Nashville Town Hall is closed until further notice after initially shutting down in response to COVID-19 last week.
“In order to keep our staff and customers healthy and safe, our office is temporarily closed to the public,” a press release from town hall said on May 23.
“We are sorry for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.”
The decision to close Town Hall beginning May 24 was done in order to “keep our staff and customers healthy and safe,” Town Manager Sandie Jones said today.
Employees are still working in Town Hall, but offices are closed to the public.
“There has been an uptick in COVID cases as well as other illness in the last week or so in our community. We thought we would try to keep everyone as well as possible,” Jones said.
Town Hall is expected to reopen to the public next week.
In the meantime, town utility customers can make water and sewer payments in the drop box to the right of the front door or by mailing them to Nashville Municipal Utilities, P.O. Box 446, Nashville, Indiana 47448.
Those with questions or concerns about their account can call the utility building at 812-988-7064 or town administration at 812-988-5526.
Customers can also email [email protected] or [email protected] with any questions.
The Nashville Town Council Town Hall meeting scheduled for June 2 at 6:30 p.m. is also canceled.
Local uptick?
Brown County has experienced an increase in positive cases recently. From May 1 to 24, an additional 30 positive cases had been reported, according to the Indiana State Department of Health COVID-19 dashboard.
This is an increase compared to March 31 to April 28 when six positive cases were confirmed in nearly a month.
Residents who are now partially vaccinated against COVID-19 also continues to increase. From May 1 to 24, an additional 54 residents received their first dose of the vaccine.
As of May 24, Brown County has had 2,623 positive COVID-19 cases reported since March 2020. The county’s reported COVID-19 deaths has remained at 61 since March 6.
Last week, the county’s Emergency Health Preparedness Coordinator Corey Frost said the health department had also been seeing an uptick in cases.
“However the total uptick amount is hard to quantify due to so many tests being done at home,” Frost said.
“Citizens should continue to stay home when feeling ill or presenting with symptoms. Getting vaccinated or boosted continues to be our best strategy.”
The county health department extended testing hours for May and June. The hours are as follows: Monday, Wednesday and Friday: 4 to 5:45 p.m.; and Saturday, June 18: 8 to 11:45 a.m.
Only PCR tests are available. Testing will be completed in vehicles. Those interested will need to make an appointment at scheduling.coronavirus.in.gov or by calling 211.
At the May 19 meeting of the Brown County School Board of Trustees meeting, Superintendent Emily Tracy also reported an uptick in positive cases in the school district.
Since May 4 the district had a total of nine students test positive for COVID-19 and six staff members. At the May 5 school board meeting, Tracy had reported that the district had only one positive case reported to them since March 4.
Under the school district’s educational service delivery plan, a school will be closed when 16% or more of the building population is reporting symptoms of COVID-19.
As of May 22, every school building had less than 2% of its population reporting COVID-19 symptoms. Find the district’s COVID-19 daily metric report here.
The last day of school is today, May 24. Students will not return to school until Aug. 10.
