Commerce & Health: We Can Do Both. Jim Desmond talks to Armstrong & Getty

a city council member, a regional transportation committee guy. He's a U. S. Navy veteran, an electrical engineer from San Diego State University, and he thinks the state of cal Unicornia needs to set more realized sticks standards for counties to open up and get people back to work and feeding themselves. Jim Desmond joins us. Now, Jim, how are you, sir? Hey, Jonak and Joe great, Thanks for having me. Oh it's

our pleasure. So listen. As a guy in pretty good touch with the business community, I assume you, like us, believe smart people can open up their businesses in smart ways and start feeding themselves again. Well perhaps lutely. I mean it's it's become a choice in California of open for businesses or playing it safe and quite frankly, we

can do both. I mean, we've already proven it with the essential businesses being open and getting people to grocery stores in the big box stores, and and our numbers went down, the trends went down, you know, the curve

was flattened while we had essential businesses open. And so we want to be able to continue those same guidelines that those essential businesses are following and allow some of the non essential businesses that same opportunity so they can start to eat their families and and give pay chance to people. We've got over twenty five percent unemployment in San Diego County. It's it's crazy that we're just you know, and then the governor puts in unattainable goals, that's going

to stagnate. To see even further. So, we're talking about a restaurant in Colorado earlier that opened up over the weekend UH for Mother's Day and got a lot of national attention, and there people were lined up around the block to go eat and everything like that, and people were cheering and it was a happy story. And then they got hit with the giant fine yesterday UH for disobeying the orders. Had their license yanked to So what would the current situation be if somebody tried to open

in your area right now? Well, right now, what we're looking at is in a couple of different counties, Uba in Sutter County in northern California. You know, they had they tried to do the same thing to start opening up businesses, and then the governor the copy of his letter he sent to them, the Governor's office said hey, if you know we're gonna start pulling your ABC licenses, we can start pulling your cosmetology licenses if you have a search, you know, we will no longer you know,

support you or give you money for that effort. So basically he's holding the taxpayers dollars hostages hostage along with the licensed professional licenses and things like that that the state grants. So he's already done that and put that threat out to ubas, Uba and Sutter Counties here in California. But what he did was, you know, we we you know, get too deep into it. But he not only moved

the goal close and he tore him down. He you know, he said, we can't have any COVID related deaths in San Diego County or any County for for for fourteen consecutive days before we can move any forward, not a single one COVID read two weeks step and we have. We've had a hundred and seventy five COVID related deaths in San Diego County. Six of those were purely COVID deaths. Well, and correct me if I'm wrong. San Diego County as

a population of over three million people. So the idea there can't be one COVID related death for two weeks, that's insane. That is one side of the argument, utterly pushing over the other one, which is we can't have an economic collapse. That's just shocking. Well, and and that's unfortunately. We we can do both. We can be safe and

we can be open. It's ridiculous that we can move thousands of people through grocery stores in a day, but we can't put fifty people through a car dealership in a day, or you know a hundred people you know in through you know furniture store. You know those places are closed and shutdown and they're just laying off, laying off people. And we keep hearing about more every day, more and more businesses that are just shuttering. When they're saying,

we can't aim we we can't, we can't sustain this. Well, just a brief thought, it strikes me, it's right. It strikes me that you're saying, listen, listen, we can do it and be safe. But what the governor of cal Unicornia is demanding is that you do it and be perfectly safe, almost literally perfectly safe. If you can't have a single death over the course of two weeks, when you have tens of thousands of people filing for unemployment

just in your district. Well, and we've unfortunately had six pure solely coronavirus death six out of three point three million people. I mean, we're what number are we trying to get to with with with those odds, I mean it's it's uh, it's incredible. I mean, we want to be safe and we can do it, but unfortunately it seems more about control than about you know, giving the economy going again and and keeping people safe. I don't

know what it's about. I don't know if they're reading the polls and thinking this is a winning issue or I I don't get it now. I mean, if you started from today, if things weren't closed down, uh, and we weren't talking about opening things up. We were talking about whether we should shut things down. With the number of deads we've had. You wouldn't shut everything down. There's no way you'd win that argument. Well, we've had we've had six deads. We better shut down everything that exists

except for restaurants. Nobody would buy that argument. No, And we still have to protect, you know, our seniors and senior film. Of course, we absolutely have to protect. So I'm not advocating for do seeing any of the health personal health requirements, keep them all in place, but let's put our businesses open under those same guidelines of the essential ones in them. In so in case we did a certain you know, we won't be so far out

on the limb. But it it just makes common sense to a lot of people, is that, you know, we can do both together. We can do it. We could be safe and we could be open. Amen to that, And there are a lot of people saying the same thing. But your voice is absolutely welcome. Jim Desmond, supervisor for the San Diego County Border Soups District five. Hey, Jim, it's good to talk. Let's stay in touch. Hey, thank you very much. Appreciate the time you got a good job.

Not if that made sense. What I let's try to say, it's like, um, sometimes you do that, like with stocks, like would you you have the stock today? It doesn't matter if you've had it for years? Would you buy it today? Is it a good idea to have it? Right? Um? What happened in the past doesn't matter. Would it be a good idea to shut down everything today based on the number of debts? No, I don't think most people

would go along with that. Right. You could counter argue that part of the reason the number has been so low is that we have been shut down. But even if that is true, we need to push it. We need to push how open we are and see what happens. The idea that we're gonna go for perfect safety at

any cost is that of the safety obsessives. And I would say Unicornians who don't understand how businesses work, don't understand how economies work, and don't understand that the capacity for government to just pay for everybody's life is limited. The one side has has had percent of the discussion. Well, I I and he said, I don't know what's driving of its power. I don't know what it is. I

don't know if it's power. I think I generally just assume politicians are looking at polls and they whatever is going to get them elected. And you know, the most recent polls, pretty overwhelmingly people are in favor of staying locked down rather than opening up. Yeah, way too way over reaction, in my opinion. I think that will be the history of this going forward years from now. We way overreacted, and not at maybe not at the beginning, but certainly after we got into it and realized where

we were. Yeah, we were. We had a certain momentum toward safety, and anybody advocating turning it around was accused of being callous toward the deaths of our old folks or or whomever, the rare thirty two year old mother of three and trying to get through everybody's heads. No, we're not going to go back to the way it

was in December. We're gonna be wearing masks and washing our hands like crazy, and opening doors with our shoulders and not standing very close to anybody and all these things that we just do on our own because we're worried about the virus. Yeah, well, I think There's a difference between a representative representing and leading, and I think we need more leadership. We need more people saying listen.

I know a lot of y'all are scared, but those are the sheeple, honestly, or the vulnerable, and we will do everything we can to protect the vulnerable. But those who think the only question is safety cannot be in charge. They don't have a realistic, adult enough point of view to be put in charge of what we do. It's time for them to step aside. A strong and getty