You can still stop in to pay your water bill, or a parking ticket even, things have not changed much in the city of Dunkirk this week. According to Dunkirk Mayor Wilfred Rosas the staffing levels haven’t changed at City Hall and all non-essential workers are currently operating from home.

“The city is still providing our normal services to our residents and our DPW crew are doing an excellent job of sanitizing and disinfecting all of our city facilities,” Rosas told the OBSERVER Tuesday. “We’re open to the public and we’re doing everything we can to protect all of our staff and residents.”

As the state continues to reel from a staggering case load of infected citizens, recommendations and guidelines from the New York State Department of Health are continuing to be strictly adhered to in the city.

“I’m on a conference call daily with New York State and we continue to follow the recommendations of the governor and his staff,” Rosas added.

“This is a very serious situation that we’re in right now, so there’s a fine line between trying to conduct business and then causing the spread of the virus, right now I think that we are doing well. I commend our community and all of our staff across all of our departments for being so diligent. I appreciate their patience; we’re going to get through this together. We’re doing everything that we can to ensure that the community is safe and we will continue to provide the services until further notice, all of that is subject to change at a moment’s notice.”

A question that continues to pop up around town however is the City Council and their meetings. According to Rosas the council is working on trying to schedule an electronic meeting through Zoom or similar entity. Councilman-at-large Paul VanDenVouver added that the council is looking at doing something electronically and one avenue being explored is televising a meeting through Dunkirk Access.

“We’ve got to do something and probably sooner rather than later,” VanDenVouver said. “If not our first meeting back after all of this will be like six hours. There’ll be so much to review.”