'We need more help': El Paso's Republican mayor says the city needs federal funding to protect public health

• Mayor Dee Margo of El Paso, Texas, told Business Insider he's struggling "walk that tightwire" between public health and ensuring small businesses don't go under during the coronavirus pandemic.
• At least 26,000 people in El Paso currently have COVID-19, with more than 1,000 in the hospital.
• Margo, a Republican, was an early proponent of wearing masks but has been hesitant to shut down nonessential businesses during the latest surge.
• "I recognize that there are physical deaths as a result of this pandemic, and physical hurt with families and others," Margo said. "But there also are financial deaths that are occurring."

Dee Margo is the mayor of a city in crisis. More than 26,000 people in El Paso, a border city of some 680,000 in Texas, currently have COVID-19, and 1,000 of them are in the hospital.

Fourteen people were reported dead on Wednesday alone, out of 696 during the coronavirus pandemic. The surge in fatalities is outstripping the city's ability to store the bodies; it now has 10 mobile morgues — air-conditioned trucks — to prevent corpses from decaying.

"I wish I were omnipotent — to be able to know what to do and how to do it," Margo, a Republican facing a 2020 runoff election, told Business Insider on Wednesday.

Unlike some in his party, Margo was an early advocate of wearing masks, pushing back against Gov. Greg Abbott and his since-rescinded prohibition on local mandates. But he does share the reluctance to shutter businesses.

—City of El Paso (@ElPasoTXGov) November 11, 2020

Last month, an El Paso County judge, Ricardo Samaniego, attempted to force such closings, issuing a two-week shutdown order for all businesses deemed nonessential, such as gyms and tattoo parlors, and limiting restaurants to takeout and delivery. Samaniego extended that order Wednesday.

Margo's administration at first declined to enforce the order, which faces a legal challenge from a group of El Paso restaurants and the Texas attorney general. Uncertainty reigned, and El Paso's restaurants continued to serve diners and, as indicated by the city's contact-tracing program, contributed to the spread of the coronavirus.

"Huge, huge confusion," Laura Rayborn, a local spa owner, told The New York Times. "The mayor went on the radio and on TV and said, 'Stay open.'"

"We were between a rock and a hard place, legally," Margo argued, citing an executive order by Abbott limiting the ability of local jurisdictions to impose lockdowns. A district court later upheld the judge's order, and, on Friday, the police in El Paso began enforcing it. It is the most stringent set of restrictions since April, when the city lifted a stay-at-home order.

The law was not Margo's only consideration. He knows bars — and bars adding food trucks so they can evade the city's public-health edicts and stay open as restaurants — contribute to the spread of the coronavirus. Indoor dining, too: In October, Margo limited dining establishments to carryout after 9 p.m., reducing the maximum occupancy to 50% before that.

"When you drink alcohol, your guard goes down and people drop their protections," Margo said. That was the thinking that informed the restrictions. He added, however: "What we found is that people were leaving the bars after 9 p.m., but they weren't going home. They were congregating in other homes together or other locations together." Over half of known COVID-19 cases in El Paso are people ages 20 to 39. "That's still a behavioral issue that's a problem," Margo said.

Shopping, too, is being blamed for the spread: Contact tracing has found that one of the top sources of infection in El Paso appears to be big-box retailers — Walmart, Target, and the like — where extended families walk the aisles in search of bargains.

Ideally, perhaps, these places would be limited to delivery or curbside pickup too. The status quo of doing just enough to arrest the spread of the virus, but not enough to stamp it out, has meant states and cities across the country, red and blue, have seen progress followed by another surge.

"I recognize that there are physical deaths as a result of this pandemic, and physical hurt with families and others," Margo said. "But there also are financial deaths that are occurring."

A quarter of El Paso's small businesses have shut down since March. "They're not underground. They're not waiting to resurface. They're gone," Margo said. "We have 32,000 under unemployment, and we have 148,000 people being fed by our food bank. So there is a balance to this. And all I've been trying to do is walk that tightwire."

Shutdowns are, to be sure, a last resort — a hammer that's brought down when a virus is out of control. They might not prevent individual bad behavior, or keep families from behaving irresponsibly, but they could, at a time when cities are resorting to morgues on wheels, arrest the spread of a deadly virus. In the long run, temporary pain could also mean long-term economic gain, putting an end to the stop-and-start pattern that's now repeating for a third time in the US.

Provided, of course, that there was a coherent and consistent federal response. No city is an island, and even those with the strictest responses to the pandemic have been unable to stave off a resurgence in the absence of a coherent federal plan.

A new round of federal relief spending has been stalled in Congress for months. Democrats have been calling for a comprehensive package — including direct payments to citizens, money for state and local governments, and billions more dollars in funding for small-business loans — and passed such a measure in May. Senate Republicans, however, have balked at the price tag, with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell putting a new deal on the back burner while the chamber confirmed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has veered between calls to cut off negotiations on a new spending deal and to "go big" — too big, even, for conservatives in Congress.

"If you had the financial support that we had at the beginning ... then yeah, that's fine," Margo said. "People can still put food on the table and they still can pay their rent and the businesses can get by. But without that, then it's a morality play. And that bothers me." Without that financial support — grants for small businesses and payments for their patrons — the result is that both the economy and public health suffer.

"We need more help," Margo told Business Insider. "We continue to need more help."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com