Business View Civil and Municipal | Volume 2, Issue 6

103 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 6 THE C I TY OF LOGANSPORT AND CASS COUNTY , INDI ANA Alter, “The County joined forces with our local hospital to open one of the first provider staffed COVID respiratory clinics. This clinic provided outpatient care for potential COVID-19 patients, which helped reduce the number of COVID patients needing to be hospitalized.“ Cass County remained proactive for their community as well as surrounding counties by opening their own testing center off site from the hospital, as well as setting up testing in places throughout the community. “From the beginning, the Cass County Health Department had support from our local nursing homes, schools, law enforcement, first responders etc. ” says Alter. She worked with the area nurses to educate best practice for COVID-19 testing, quarantine, as well as CDC/ ISDH recommendations and guidelines. The community schools continue to be an active part of the COVID Clinic as they are able to do testing on-site of the schools. When vaccines became available, CCHD turned a portion of their testing site into a vaccination zone. “We have been very fortunate as a health department to be able to staff both clinics with funding provided by federal grants,” says Alter. The Clinics provide testing and vaccinations to Cass County as well as surrounding counties. The Cass County Health Department has provided vaccination clinics in the community schools throughout Cass and surrounding counties to provide vaccines to all students 12 years of age and older and plan to continue the vaccine clinic as long as possible. “We put all our differences aside and worked together to get ahead of a situation that still shows its effects to this day,” Logansport Mayor Chris Martin shares. “We are continuing to do great things and we’re just getting started.” “We wanted to make sure the businesses that we have weather this storm,” notes Cass County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Bill Cuppy. “We put together what we call a small business forgivable loan program, focused on things like rent, lease payments, utility payments, insurance payments, and marketing expenses, and awarding a total $250,000 to 50 businesses in the form of $5,000 grants. We believe it did help many businesses that either could not qualify for PPP or needed the money for things besides personnel expenses. We were able to use our economic development income tax dollars to do that, and we recently got reimbursed by the CARES Act money. I think we put the funds we had to good use and it did help retain several businesses.” As schools turned to virtual learning, the county saw the need for rural broadband access for all citizens. “We approved a public/private partnership with Miami-Cass REMC using CARES Act monies are to deploy 114 miles of fiber, creating a fiber ring around the entire county,” says Christy Householder, Director of Economic Development for Cass County. Not only will this