Official threatens to sue Newsom if Placer County can’t reopen from the coronavirus shutdown
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s criteria for California counties to reopen from the coronavirus stay-at-home order have been revealed. Based on the requirements, Placer County won’t be in the first wave of counties to get the green light.
That’s upsetting some Placer officials. The county this week sent the governor a demand that he allow them to set their own reopening course.
“If we don’t see any action, we may be calling a special meeting to seek a legal injunction,” Placer County Board supervisor Kirk Uhler said on Thursday. Uhler said he believes the governor has overstepped his legal authority in effectively shutting down much of the economy and requiring people to stay mainly at home.
It could be the first county in California to pursue legal action against the state over Newsom’s stay-at-home orders.
Increasingly alarmed by the hit to the local economy, city and county officials in Placer County and throughout the region have urged Newsom for weeks to give locals more agency over how to reopen businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. “I hear stories every day of family businesses that will never come back,” said Uhler.
Placer County will self-certify a readiness plan “if qualified based on current data,” according to county spokeswoman Katie Combs-Prichard.
But the county fails to meet several factors.
The county recently opened two new state testing sites, which has more than doubled its testing capacity. But the highest number of results in one day the county has received in the last two weeks is 199. Newsom’s guidelines require the county conduct nearly 600 daily tests.
Counties will need 15 coronavirus “contact tracers” per 100,000 residents. As the economy reopens, contact tracers will have the critical role of quickly tracking down anyone who had contact with a newly infected person and get those people tested and potentially quarantined.
Placer County has only six full-time contact tracers on staff, though the county plans to “ramp up quickly” with additional state and county workers, Combs-Prichard said in an email Thursday. The county would need at least 61 disease detectives under Newsom’s criteria, but “in the later stages of reopening, Placer County could need around 100 contact tracers,” Combs-Prichard said.
Uhler criticized Newsom’s criteria, however, calling it “completely arbitrary, completely excessive.” Though the county health department plans to self-certify, Uhler said he’s “not interested in playing Newsom’s little games anymore.”
“We have a grand total of ten people in the hospital. We’re not beyond our control, we’re completely within our control,” Uhler said.
Lower infection and hospitalization rates in Placer County prompted the board of supervisors to send the letter to the governor this week. The coronavirus has killed eight people in the county, and infected at least 165 people as of Friday morning. Eleven individuals are currently hospitalized.
Though the county may provide safety guidelines or advice for industries and businesses looking to reopen, Uhler said that “we are at the point where we have to rely on the common sense of our citizens.”
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 11:02 AM.