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

San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond talks to Armstrong & Getty about California Governor Gavin Newsom's unrealistic standards for re-starting local economies across the state of Calunicornia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The armstrong and getting We will get to the woman
who's looking for advice about our boyfriend that gets in
a fight every time they go to the waffle house
in about ten minutes or so. Oh boy, it's a
good story. Jim Desmond is a supervisor for the San
Diego County Border Supervisors for District five. He's a guy
with quite an interesting resumes, served as a mayor and

(00:24):
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,

(00:44):
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

(01:07):
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

(01:30):
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

(01:52):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:35):
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.

(02:56):
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.

(03:19):
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

(03:43):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:48):
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

(05:10):
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

(05:31):
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

(05:54):
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

(06:16):
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?

(06:38):
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.

(07:00):
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,

(07:23):
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

(07:45):
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

(08:07):
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

(08:29):
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.

(08:50):
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