Letters: Remote access to council meetings

Dear Editor, 

This is a letter I sent to the Larkspur City Council.

As a sometime attendee of your meetings, I appreciate having had remote access during the pandemic.

Now that you are required to consider regularly whether to continue remote meetings or move to hybrid or in-person meetings, I hope you will keep in mind a new reality and a new disability category for the immune compromised like me. The CDC says that the immune compromised constitute about 2.7 percent of the population. These are people who risk hospitalization and death from Covid-19. Before the pandemic, we immune-compromised individuals risked getting a minor infection if we attended a City Council meeting. We didn’t expect to be risking our lives.

Add to the list of immune compromised, older residents (Marin has more than its share of these) and those with other co-morbidities, and a lot of Larkspur residents would benefit from continued remote access to your meetings.

So, as you consider how to hold upcoming and other future meetings, I urge you to continue to provide remote access, regardless of the format you choose.

Laura Effel 

Larkspur