Some aldermen called Thursday for Chicago’s City Hall to be closed to help slow the spread of coronavirus.
Residents crowded into City Council chambers Thursday along with more than a dozen aldermen for the Finance Committee meeting, coming into close contact with one another as health officials call for people to avoid close interaction to avoid spreading the COVID-19 virus to one another.
Meanwhile, the building’s lobby remains open to the public to walk through or conduct business in the city clerk’s office and other city departments.
The City Council is set to meet next Wednesday, and there are several council committee meetings scheduled each day in the run-up to that.
“I think we need to be proactive about this,” said Far Southeast Side Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, 10th. “We can’t stop it from coming. It’s already here. Now what we have to do is worry about just slowing it down. And I think that we need to close City Hall for two weeks, close our offices, maybe just a skeleton crew, two people, encourage people to make requests via the phone so we’re not transmitting.”
Sign up for The Spin to get the top stories in politics delivered to your inbox weekday afternoons.
Northwest Side Ald. Felix Cardona, 31st, said City Hall should shutter for a deep cleaning. “I know that, how things are going, we don’t know who’s carrying it,” Cardona said. “So I think we probably should shut down the building temporarily, clean, disinfect.”
But Health Committee Chair Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, said “we’re not there yet, to a complete shutdown.”
“(The Chicago Department of Public Health), the mayor’s office will meet today again, and if we come to that decision, that’s the decision we’ll make,” Cardenas said. “I think we want to be cautious. We want to avoid large crowds, obviously. We asked all the seniors not to come down. But to some extent, government has to run. Some of the things we have to do have to get done.”
State lawmakers have postponed their spring session, and the U.S. Capitol was closed to the public Thursday.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday canceled the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parades, but she has not followed the lead of officials in San Francisco and Washington state in banning larger public gatherings.
Mayoral spokesman Patrick Mullane said the administration would meet with aldermen later Thursday to figure out whether to proceed with committee meetings and the council meeting.
Twitter @_johnbyrne
