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Broken Arrow City Councilor Johnnie Parks (left), Vice Mayor Scott Eudey, City Manager Michael Spurgeon, Mayor Craig Thurmond and Councilor Debra Wimpee participate in a council meeting Tuesday night at the Stoney Creek Hotel and Conference Center. The meeting was held there to allow for greater social distancing.
The Broken Arrow City Council had a mask mandate on its agenda for the first time Tuesday night, but it didn’t even come up for a vote.
Over the course of more than four hours on the topic of masks, councilors first heard an onslaught of misinformation from outspoken anti-mask Dr. James Meehan, who a Connecticut judge ruled last fall was not qualified to serve as an expert witness in a lawsuit against school mask-wearing rules. They also heard from medical informatics expert Dr. David Kendrick, who showed them places in the state with mask mandates have new case rates 50% and death rates 67% lower than those without.
Broken Arrow City Council
It was a familiar scene at Tuesday s Broken Arrow City Council meeting: Councilor Johnnie Parks expressed interest in exploring a mask mandate to address rising rates of COVID-19, but the suggestion did not garner enthusiasm from the majority of either his colleagues or public commenters. We ve looked at this for several months now and our rates keep increasing. I think that we need to have it on the next city council meeting as a decision item, Parks said of either a mask mandate or recommendation. With the opportunity, maybe, to do something different as leaders in the community, to see if there s some way we can help this.