Macon Reporter

Decatur Mayor Julie Moore Wolfe is evaluating what she thinks life will be like in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Things have already changed,” Wolfe told the Herald & Review. “They probably will continue to change and businesses are going to adapt, families are going to adapt. Things are going to be different than they were before."

Wolfe stresses that’s not to say things can’t be as good as they've been, just that it'll take everyone working together and recognizing what needs to be done to make that happen.

“It is going to take everybody working on this for a recovery,” she added. “But Decatur of tomorrow, and I would say post-COVID-19 because again I think we will be living with this for a long time, is just how do we deal with this on an on-going basis.

Wolfe added she is still amazed at the way life for so many changed in an instant.

“I don't think any of us expected it to be this bad or last this long,” she said. “It is like a switch flipped and it just wasn't like the recession more than 10 years ago. It was slow. Not terribly slow, but things happened in progression.”

As strange as things have been, Wolfe said the rules keep on changing, especially when it comes to how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said Americans should combat it.  

“It's evolving as we are learning more and more about this virus,” she said. “That's OK. We can adapt to change. But it's trying to find the consistency and how do we get through this phase and onto the next phase. It's been something that none of us will ever forget."

Wolfe said the reaction of the people of Decatur to Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently moving to extend his stay-at-home order through the end of May has varied.

“It is a mixed bag of people saying 'you need to do more, you need to make sure that when people go into stores that they are wearing a mask,'” she said. “Then you've got the other side saying, 'Come on, we've got to open this up, we can't live like this, we need to keep going.'”

Going forward, Wolfe said she worries about what the losses in revenue will ultimately mean for Decatur.

“Government, especially city government, is people,” she said. “It is people performing services for the public. Well, we don't have a lot of places to cut. Yeah, we can postpone buying (police) cars, but we did that during the recession and that put us in a world of hurt.”

Wolfe said she was happy to see Pritzker’s Restore Illinois plan take more of a regional approach to reopening the economy.

“I think that we are in a lot better shape than if we were going to be doing it as a whole because Chicago is going to have a lot worse situation than we are down here,” she said. “It gives us an opportunity to, as a region, to start opening businesses and activities and that sort of thing once we hit a certain point.”

As of June 20, Illinois reported 136,104 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, including 6,625 deaths. Macon County has had just 218 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

In the end, Wolfe said the only way forward is to allow people to safely return to work and their businesses.

“All of our tax revenues are really based on people going to work and spending money and buying things — sales tax revenue,” she said. “If nobody is doing that, then there is no money coming in from state government, so we can't take care of the things that we need to take care of.”