Oklahoma City Mayor on mask requirements: Difficult to control individuals, but a lot easier to enforce on businesses

Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss the city's reopening plans amid the coronavirus as U.S. cases surpass 3.9 million, according to John Hopkins.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: Certainly interesting when we think about everyone, since this is jobs Friday, going back to work. That is the question, of course, we've been highlighting earlier in the week, the way that customers might be a little bit more hesitant to actually go back and occupy some of these businesses. But we did highlight before off of a Reuters report that about less than half of Americans plan to go to sporting events, concerts, movies, and amusement parks when they reopen unless there is a vaccine out there on the market.

But since it's jobs Friday, I mean, when we shift the focus to workers going back to work, It's not just a safety question for customers but also for clerks working in stores around the country. And right now we've seen a few worrisome incidents out there as people do return to work, one of those being in Oklahoma City earlier this week, a scary scene in a McDonald's when two employees there were shot after asking a customer to leave the dining area to adhere to social-distancing guidelines that were instituted by the city to keep people safe. The alleged shooter was apprehended a little bit later, and luckily the employees are expected to make a full recovery. Some thankful news on that front.

But it does raise questions about the growing hostilities of people going back into these businesses, potentially not listening to safety protocols being put in place. For more on that, we're joined by the mayor of Oklahoma city himself. Mayor David Holt joins us now. And Mayor Holt, I know thankfully that this isn't the scene playing out at the majority of businesses reopening right now in Oklahoma City, but what's the mood been on the ground there as businesses look to reopen?

DAVID HOLT: Well, you know, as you know, at the state and city level we began to let some of these high-risk businesses reopen. So I'm talking about restaurant dining rooms, talking about hair salons, gyms, and all of that began a week ago today.

What I think is really interesting is-- and you kind of alluded to this-- a lot of the businesses are still not opening, you know? And I think it really draws attention and reflects the reality that this has never really been about proclamations. It's ultimately about a virus, and people's behavior is not going to change, and customers are not going to spur an economic rebound until people feel safe.

And that's got nothing to do with proclamations because I can't make the virus go away with a proclamation. It does have a lot to do with, you know, creating a robust infrastructure for testing, tracing, and quarantining in the interim before we have a vaccine.

So you asked me how it feels. I mean, it feels very measured and very cautious and very gradual, and a lot of our leading restaurants are still not open even though they could be, at least their dining rooms. And the same goes for a lot of businesses and churches as well have not-- have not returned even though they're legally allowed to. And I think that really shows that we've got a long path ahead of us and it's not just about the closures from March and April.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and Mayor Holt, I mean, we've been having a few mayors on the show this week. We had the mayor of Kansas City on yesterday kind of highlighting a couple of concerns he had with help above his level when you think about governor-- the governor level and then also the federal government above that. When we think about actually applying and providing the resources that you need to make it safe and testing and contact tracing and all of these things you wanted to institute, what's your take been in terms of how much help you've been able to get or not get on that front?

DAVID HOLT: Well, obviously early on, especially in Oklahoma, we were, for a while, ranked dead last in the country in testing because we just didn't have the ability to get all the ingredients, you know? We were ready to write a check, but nobody would take our money. You know, we couldn't get the testing supplies. It's a lot better now, but, you know, I think we're still, as a country, kind of hemmed in from the lack of national infrastructure that was built for testing.

We do seem to have the financial resources. So you probably know this, but cities about 500,000 in the United States-- and Oklahoma City proper has 650,000 in our city limits-- we got direct funding through the CARES Act for COVID-19 response. So a couple of weeks ago we had $114 million wired into our account from the federal government.

So when it comes to financial resources, now we have what we need, but obviously we need the access to testing, and we need-- you know, we would love some guidance and some direction. I think you've seen a lot of communities have to kind of figure it out on their own for lack of really a national direction.

I've tried to, you know, in my own little advocacy tried to fill that gap. I cowrote an op-ed with Mayor Garcetti of LA and with Mark McClellan, a Bush-administration public-health official, calling for a cares core, almost like a Peace Corps but, you know, at a national level to address COVID-19. It's an effort to try to have some kind of federal direction. I think we really need that as a country, and we've had it only sporadically in this pandemic response.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, you highlighted the funding there, and you're right to point out-- we've had other mayors, as I noted, who don't meet that threshold for the population to get that funding, and we've heard from them. I mean, obviously they're not happy that they don't qualify, but even for mayors in your position that do qualify to get that funding, which applies directly to costs associated to COVID-19, you still have to grapple with the drop-off in tax revenues that are key to your city here, and you're not really necessarily getting made whole on that front. So what have you seen in terms of that drop-off due to revenues and what kind of shortfall you might need to make up for now?

DAVID HOLT: Yeah, so it's-- the COVID-19 funding that I just referenced is a little bit like water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink, you know? So we can't use that money for our revenue shortfall. That has been explicitly, you know, made clear in the Treasury regulations.

So, of course, we are actually the only state in the union that is entirely dependent on sales tax for our operations. So, of course, we are really going to get hit hard. We haven't gotten our first check from the pandemic response yet, but we have every reason to believe it's going to be a tough fiscal year ahead of us.

And unless something changes-- which we're open to-- but unless it changes at the federal level, that COVID-19 $140 million I just referenced cannot be used to try and pay for our police and fire salaries and our parks budget and all the other things that we do as a city. So that is a pretty significant challenge that we're going to be dealing with.

We hope that things recover a little bit. Obviously I just referenced some of the challenges to that. But we did enter this pandemic with the number-one-lowest unemployment in the country. We just found that out a week ago. It was a little bittersweet because we knew a lot had happened in the intervening weeks, but it was 2.5%, our lowest unemployment since 2000.

So we hope that that innate strength in our local economy helps us move out of this and that sooner rather than later maybe our revenues recover, but we're definitely going to have some financial challenges funding our core city services in the months ahead.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I mean, I just want to return to-- since it's not just your town in the state of Oklahoma that we've seen issues in terms of reopening here with store workers. There was the mayor of Stillwater, Oklahoma, also kind of reversing his point on making masks mandatory, then had to shift to voluntary after clerks there were threatened in their places of business.

When we look at it, you're talking about doing testing, making sure one feels safe with the businesses reopening. Is it strange to you as a local official to kind of be grappling with that and then also maybe people saying that they don't necessarily want to adhere to the rules that you're trying to put in place to make them safe?

DAVID HOLT: Well, yeah. Obviously we have a broad spectrum of reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. And, you know, I do all my own social media, so I'm at the tip of the spear seeing all of those reactions. And yeah, I mean, you have people who think that, you know, I'm an authoritarian dictator, and you have people who think why aren't you dictating that everybody stay in their homes and wear a mask, you know? And everybody else is probably somewhere in between.

So I'm very close to the mayor of Stillwater. We had not actually put in a customer mask requirement in Oklahoma City, probably for some of the reasons that, you know, he ended up discovering in his experience. That's tough, and it's very hard to enforce, obviously, mask requirements on the general public. So we try to lead by example, and we just try to continue to push that message.

But in a free society-- and I've been saying this from the very beginning. You know, we can't enforce many of these regulations, especially when they're applicable to individuals. You know, in our proclamation for this new phase, we have a lot of business restrictions that are on the business. So our waiters and servers have to wear masks. Hairstylists have to wear masks, and that's a little more enforceable. But on the customer and on the public at large, it's very difficult. So I think that's been an ongoing tension throughout this pandemic response in a free-- in any free country, and we'll just continue to try to muddle through as best we can in the weeks and months ahead.

But we'll continue to message as we do here. Wash your hands, keep your distance, and wear your mask, and we will hope that people continue to follow those guidelines.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and hopefully with fewer incidents than we've seen play out in your town and across the country as these rules do go into place. But mayor David Holt, appreciate you taking the time.