TALLAHASSEE – A day after Governor Ron DeSantis announced his executive order for Florida residents to stay home, he took time Thursday to clarify what will be affected.
Starting with Floridan’s who’ve lost their jobs and are struggling to pay rent or bills at the beginning of the month. The governor reports in the past two weeks alone, there have been 348,511 claims for re-employment assistance.
WFLA in Tampa is reporting Gov. DeSantis says his executive order directs all agency heads to deploy employees to help with re-employment assistance operations, including in call centers. In addition to expanding on the call centers, Gov. DeSantis says he’s also looking to add alternative options of how people can submit claims.To help with the web platform, the governor says he directed state officials to purchase additional capacity software technology to help deal with the high volume of applications.
Amid confusion from residents regarding the governor’s safer-at-home executive order he says “when you’re limiting people to essential services and essential activities the goal is to reduce contact.”
DeSantis says all essential services in the state have been contacted to inform their employees all CDC guidelines must still be followed if they plan to be open including places of worship.
“We definitely asked them to absolutely abide by the social distancing guidelines, but I think that in times like these the service that they are performing is going to be very important for people especially when you have difficult circumstances,” said DeSantis. “So do it right make sure you’re following the mission, but I think that coming up on the Easter season people are going to want to have access to religious services.”
The governor explained his executive order lays the foundation for local government to further add restrictions for residents to stay at home.
“What we’re doing is setting a floor and they can’t go below the floor. They can go beyond what I’ve done, if they want to restrict access to certain areas for example we’re saying you can go out for a jog and I know there are running trails,” said DeSantis. “The locals want to just shut down the running trail and they want to do that then they can do it and that’s just going to be their decision.”
For a full list of all essential businesses and activities visit flgov.com
