Thank You City Staff

This year has been tough.  Tougher, harder and more chaotic than most of us have ever experienced, and hopefully we will never see another year like 2020.  With that said, what the City of Edmond elected officials, staff and employees have done to keep our city safe and moving forward with as little chaos as possible should not be overlooked.  The efforts of Edmond staff and employees have gone far beyond what anyone might have believed possible.

In March the pandemic hit Oklahoma, with what we thought at the time was a “full on this is as hard as it gets” punch to our collective gut.  However, we have since learned that our struggles in March were easy compared to this fall which has been much rougher and more painful than anything we have ever experienced.  And yet, through it all our local government has shown an amazing dedication to their work and to our city.

Matt Stillwell, the city’s emergency management director, and his staff should be congratulated for their hard work and dedication keeping the city council updated daily on the number of new COVID-19 cases reported inside the city limits.  Even when the state health department couldn’t find the time to report on Thanksgiving Day and have struggled ever since getting the numbers reported correctly, Matt and his team haven’t missed a beat; combing through the county health department records every day to report on the spread of new cases in Edmond.

Then, just when we thought things couldn’t get worse, we had an ice storm in October while leaves were still on the trees.  If you’ve lived in Oklahoma for any time at all, you know what that means: electrical power outages; school closings and tree damage all over town.  The aftermath of this storm looked more like an EF-1 tornado had hit the entire city with streets blocked, tree limbs on top of cars and houses, and of course power outages.

But in Edmond, the power outages were relatively short thanks to the hard and fast work of Edmond Electric.  And city staff had a debris cleanup plan in place as fast as, if not faster, any other municipality in central Oklahoma.  A contract was executed by the end of the day on October 28th just as the ice was melting and debris pick up began on November 9th, before Oklahoma City had even finalized plans for similar activities.

City employees began clearing streets and cleaning up broken tree limbs at Kickingbird Golf Course before the storm had even ended.  All of this was achieved in the midst of a pandemic that already had many of these employees’ families struggling with how to balance work and children’s school schedules. 

For all of this extremely hard work during what most assuredly will be remembered as the worst year of our lives, we say thank you to the hundreds of Edmond city employees who are working tirelessly to serve and protect all of us each day.