As the state of Alaska urges people to make sacrifices to slow the rapid spread of COVID-19, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s director of communications and community outreach told friends and family to gather and party.
“Monday night, go to your favorite bar and party like it’s New Year’s Eve,” Dunleavy outreach director Dave Stieren wrote Thursday on his personal Facebook page. “Dress up. Uber. Whatever. Do it.”
The mixed messages highlight an ongoing contrast between local and state approaches to preventing the spread of the coronavirus, and even the public statements of state government versus the private actions of state leaders.
State officials did not respond to repeated requests for an interview regarding Stieren’s posts. On Monday, Dunleavy spokesman Jeff Turner said in a statement that “Dave Stieren’s comments were made on his personal social media accounts and are his own personal opinions. Those comments do not reflect the policies of the Dunleavy administration regarding COVID-19.”
Turner did not answer a list of questions, including why the public should see Stieren’s Facebook posts as severed from his role as communications director.
Stieren’s post came a day after Anchorage Acting Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson announced that she planned to close bars and restaurants to indoor service on Tuesday in hopes of slowing the spread of the coronavirus.
On Nov. 24, the state reported a record 13 deaths and on Nov. 25 recorded the second-highest single-day case count up to that point. A total of 120 Alaskans with COVID-19 have died. Alaska health department officials say the true number of cases may be higher as the influx of new cases has overwhelmed the ability to update the database in a timely fashion.
Finding the balance between prioritizing public safety and upholding civil liberties has become a difficult task for politicians in Alaska and nationwide. Former Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz’s four-week shutdown of bars and restaurants in August spurred upheaval as groups protested him near-weekly at Assembly meetings, calling him fascist and a dictator.
This fall, COVID-19 hit new heights, getting dire enough that on Nov. 12, Gov. Mike Dunleavy used the state emergency alert system to call on Alaskans to help contain the virus, which was spreading at “unprecedented” rates. Dunleavy said that if too many people performing critical jobs — such as trauma nurses, police officers and paramedics — get the virus, it could impede response to emergencies in Alaska.
Dunleavy said the next few weeks were “critical” and called on local governments to take action to protect their workforce and communities. He asked that people celebrate the holidays differently this year and return to the mindset Alaskans had in the spring, when the state ordered businesses to close due to the virus.
“I’m going to ask Alaskans to sacrifice a little more by changing your daily routines,” Dunleavy said.
Dunleavy has resisted imposing a statewide mask mandate or closing businesses down a second time. He has said he favors local governments deciding what works for them.
Stieren at some point edited his recent Facebook post to add a line saying, “Or pay a tab that you’d have IF you would go out.” He also posted to Facebook that Quinn-Davidson’s order would cause panic, an increase in cases and the death of the Anchorage economy.
He then posted to the Hideaway Club’s Facebook page, saying, “Since the Mayor is killing us, New Year’s Eve Party Monday the 30th at the Hideaway? The answer, of course, is yes.”
A city spokeswoman did not immediately provide a response to questions. Stieren did not respond to questions or interview requests.
His posts quickly gained traction on social media, where people — many of whom are critical of Dunleavy and his administration — attacked his comments.
Stieren, who in early March referred to the coronavirus on social media as the “beer virus,” on Thursday responded to the outcry with a tweet of his own. “Checking screen shots of my Facebook on Twitter,” he wrote, posting a gif of actor Ray Liotta laughing hysterically in a scene from the movie “Goodfellas.”
When the state health department on Friday held a media briefing where public health officials discussed the state’s inability to keep up with soaring coronavirus cases, a department spokesman, Clinton Bennett, refused to answer questions about Stieren’s remarks and how they compare to the state’s public health messaging.
“You are asking about a governor’s office employee and his personal social media account,” Bennett said. “I would recommend reaching out to them, or reaching out to him specifically for that.”
Stieren is a former conservative talk show host for KFQD in Anchorage, and in 2019 was hired as communications and community outreach director at a salary of $135,000.
At the time of his hiring, Dunleavy said, “Mr. Stieren will serve as the bridge between Alaskans and this administration. He will be an effective combination of communication and outreach.”
The state has reported 31,323 cases among Alaskans so far, resulting in 710 resident hospitalizations. Deaths, hospitalizations and case rates have increasingly risen since July, and most of the state is at a “high alert” level. On Monday, Alaska’s seven-day average per capita case rate was the eighth-highest in the nation.
The first time Tom Thibodeau opened a debut training camp was 10 years ago, and he knew exactly what he would be walking into on Sept. 27, 2010, at the Berto Center in Deerfield, Ill.
Waiting for him inside that gymnasium was Derrick Rose, 21, who across the next six months would blossom into the NBA’s Most Valuable Player. So was Joakim Noah, 24, on the verge of starting a five-year stretch in which he would average a double-double and be one of the NBA’s best defenders. So was Luol Deng, 24, already a five-year veteran and a reliable scorer.
“This is a good team,” Thibodeau said on the eve of training camp — oddly, Thibodeau was allowed, encouraged even, to express public thoughts in free-speech Chicago — “and I think we all know we have the capacity to get much better if we can learn to work together.”
The second time Tom Thibodeau opened a debut training camp was six years later, and he knew exactly what he would be walking into on Sept. 26, 2010, at the Mayo Clinic Square Training Facility in Minneapolis.
Waiting for him inside that gymnasium was Karl-Anthony Townes, 21, the reigning NBA Rookie of the Year who was about to become a top-10 player. So was Andrew Wiggins, also 21, who’d won the same award the year before. So was Zach LaVine, himself only 21, on the verge of becoming one of the league’s most explosive offensive weapons, good enough to be traded for Jimmy Butler.
“I think any coach would be excited to have those kinds of pieces to work with,” Thibodeau said on the eve of training camp — oddly, Thibodeau was allowed, encouraged even, to express public thoughts in free-speech Minnesota — “and I can’t wait to get to work with these guys, see what we can become.”
Tom ThibodeauGetty Images
Thibodeau’s third debut training camp will be Tuesday, and we must take it on faith that he knows exactly what he will be walking into at the Knicks’ practice facility in Westchester County because since he last uttered a public word during September minicamps. he has either been subjected to an absurd Knicks gag order or had his voice box surgically removed.
So we can really only presume what he thinks about the players who will be awaiting him inside his gymnasium in Tarrytown.
We can assume he is excited about having the chance to coach Obi Toppin and Immanuel Quickley from the very start of their careers; we can guess he accepts as a genuine challenge maximizing the tantalizing skills of RJ Barrett and Mitchell Robinson; we can suppose he will accept the puzzles of Kevin Knox and Frank Ntilikina, trying to will them to acceptable professional standards; we can imagine he will lean heavily on Julius Randle (19.5 points, 9.7 rebounds per game last season), the Knicks’ lone veteran with any kind of professional pedigree.
Thibodeau surely understands that the challenge that awaits him here is far different than the ones greeting him in Chicago — which he elevated from 41 to 62 wins in one year — and in Minnesota — 29 to 47 in two — and that he must have a far more patient approach than he’s ever had before. Surely he convinced Leon Rose that he’s capable of that.
And that’s good. Because right now it is Thibodeau who is, by far, the most accomplished Knick, and that is never a good sign for a basketball team. Great coaches become great because there is more relevant greatness in the room, excellent players who can turn abstract X’s and O’s into wondrous and wonderful basketball art on the floor. The Knicks are a long way away from art, although in recent years they have resembled some of the stuff Jackson Pollock might’ve tossed aside as rough drafts.
Still, he is a start. He is a building block. It is on him to preach professionalism and craft the seedlings of promise here, on him to infuse the kids with a sense of belonging and the older guys with a sense of purpose. Gifted coaches can carry the day in high school, and they can create “systems” that succeed each year in college. In the NBA, by definition, they must be silent partners in a team’s success. The Knicks don’t have Derrick Rose on their roster, don’t have Karl-Anthony Townes, not now, not yet.
For now, they have a coach who is also, for better or worse, their star attraction. It is on him to start the process where he can slowly fade to the background, pull the strings from afar, where the focus can be on the guys on the court. Someday, perhaps. Just not this day. Not now. Not yet.
The team at S&P Dow Jones Indices, after seeking feedback from the investment community, has determined the stock will be added in one shot or "at its full float-adjusted market capitalization weight effective prior to the open of trading on Monday, December 21, 2020" the firm disclosed late Monday.
Adding, "in its decision, S&P DJI considered the wide range of responses it received, as well as, among other factors, the expected liquidity of Tesla and the market’s ability to accommodate significant trading volumes on this date."
CEO Elon Musk has shepherded the electric auto maker’s market cap to a category of its own creating a conundrum for the team that oversees what is considered the broadest measure of the stock market.
When Tesla was tapped for inclusion in mid-November, it was noted the stock would be “one of the largest weight additions to the S&P 500 in the last decade, and consequently will generate one of the largest funding trades in S&P 500 history" said the firm.
Had S&P Dow Jones Indices decided to break up the inclusion into "tranches" it would have been the first time in history it would have been done in parts.
Musk's company is now bigger than Toyota, General Motors and Ford, despite being a much younger organization and an early struggle with maintaining profitability.
TESLA TOPPLES RIVALS
Tesla: $538B
Toyota: $219B
GM: $62.7B
Ford: $35.4B
Source: Thomson Financial
S&P will disclose the company Tesla will replace after the close of trading on Dec. 11.
Some will be available online weeks earlier; the schedule depends on your status and your branch of service. For those who receive their tax statements by mail, those forms will be mailed no later than Jan. 31.
Military retirees will have access to their retiree 1099R statements on myPay starting Dec. 15.
As for tax statements on myPay for active duty and members of the Reserve components:
• Reserve Army, Navy, Air Force W-2: Jan. 8
• Active duty and Reserve Marine Corps W-2: Jan. 13
• Active duty Army, Navy, Air Force W-2: Jan. 25
Tax statements for annuitants will be ready on myPay by Dec. 19; federal civilian employees serviced by DFAS will have access to their W-2 statements by Jan. 20.
Sign up for the Pay and Benefits Report
Stay up-to-date on changing military benefits and pay
Starting in January, DFAS customer service phone numbers will provide prompts for those who need tax statements reissued. DFAS also provides for online requests through its askDFAS feature. Click on “Contact Us” at the top of the myPay site for more information. Phone and online requests are answered within seven to 10 business days with printed and mailed documents.
While you can start gathering your documents and working on your tax returns, you can’t file the returns immediately. The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t start accepting tax returns generally until late January. That start date hasn’t yet been announced, but it should be announced in early January.
Service members and their families have options for free tax preparation, through on-base tax centers with trained, certified volunteers who also have training in military-specific tax questions. In addition, Military OneSource offers free MilTax Preparation and e-Filing software starting in mid-January. Military tax consultants are also available year-round through Military OneSource for those with questions.
A study published by Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, and The Washington Post’s interpretation of it, shows the dangers of trying to analyze change, in this case, the transition from traditional teaching to online delivery, prompted by the pandemic. According to the study, there was an 83% increase in the number of high school and college students who failed at least two subjects, rising from 6% to 11%.
To try to extrapolate from such results some kind of problem with online versus face-to-face education is misleading at best, but is one of the most common symptoms of resistance to change: to conclude that after an isolated test, a new method does not work as well as the previous one.
Online teaching, as delivered during the pandemic, is obviously not as good as face-to-face teaching. Anything else would be a miracle: it was carried out under emergency conditions, in which practically any type of innovation in methodology was rejected, and with students and teachers typically lacking in equipment and training. Where have the worst results been produced? In children whose temperament, socioeconomic level or family situation made it difficult for them to perform adequately academically. And that in Virginia… if we had included in the study children in Indonesia or India, who have to walk to certain places or even climb trees to get cellular connectivity, the results would have been, surely, even more conclusive.
We are faced with a common problem: that technology is magic and will automatically improve results by itself, simply by doing the same thing as before. If we really want to develop online teaching, using computers to actually replace classrooms, rather than a mere substitute at times of crisis, we will have to go about things very differently. Do students hate online classes? Yes, when what they are being taught is not adapted properly, and is instead merely a reproduction of the classroom and involves listening to a person talking to a camera for an hour. Under these conditions, learning is not just hard work, so is staying awake. That said, not all children hate it: for some, it works very well.
The future of online learning involves more than simply doing the same thing we do in a face-to-face class, mainly because it is superior in terms of possibilities. But it means creating content adapted to the medium that takes advantage of those possibilities, creating interactive models that avoid prolonged unidirectional delivery, real-time analytics that evaluate attitude and progress, and even devices that allow the development of more immersive environments and reduce distraction. We will have to create new tools, which are not necessarily an extension of the traditional ones, and develop literacy in those tools that will allow all those involved, both students and teachers, to handle them with total ease (it really isn’t rocket science: technology makes the tools increasingly easier to use).
Developing online teaching implies re-education in the use of technology, unlearning mindset that assume that screens are not for in-depth reading, but a quick scroll from the headline to the end of the paragraph. This will mean learning how to make the most out of digital channels, creating new methodologies and communication approaches, and not recreating on a screen what we used to do in a class.
The possibilities of the online medium are, by its nature, much greater than those of a face-to-face class, and anybody who doesn’t understand this will never be able to take advantage of them. Better access to information, more ways to create attractive formats, to personalize them, to generate involvement, to click on an opinion or to evaluate performance. Even the social aspect of learning can be enhanced.
I have said it many times: if you want to teach online properly, teachers have to do much more work than in a face-to-face session. A face-to-face class is prepared, an online class is produced. If we simply sit in front of the webcam and start talking, or if we just post essay titles by email, we are not giving online class: as the saying goes, if you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail. It’s not the fault of the online medium.
Currently, the BMW X7 is powered by a standard 3.0-liter turbocharged inline-six with 335 horsepower and 330 lb-ft of torque, a twin-turbocharged V8 with 456 hp and 479 lb-ft, and the same engine with an increased power output of 523 hp and 553 lb-ft in the M50i. The X7 starts with an MSRP of $74,900. BMW is yet to announce the debut of the updated model, but don't expect to see it in 2020.
Since winning the election, Biden has made moves to carry out his campaign promise of building an administration that looks like and reflects the diversity of America. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris has already shattered a monumental barrier by becoming the first woman elected Vice President.
Here are other people who would be historic firsts:
First Black Deputy Secretary of the Treasury
Adewale "Wally" Adeyemo
Adeyemo currently serves as the president of the Obama Foundation. Adeyemo served during the Obama administration as the President's senior international economic adviser, and also served as deputy national security adviser, deputy director of the National Economic Council, the first chief of staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and senior adviser and deputy chief of staff at the Department of the Treasury.
First Hispanic American White House Social Secretary
Carlos Elizondo
Elizondo was a special assistant to the president and social secretary to the Bidens for all eight years of the Obama administration. He will be the first Hispanic American appointed to this position. During the Clinton administration, Elizondo served in both the White House and in the Office of the US Chief of Protocol.
First woman to lead the US intelligence community
Avril Haines
Haines would become the first woman to serve as director of national intelligence. Haines served as assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama. She chaired the National Security Council's Deputies Committee, which is responsible for formulating the administration's national security and foreign policy. Haines previously served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Avril was also legal adviser to the NSC. She served as deputy chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Biden served as chairman.
First Latino and immigrant as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas
Mayorkas would be the first Latino and immigrant as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security if confirmed by the Senate. He was deputy secretary of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, and served as the director of the Department of Homeland Security's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. While at USCIS, Mayorkas oversaw the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which was an executive action under Obama that protected young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation. President Donald Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2017 but was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court from doing so.
First woman of color to chair the Council of Economic Advisers
Cecilia Rouse
Rouse would be the first woman of color to chair the Council of Economic Advisers if confirmed by the Senate. Rouse has served as the dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, as well as a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. Rouse previously served as a member of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. She also worked at the National Economic Council in the Clinton administration as a special assistant to the president.
First woman of color and first South Asian American as Director of the Office of Management and Budget
Neera Tanden
Tanden would be the first woman of color and first South Asian American to become director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden is the CEO and president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, and is the CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Tanden previously served in the Obama and Clinton administrations. She was a senior adviser for health reform at the US Department of Health and Human Services, and also served as the director of domestic policy for the Obama campaign. She was the policy director for Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign, and worked in Clinton's Senate office.
First woman as Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen
Yellen would make history as the first woman to serve as Treasury secretary. Yellen already made history as the first woman to have chaired the Federal Reserve, and did so from 2014 to 2018. She previously served for four years as the vice chair of the board, and president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for four years prior to that. Yellen was also chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999.
While there's support from both Republicans and Democrats for sending out another round of payments, it's unlikely Americans will get a second round of stimulus checks before the end of the year -- and lawmakers have been unable to come to any agreement on a broader economic aid package.
Congress returns to Washington this week focused on passing a broader spending bill by December 11 to avert a partial government shutdown, though it's possible that some relief programs could be added to such a broader spending bill.
If anything, those provisions may extend programs set to expire on December 31 -- including expanded unemployment benefits, an eviction moratorium and a pause on student loan payments.
Disagreements over new checks
There's been little talk from lawmakers of a second round of stimulus checks since the summer. The most recent stimulus package proposal put forth by Republicans, who currently control the Senate, didn't include money for direct payments.
President-elect Joe Biden supports a $3 trillion Democratic-backed bill that passed the House in May, which provided for a second round of checks. But that package has little chance of passing Congress unless Democrats gain control of the Senate by winning both runoff Senate races in Georgia set for January 5.
More than 160 million Americans received stimulus payments earlier in the year, after Congress approved a $2 trillion aid package in March. They helped keep many families out of poverty as millions of people lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
But for many, that $1,200 check has already been spent. Now, as coronavirus cases surge, a group of more than 120 economists are urging lawmakers to approve another round of checks, arguing that they are "one of the quickest, most equitable, and most effective ways to get families and the economy back on track."
Congress has already allowed some relief programs to expire, like the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses and the $600 federal boost to weekly unemployment benefits.
But others end this month. If Congress adds any stimulus to the general spending bill, they may prioritize pushing back those deadlines.
Expanded unemployment benefits
As part of the historic broadening of jobless benefits under the CARES Act, lawmakers created three programs to help out-of-work Americans. While the $600 payment enhancement lasted only four months, the other two run through the week ending December 26, which is the last weekend of the year.
One of them, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, allows independent contractors, the self-employed and gig workers to qualify for payments. It also opens up the program to those who can't work because of the pandemic, including if they or family members are ill or quarantining or if their children's schools are closed.
The other program, called Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, provides an additional 13 weeks of federally paid benefits to those who run out of state payments, which typically last 26 weeks.
Student loan payment pause
In March, the US government automatically suspended payments and waived interest on federal student loans. That meant millions of borrowers could skip making their monthly payments without their balances getting any bigger.
Initially, the relief -- which was included in the $2 trillion congressional stimulus package -- was set to expire at the end of September. But President Donald Trump later moved the date to December 31 by an executive action.
If neither Trump or Congress acts to push the deadline back, millions of student loan payments will come due a couple of weeks before Biden takes office on January 20. Even if Biden reinstates the pause retroactively, it could create confusion for borrowers as well as a mess for student loan processors, who aren't built to suddenly stop or start payment.
Eviction protection
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order that went into effect in September temporarily halted evictions through the end of the year. It applies to renters who meet certain income requirements, have experienced significant losses of income and have made their best efforts to find rental assistance and pay their rent.
Since the order does not cancel or freeze rent, all of a tenant's back rent will be due January 1 if the moratorium is allowed to expire. Without rent relief or an extension of the protection, many struggling renters will again face eviction.
An eviction moratorium established by Congress in March shielded only tenants who receive federal assistance or live in rental properties with federally backed financing. That protection lapsed over the summer.
Paid family leave
Earlier in the year, lawmakers expanded paid family leave benefits for many workers who become ill or are caring for someone else.
It was limited to employees of companies with fewer than 500 workers but provided up to two weeks of paid sick leave and an additional 10 weeks of paid expanded family leave for parents who need to care for children whose schools closed.
However, the payments are capped, and small businesses can apply for waivers from the provisions affecting workers whose children's schools have shut down.
Those benefits also are set to expire on December 31.
CNN's Tami Luhby and Lauren Fox contributed reporting.
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Don't expect a second stimulus check this year. Here's what Congress is talking about instead - CNN
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Early bitcoin investors and founders of crypto-exchange Gemini, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, see bitcoin gaining more than 25 times its current value as more investors adopt the cryptocurrency as an inflation hedge.
"We think it will be the best performing asset of the current decade," Tyler Winklevoss said in an interview with Seema Mody on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Monday.
"Our thesis is that Bitcoin is gold 2.0 and it will disrupt gold. If it does that it has to have a market cap of $9 trillion. So we think bitcoin could price one day at $500,000 a bitcoin. So at $18,000 bitcoin it's a hold or if you don't have any its a buy opportunity because we think there's a 25x from here," Tyler expounded.
The price of Bitcoin rose 5% on Monday to top $19,000 as investors continue to pile back into the cryptocurrency in 2020. The price of bitcoin was trading around $19,022, according to data from industry site CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency first climbed near the $20,000 mark in December of 2017. It collapsed soon after, and had not recovered to the $18,000 level until recent weeks.
The asset is up over 160% this year with interest from big-name investors such as Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller. Fintech giants Square and PayPal have lowered the barrier for entry into the asset.
"I think a lot of it is investors coming in and realizing that inflation, there's a specter of inflation out there and how do you protect against that? I think there's not much of a debate about all the debt that's increased in the U.S., the money printing, so how do you defend against that?" Cameron Winklevoss added. "I think a lot of people are starting to realize that bitcoin is really the best defense and offers the opportunity for an asymmetric return of something like 25 to 40x from here. I don't think there's an asset in the universe that can credibly offer that kind of potential and protect against inflation."
The Winklevoss twins said gold has historically been the classic hedge, but bitcoin is moving in as gold 2.0.
"It doesn't really need to be a great medium of exchange, it just needs to be better than gold and it's better across the board. So bitcoin, the supply is fixed at 21 million. Gold is scarce. Bitcoin's software it can be sent through the internet, like email, gold is hardware and its hard to transport," Cameron Winklevoss said.
The total number of bitcoins that will ever be produced is capped at 21 million. The digital asset underwent a key technical event in the spring known as the "halving," which saw the amount of bitcoins rewarded to the so-called "miners" who add bitcoin transactions to its public ledger get cut in half.
The Winklevoss twins are not concerned about regulation headwinds for the digital asset.
"Back in 2013, there was a question about whether bitcoin was going to be outlawed. We're way passed that. We believed in healthy, thoughtful regulation. We don't see that not continuing. We think bitcoin's here to stay, we think thoughtful regulation around it in the U.S. and other sophisticated jurisdictions is also here to stay," Tyler Winklevoss said.
"Bitcoin is still the best performing asset of the year, even compared to equities," he added.
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NORTH LAWNDALE — The city’s planning department unveiled possibilities for what the forthcoming Ogden Commons development could look like at a recent North Lawndale community meeting.
Ogden Commons, to be built in the 2600-2700 blocks of West Ogden Avenue, is a core piece of the North Lawndale Quality-of-Life Plan, a community-driven blueprint for addressing key issues like health disparities and public safety. The development will have affordable housing, public art, restaurants, retail space and a one-stop-shop outpatient medical center.
Neighbors were able to review three concept designs for the $200 million multi-use development at the final North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council neighborhood meeting of the year. The project is slated to be completed by 2026, and the final design and offerings of the project will depend on the outcome of a request for proposal the city will launch in the coming weeks.
The designs are not intended to represent the final layout of the Ogden Commons project, but rather to invite residents to imagine possibilities for the development and offer feedback, said Brian Hacker, a coordinating planner with the city’s planning department.
“We are going to have the community involved in the evaluation process. We want to, as much as possible, prioritize a project here that has community ownership,” Hacker said.
A lower-density design for Ogden Commons emphasizes ground-level retail.Provided
One design shows a widened streetscape to improve walkability along Ogden, with the development including a hotel, an affordable housing complex, a mixed-use office building and retail center. Other designs showed a lower-density development with an emphasis on public space.
“Whether it’s a performance space or pop-up retail, food trucks or things like that, we think a site like this should include a component where there’s an opportunity to activate it at the street level,” Hacker said.
A lower-density visualization of Ogden Commons that emphasizes street-level public space.Provided.
Residents at the meeting suggested Ogden Commons include amenities like a café and a business incubator since the neighborhood lacks gathering places and small businesses. But Hacker said the planning department is incorporating community feedback by trying to include space for retailers, grocers and other organizations that respond to the needs of residents.
“One thing that we have heard quite a bit is the lack of a grocery store here in the community,” Hacker said. “We’re putting forward in the request for proposal that these are the type of uses we want to see.”
The city is supporting the Ogden Commons development with tax increment financing funds, low-income housing tax credits and other public dollars aligned through the INVEST South/West initiative to support up to half of costs, Hacker said. Two businesses, Ja’ Grill and Steak ‘n Shake, have received Neighborhood Opportunity Fund grants to finance storefronts at the site.
About $7 million of the city’s federal CARES Act funding was directed toward the ambulatory center that will be an anchor for the development. The medical center will be run by Sinai Health System as a one-stop shop for outpatient care and wraparound services that address social issues behind health disparities in the area.
“This entire project addresses the holistic person. Not just the health care needs, but the mental and psychological needs and the quality of life as a whole,” hospital COO Airica Steed said.
The city wants Ogden Commons to be a commercially successful development that generates enough revenue to attract private support.
“We want people in North Lawndale to be able to walk down the block to get a cup of coffee, pick up some necessities, be able to go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant,” Hacker said. “We’re hoping a project like this can be catalytic … so those kinds of uses can be more common.”
Pascal Sabino is a Report for America corps member covering Austin, North Lawndale and Garfield Park for Block Club Chicago.
The nation was heading into winter with the threat of a new infectious disease from abroad causing widespread panic. Hospitals lacked proper protective gear and were struggling to contain outbreaks. And Donald Trump was using his Twitter account to attack Democratic officials over their handling of the virus and spread misinformation.
But this was 2014, not 2020. And the virus causing alarm around the globe was Ebola, not the coronavirus.
Six years ago, President Barack Obama and his administration feared the kind of calamitous situation the coronavirus has unfortunately caused. To help ensure that did not happen, Obama tapped a veteran Democratic operative, Ron Klain, to oversee the response to the outbreak in West Africa that had already made its way to the U.S.
Now Klain is on the verge of returning to the White House as chief of staff to President-elect Joe Biden as the country battles a raging pandemic far more deadly and pervasive than Ebola ever became. As one of the key architects of the incoming administration’s Covid-19 plan, Klain’s experience is already shaping how the next administration will respond.
“Klain’s Ebola work, in particular, has played into things hugely — starting back during the campaign with all our messaging and conversation about what to do,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who coordinated pandemic preparedness for the Health and Human Services Department during the Obama administration and served as a public health adviser to Biden’s campaign.
Starting back in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, Klain was part of a tight circle of longtime Biden allies briefing the then-candidate multiple times a week on the pandemic’s progress and advising the policy team as it put together plans on testing, contact tracing, production of protective equipment and preparations to distribute a vaccine. He also served as the public face for Biden’s strategy — standing before a whiteboard in a series of viral campaign videos, walking viewers through his criticisms of Trump’s pandemic response and explaining what Biden would do differently.
Klain is one of a number of people Biden has tapped for his administration whose views on battling a health crisis were shaped by what happened in 2014. At an event in Wilmington, Del. last week, Biden highlighted how his just-announced pick for Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, helped combat Ebola and Zika as part of the Obama administration. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, his pick for UN ambassador, “was our top State Department official in charge of Africa policy during the Ebola crisis,” Biden noted. And the former vice president praised Jake Sullivan, who served as his national security adviser during much of the Ebola outbreak, for “helping me develop our Covid-19 strategy.”
The coronavirus outbreak is different from Ebola in important ways. Covid-19, for instance, is spread much more easily — through tiny droplets that can hang in the air rather than direct contact with bodily fluids. And as Klain himself testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in February, “We know much less about coronavirus today than we did about Ebola in 2014.” But many of the public health, communication and government mobilization lessons Klain and his team learned then are not only applicable now; they’re also at the core of Biden’s plan for tackling the pandemic when he takes office in January.
Four, in particular, will be critical to the new president‘s — and the country’s — success in finally curbing the virus:
1. Managing the pandemic response is a full-time job.
Klain's experience coordinating the Ebola response taught him that managing a disease outbreak has to be full-time job and the person doing it has to be as close to the levers of power as possible — a model he'll bring to the Biden White House as they work to bring Covid-19 under control.
“What we learned in Ebola is that there are assets at the Defense Department, there are assets at the State Department, there are assets at Homeland Security, there are assets throughout HHS,” said Leslie Dach, the senior counselor to the secretary of Health and Human Services during the 2014 outbreak. “And we needed somebody at the White House to pull all that together.”
The lack of centralized coordination in the Trump administration, Klain said in an interview earlier this year, created “this rotating carousel of Covid coordinators” — with HHS Secretary Alex Azar, Vice President Mike Pence, coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, alternately taking control of different aspects of the pandemic and promoting competing messages and goals. All of them already had full-time jobs, Klain has noted, and none were empowered to pull together the diplomatic, economic, health and national security components of the response.
All that will change once Biden takes over, Klain pledged in his first TV appearance since being named chief of staff.
“He will have a Covid coordinator who works in the White House who has direct access to him and will be briefing him daily,” Klain told MSNBC. “The important thing is that that official will have a team of people he works with: someone coordinating vaccine distribution, someone coordinating fixing the supply chain problems we're having, someone coordinating the testing problems we were having so that we get this response where it needs to be.”
Biden’s team will soon announce who they want in this pivotal role, and is considering both Jeff Zients, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — both of whom were closely involved in the campaign‘s and transition’s Covid-19 plans.
2. Set appropriate expectations … and let the scientists do the talking.
As they’ve forged plans for tackling Covid-19 — including the rollout of a vaccine and strategies for getting more people to wear masks — Klain and the rest of Biden’s team have focused heavily on which officials should talk about the pandemic and how they should do so.
Drawing on his experience with Ebola, Klain has urged the team to put the career federal scientists who’ve been sidelined by the Trump administration front and center, in the belief that they can help persuade a skeptical and fatigued public to rally behind the measures needed to defeat the virus.
“Our approach on H1N1 and on Ebola was to have the messaging coming from the scientific experts,” Klain told POLITICO earlier this year. “[Biden’s] view then was that information should come from medical experts so it would be seen as neutral, expert-based advice and not shaped by political considerations.”
Still, Klain stressed, there are moments when “people need to hear from your president in terms of the progress of the disease.” And in those moments, leaders need to be careful to stick to hard facts, set realistic timelines, and manage expectations on everything from a vaccine to school reopenings.
“The reality is the reality. People are experiencing it,” he said. “Trying to tell them we don’t have a Covid problem is not going to work, because people are seeing it in their own communities.”
That’s why in his speeches on Covid on the campaign trail and as president-elect, Biden has taken pains to give sober assessments of the many months left to go before a vaccine is widely available — a sharp departure from Trump’s repeated declarations over the summer that the pandemic was “rounding the corner” and a vaccine would be out by Election Day.
It’s a lesson that Biden, Klain and others learned the hard way during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, when the Obama administration failed to meet its early promise to have 100 million vaccine doses ready by the start of flu season in October. Beset by manufacturing problems, as few as 11 million doses were available by mid-October, according to one report. And by the time production ramped up, demand for the vaccine had gone down.
Now, with vaccine hesitancy on the rise and the public deeply divided following the election, Biden adviser Jen Psaki said “the public communication portion of this” had been significantly influenced by those past experiences, with a focus on managing expectations.
“We are fully eyes-open that there needs to be a rebuilt trust in government and institutions and what is communicated to the American people, and that’s part of the discussion,” said Psaki, whom Biden has tapped to be his White House press secretary.
3. Hospitals need protective gear and federal support to handle a new disease.
Klain has said repeatedly that one of the darkest moments of the Ebola crisis came in late September 2014, when a Liberian national visiting family in the U.S. tested positive for the virus at a hospital in Dallas and two nurses subsequently became infected, setting off a wave of public hysteria and fears of a widespread outbreak.
“Confusion and a lack of preparation led to missteps when the first case of Ebola arrived in Dallas,” Klain told a House committee earlier this year.
A National Security Council report in 2016 went into greater detail, outlining the “oversights in personal protective equipment use, disinfection, the collection, transport, and disposal of hazardous waste, the provision of social services for those placed under quarantine, and post-event monitoring and travel restrictions for potentially exposed health workers” that characterized the Dallas scare.
Working with several different government agencies, Klain implemented plans to create a network of hospitals where health workers were trained and properly equipped to test for Ebola, treat infected patients and safely transport serious cases.
“Somebody who got sick could go into an assessment center and somebody there would quickly ascertain whether they had Ebola or not and would make sure that nobody else was infected while that process was going on,” said Dach, who worked with Klain on the hospital network plan in 2014 and now serves as chairman of the health advocacy group Protect Our Care. “It was a very rigorous process and Ron was very hands on, working with us at HHS.”
Some of the same shortages of protective gear and federal resources for medical workers have plagued the Covid-19 response, and Biden’s team has made eradicating these issues a top priority.
The president-elect told a group of front-line health care workers in a virtual meeting on Nov. 18 that he planned to use the Defense Production Act to produce enough masks, gloves and gowns to ensure that medical providers and other front-line workers are protected. He also said he would implement and enforce paid sick days to allow infected workers to recover, and push Congress to approve adequate funding for hospitals and state health departments.
“It’s not enough to praise you,” he told the group. “We have to protect you.”
4. A global pandemic demands a global response.
Biden’s pledge to rejoin the World Health Organization on his first day in office can be traced directly to what his team learned from the Ebola outbreak, when the success of protecting Americans from the disease depended on working with international bodies and heads of state to stamp out the virus where it originated.
“This is not just a domestic issue,” Psaki said Wednesday. “It’s also an international issue, and there needs to be coordination across the national security and domestic teams. ... Certainly, that was the case with Ebola.”
It’s the subject of some of the very first meetings the transition team is holding with federal agencies, Psaki added.
Dr. Celine Gounder, an epidemiologist who volunteered as an Ebola aid worker in Guinea in 2015 and is now serving as a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, said she expected that same philosophy to infuse the Biden administration’s vaccine distribution plans.
While Trump moved to cut off funding for the WHO’s vaccine development and distribution work and has pushed for Americans to be first in line for the shots — even though Pfizer’s vaccine was created by German scientists — Gounder says Biden’s views are shaped by an understanding that “we’re not an island.”
"If anything, March and April taught us that supply chains are not just in the U.S.," she said. "If we withhold access to vaccines, they may withhold access to other critical supplies — for example, gloves and masks and so on. We do have to work with others.”
Biden himself emphasized the parallel last week, in a statement pledging to reinvest in the Global Health Security Agenda that was first set up during the Obama administration and that has had its funding slashed under the Trump administration.
“Whether it’s Ebola or COVID-19, diseases do not respect borders, and the capacity to fight them must be strong, resilient, and accessible the world over,” Biden said in a statement.
End this pandemic, prevent the next one.
Despite some missteps that Klain and others have openly acknowledged, his and his team’s efforts in 2014 calmed the public panic and squashed the Ebola outbreak with only a single fatality on U.S. soil. Now, as he rejoins the White House, he faces a far more daunting challenge with Covid-19, which has killed more than 265,000 Americans and infected more than 13 million, with a widely available vaccine still months away. Still, those who worked with Klain on Ebola say they believe he can actually "turn the corner" on the pandemic the way Trump has been promising since March.
“I literally sleep easier at night knowing that Ron Klain will be part of the administration’s response,” former CDC Director Tom Frieden, who worked on the Ebola response, said in an interview.
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Biden’s chief of staff has battled pandemics before. Here's how he plans to beat this one. - POLITICO
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