Avondale Estates, GA — The Avondale Estates City Commission held its first meeting of the year via Zoom. The board will continue to meet virtually for the foreseeable future. On Wednesday night, the commissioners approved a resolution declaring that emergency conditions are present which necessitate meeting by Zoom.

The resolution will be in effect until it is either changed or repealed by the City Commission. A specific end date was not stated during the meeting or in the resolution.

Recently, the city suspended its back door sanitation collection. All residents and businesses should move their garbage containers to the curb on scheduled sanitation collection days. Along with that came the suspension of loose yard waste collection. The public works crews will pick up yard waste bags and containers will be picked up, but won’t pick up loose piles of leaves and sticks.

City Hall was additionally closed to the public and the municipal court has been suspended for the time being.

The public works department has gone back to staggered work crews and will be working at a lower capacity. City Manager Patrick Bryant said the staff have received many questions about the suspension of the back door sanitation collection.

“It’s because of the fact that in order to maintain sanitation pick up, which is a health and safety issue, we have to split our crews into two. So, each crew is working a day, so crew A works Monday, Wednesday, Friday and crew B works Tuesday, Thursday and then the next week it switches,” Bryant said. “We do this so that if we incur an outbreak of COVID in a singular crew, we still have another crew who can continue picking up solid waste from our residents. We know this isn’t ideal.”

For the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Avondale Estates managed not to have a single COVID-positive case among the city staff; however, that has not been the case since the beginning of the new year.

“We’ve had quite a few COVID positive [cases]. We’re doing our best to manage our way through that. I have already made the decision to continue these protocols through next week,” Bryant said.  “We are closely monitoring the case load in the state of Georgia. Much like the resumption of public in-person meetings, we will be monitoring that to resume full-service practices.”

He added the city recently invested in additional resources to help better control possible transmission through the city staff.

“We’re going to try our best to keep everything together, and I would ask for the residents and business owners of this community to bear with us through this process,” Bryant said.