Diligent planning and community adherence to recent public health orders has allowed Lyon County to weather the COVID-19 storm over the past year.
Lyon County Commission Chairman Rollie Martin, Wednesday’s Newsmaker guest, says when the pandemic began there was no playbook on how to handle the situation. As such, he says the county had to have a flexible mentality when addressing the pandemic.
That approach seems to be paying off as active cases are now into the double figures after being as high as 640 last fall. Martin says the development of the county’s Public Health order played a significant role in this positive trend.
Martin says the county’s budget has remained stable throughout the pandemic with the Countywide Sales Tax actually seeing a more than two percent increase over the past year. Martin says this development is both surprising and not when you consider that travel was essentially nonexistent meaning more dollars were being spent locally and the majority of local industries were deemed as essential allowing operations to continue.
The county’s most recent public health order extension came earlier this month and lifted the restrictions on local long-term care facilities that had been in place since the start of the pandemic. The order is set to expire on Apr. 8.
