ATLANTA — Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is on Capitol Hill - virtually - today to testify before a House Oversight subcommittee about safely reopening America's cities. Scroll below for the video.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has made Georgia one of the states most aggressively pursuing a return to normal public life, with Bottoms perhaps the state's most visible opponent of his policies.
The digital briefing before the select subcommittee, "Supporting America's Cities: What Mayors Need to Safely Reopen" beings at noon and can be viewed in the YouTube embed below.
Last week Bottoms released her own reopening plan for the City of Atlanta. While the plan is not legally enforceable where it goes beyond Gov. Kemp's orders, it serves as an outline for how the mayor hopes residents will take caution.
The mayor told 11Alive's Doug Richards she believes aggressive action and communication by the city has helped keep the metro area from experiencing a worse outbreak. While more than half the state's population lives in the metro Atlanta area, the city and surrounding counties have seen less significant infection rates by cases per 100,000 residents.
"I believe the decrease in numbers that we saw is because we took very aggressive action - especially in the metro area and our densely populated areas - that made our numbers not as high as we’ve seen in other places," Bottoms said.
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