DECEMBER 2020
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The Voice of Seguin Today
Volume 55 • Number 235 830 • 379 • 2234
Local emergency official vacations in COVID-19 hot spot fishing trip. Pinder has received some criticism for traveling during the pandemic. The CDC currently recommends that people not travel to the Dominican Republic. It has a level four risk assessment, which suggests the risk for exposure to COVID-19 is very high in that nation.
Patrick Pinder By Darren Dunn (Seguin) -- Guadalupe County officials are responding to reports that have been critical of a vacation taken recently by the person in charge of the county’s COVID-19 response. Guadalupe County Emergency Management Coordinator Patrick Pinder took a vacation at the end of November, which stretched into early December. Pinder, his wife and some friends traveled to the Dominican Republic for what was largely a
Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher says he had spoken to Pinder about his travel plans. He says he raised what concerns he had, but in the end, Pinder decided that he would safely be able to take his planned trip. “I knew that Patrick was going to take vacation early on, months and months ago. We didn’t find out really the specific location until I say a couple of weeks prior to and that’s when Mr. Pinder and I had a discussion about whether -- I asked Patrick, do you think it’s safe to travel? And, we talked about concerns and the issues, rising cases and personally, I had a little bit more concern about the travel rather than the destination just because of airports and the nature of people being more congested and together.
So, we had those conversations and Patrick being the person that has been very involved in COVID knowing precautions to take, basically just thought that he could take those precautions and safety measures because he is so familiar with them to be safe and so he and wife decided to still go on the trip,” said Kutscher.
downplay the seriousness of COVID. He’s been very consistent in a steady voice of bringing awareness to the public and only providing information and being a resource to not only myself as county judge but commissioners court and the public. So, I think he thought about it very long and hard and was very serious in his approach to say ‘okay, how would people look at this? How dangerous is it? Where are we at as a county? What message are we sending? Personally, I think he looked at it from a standpoint -- did he think he and his wife could be safe traveling and ultimately, he came to the decision that he thought he could? said Kutscher.
Guadalupe County does not have its own health department, which made Pinder the chief spokesperson and resource for all things related to the local COVID-19 response. Judge Kutscher says he knows that Pinder never would have taken that trip if he didn’t believe that he could stay safe. He says he took extra precautions during his travel, and he made sure Judge Kutscher says regardless of he did all he could to reduce his whether you believe Pinder should exposure. have traveled or not, he wants to make sure that he doesn’t get lumped into Kutscher says Pinder is not a a discussion about some other public COVID-19 denier, and this trip officials who have said one thing and doesn’t necessarily make him a then have done something else when hypocrite for traveling at this time. it comes to COVID-19. The mayors of Austin, Texas and Denver, Colorado “Mr. Pinder has never been one have both come under fire recently for throughout this entire pandemic to telling their constituents not to travel,
while they were traveling themselves. Kutscher says he thinks it’s a bit unfair to include Pinder in that conversation. “There was some misrepresentation in another article in a neighboring community comparing him to the Austin mayor. We don’t have those same type of restrictions in this community. Mr. Pinder and the county have not been restricting travel. We’ve been making recommendations all along about practicing social distancing and everything and all the messages with the governor and state of Texas and CDC have been putting out but we have not been as strong handed sort of speak as some of the larger, more metropolitan areas so I understand why some people may see this and feel frustration but at the same time, I ask everybody not to put Mr. Pinder or the county in the same position as Austin, Houston, Dallas, New York, some of those places saying that we restricted everybody from doing everything yet he is still traveling,” said Pinder. See PINDER page 2