap there, it seems like, between getting them off the street and putting them in jail.”
Ultimately, the county should aim for “getting them into some service that’s going to create an infrastructure for them to turn around their lives and get into some kind of stabilized housing,” Rodriguez added.
Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said the county has “made a lot of headway” on mental health treatment in the past 20 years, yet still has work to do on a “major issue” that has been brought to the fore by the pandemic. About 85 percent of homeless and transient individuals have a drug or mental health problem “or a combination of both,” he said.
Also approved Tuesday were a $1 million grant agreement with Say Sí, following up on a 2019 commitment, for construction of a West Side campus for the youth-oriented nonprofit and expansion of its community arts and tuition-free programming and a $75,000 general fund allocation to establish wireless internet service at a new, privately funded multimillion-dollar campus that Girls Inc. is developing off Basse Road.
Girls Inc., a nonprofit that works with girls ages 6 to 18, will have a branch of the county’s Bexar Bibliotech digital library system, branded as “Bibliotech Niña,” with an emphasis on works by female authors.
“We don’t want the county to be having the egg on our face that the Canelo fight had with the Alamodome.”
County Commissioner Tommy Calvert