Nearly half of the Otago Regional Council workforce is responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, council chief executive Sarah Gardner says.
Late last week, Mrs Gardner updated councillors on the role the organisation was playing during the Covid-19 Alert Level 4 lockdown in the first council meeting since the country entered a state of national emergency.
Among those responding to the crisis were about 30 staff running essential services "necessary for the preservation of human health", including the monitoring of drinking water at source and air quality monitoring.
Another 30 were embedded in the council’s seven-day-a-week emergency co-ordination centre, which was expected to be in operation for three months.
Some staff were working in preparation for a "recovery mode" for the region.
"Our role really is a welfare role, so we are providing provisions for foodbank; we are responding to the community in terms of calls they make for welfare assistance," Mrs Gardner said.
"We will at some point switch to more of a recovery focus; quite a different role to what we expect we usually play in recovery for an event like a flood. It’ll be a long-term process."
The council’s economist was among those in the region working to forecast the impact of the pandemic.
A council workshop on April 22 would focus on the recovery strategy "and some of the economic data" to understand the impact on the region.
