Placer County was ground zero for COVID culture wars. How did its approach work out?

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Roseville restaurant owner Matthew Oliver practically challenged California Gov. Gavin Newsom into cracking down on his Placer County businesses.

Oliver is a pastor who owns three restaurants. In November 2020 he pledged to keep one open after a curfew in defiance of state public health orders. In a social media post, he promoted his plan as a “Newsom hour.”

Oliver could take that risk in part because local officials from Placer County and the city of Roseville didn’t appear to have any interest in enforcing Newsom’s orders. That left a gap, because the state depended on local cops, health departments and schools to uphold the rules.

He eventually abandoned his “Newsom hour” plan, but not before an Alcohol and Beverage Control agent cited his restaurant.

Still, today, Oliver credits Placer County’s approach for helping him keep his doors open.

“I think what Placer County has done is say that we care,” Oliver said. “They’ve repeatedly asked questions of the governor that the governor has refused to answer . . .they continue to stand up for small businesses. . . What they did was, one, do what makes sense and, two, do what’s going to help our local business continue to succeed so they can take care of our community.”

As the mask mandates drop and another COVID anniversary is upon us, Placer County can now look back to assess whether it was not only a conservative bastion, but a right one. Did its approach differ all that much from the rest of the area and state, as our perception of it leads us to believe? Was it a rebel county? And how effective was its approach compared to everyone else?

Skirting state rules

Placer County’s refusal to enforce health rules was just one way the local government resisted Newsom’s pandemic policies.

The county public health officer resigned in protest in September 2020 because the Board of Supervisors lifted an emergency that restricted business activity.

One of its former elected officials, ex-Supervisor Kirk Uhler, declared on Facebook in July of that year: “I can now say with 100% certainty that everything you think you know about COVID hospitalizations and deaths IS A LIE!”

By the time of Oliver’s spat with Newsom, the county put out the word to businesses that they should do whatever they could to stay open, even if that meant skirting state rules.

“(B)ecause we fully understood the implications and difficult decisions, our staff were very gentle and allowed the warnings to escalate slowly over time instead of being heavy-handed to someone who was close to losing their life savings,” Roseville City Councilman Scott Alvord wrote in an email to The Sacramento Bee. “Remember, back during this time, there wasn’t any guarantee of financial aid coming and we were all trying to figure out how long this would last.”

The split between Newsom and Placer County continued to the final days of the state’s in-class mask rules for students. School districts in Placer County simply quit enforcing the rules last month, weeks before Newsom’s policy change.

Now, with the pandemic waning, Placer County leaders are looking to put the last two years of discord behind them.

“We try to be measured, tell the truth and not inflame different communities because we want to work with them when this is over,” said Placer County Public Health Officer Dr. Rob Oldham.

What were Placer’s health results?

After two years of data collection, Placer County’s per capita COVID-19 death rate is about two-thirds that of the state average. Placer County reported 591 deaths to the state as of March 7, bringing the death rate to 146 per 100,000 residents for the duration of the pandemic. California’s death rate stands at 217 per 100,000.

Oldham said Placer County’s policies had “consistently tracked with the state” despite its reputation for flouting enforcement of COVID-19 rules.

He added: “I think the things we have been doing have been successful.”

“Viewing and judging pandemic response by the single criterion of whether a local jurisdiction has a formal mandate in place that is more stringent than the state’s guidance ignores and negates the thoughtful work of public health professionals,” he said.

Placer led the region in vaccinations at one point, with the highest vaccination rate per capita in the region, surpassing Sacramento County.

It was ahead of the state this summer when it recommended people ditch their cloth face masks in favor of “high quality” masks such as N95s and KN95s. And it has distinguished between hospitalizations with COVID and because of COVID on its county dashboard since the summer of 2020. The federal government didn’t take that step until last month.

The county was among a few in California that voluntarily enrolled in a COVID-19 seroprevalence study, which measured the presence of antibodies in a random sample of Placer County residents. It found that about 68% of cases went undetected and unreported, many of them asymptomatic.

“That number is pretty consistent with what we’ve seen on a national level,” Dr. Julie Parsonnet, professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, told the board in an April 2021 presentation.

The highest rates of infection were detected in those with only a high school degree, whereas the lowest rates of infection were among those with graduate degrees, the study results said.

The county had documented early and fast adoption of the COVID-19 vaccine, even among school-aged children. Nearly 75% of all 12-year-olds in the county have received two doses of the vaccine. More than 66% of all county residents are fully vaccinated, and at least 141,000 booster doses have been administered, according to the county’s COVID-19 dashboard.

Effect on businesses

Like the rest of California, Placer County’s economy suffered a serious hit when the state restricted business activity because of the pandemic.

By August 2020, Placer County reported losing 89,500 jobs since the previous year, with the leisure and hospitality sector shedding the most at 32,200 jobs. The accommodation and food services industries were hardest hit next, losing 23,600 jobs, according to a county executive report at the time.

Oliver, owner of three restaurants in Placer County– House of Oliver, Oliver’s Brewhouse and Grill and Oliver’s Antler Steakhouse – said the county’s attitude of working with businesses helped keep his businesses afloat and his employees working.

He said the county opted not to take a punitive approach early on when business owners were struggling to adjust to new rules, and confusion surrounded many of the guidelines.

“We were calling out things that didn’t make sense early on,” he said. “You can go to Wal-mart and stand in line with hundreds of people but you can’t go to a restaurant?”

“No one took the time to write a manual or give us proper guidelines,” Oliver said. “No one told us how we were supposed to adjust.”

On a weekday evening in January, Oliver’s Roseville restaurant offered no signs of controversy. His restaurant staff were wearing masks, and patrons gathered near the fire pits on the tented patio, a pandemic addition.

During happy hour, the restaurant was about half full and food service was slow, a result of a shortage of kitchen staff at the time, a server said.

Oliver said at the time fear over the omicron variant and a renewed statewide mask mandate was slowing down business for most restaurants once again.

Oliver said he decided not to close after reopening in the summer of 2020 because he couldn’t afford to leave his 120 employees, who depended on tips, without their livelihood. He said the COVID relief didn’t come close to what many of his staff were making while working.

Placer County supervisors often sympathized with businesses at public meetings.

“Businesses are not a significant contributor to the spread of COVID-19 in Placer County,” Supervisor Bonnie Gore said in a statement in August 2020, a month before the county lifted its coronavirus emergency order. “Our data tells us that. ... The livelihoods of our friends and neighbors are not bartering chips to coerce people into compliance.”

Supervisor Robert Weygandt said he sent numerous letters to the state asking for more autonomy, frequently out of concern for local businesses.

“I’ve always been driven by what the cost and benefits of COVID policy are,” he said. “There are huge costs to policies put in place by the state.”

Supervisors prioritized businesses in the coronavirus relief they distributed from the federal government. They dedicated $16 million from the county’s first round of COVID-19 relief to small business grants. That was more than one-third of what Placer County received at that time. It funded more than 500 grants to bars and restaurants, and another 1,200 to various small businesses.

Drama at Placer County meetings

People with extreme beliefs were ever-present at Placer County government meetings throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

They included the anti-vaccine group Freedom Angels, which urged the county to drop its coronavirus emergency orders in September 2020. Members of the far-right group Proud Boys attended school board meetings, too.

Former Supervisor Uhler — the one who accused California officials of lying about COVID-19 hospitalizations — railed against the state’s pandemic policies in public meetings and videos posted to his social media.

Conservative residents in turn, often from the county’s rural region, argued that the county was being too stringent, infringing on their personal rights. Liberal residents argued the county was doing too little to protect people from the virus.

It became a microcosm of the political divisions on display nationwide, Weygandt said.

“You realize you can’t control others,” said Supervisor Cindy Gustafson. “All you can do is educate and persuade. You can’t control behavior. .. but also to have compassion because often those that have the strongest opinions are acting out of fear, and it might not be fear for the virus, but it might be fear for their personal rights. I don’t feel that way but many do.”

Battleground in Placer schools

Nowhere did the conflict play out more visibly than in local schools.

Boards of trustees for Roseville Joint Unified High School District and Rocklin Unified School District adopted resolutions barring vaccine mandates, relaxing mask enforcement and challenging the state’s control over pandemic policy.

Roseville Joint Unified High School District led the way in August 2021. Its resolution, which passed unanimously, “requests” the California Department of Public Health hand over policy-making to county public health officers and elected school boards.

The board went a step further in early February, voting unanimously to relax its mask enforcement, letting students choose whether they wanted to wear one in the classroom.

That vote was a full month ahead of state policy changes, putting the local rules in conflict with the Newsom administration.

Jessica Fork, union leader and social studies teacher in the district, said the board’s decision put teachers in a “no-win” situation.

“When we have a school board showing that they don’t support the mask mandate, that makes it harder on the teachers,” she said. “The board will say we’re trying to make (teachers) not the bad guys, but no matter what we’re stuck in this adversarial role.”

In an email to The Sacramento Bee, school district Superintendent John Becker said state agencies had made no contact with the district regarding its policy change.

The Roseville decision lit a fuse for other districts, which stopped excluding unmasked students from school. Rocklin Unified School District followed suit a week later. The district’s teachers walked out in response.

“While there are varying opinions on masking in our community and our schools, the issue teachers are most concerned about is the lack of respect for educators blatantly displayed by the RUSD Board of Trustees in making this change,” a statement by Rocklin Teachers Professional Association read.

“Our school board’s actions not only violated the state mandate, they violated our collectively bargained agreements, and, most importantly, the trust we worked so hard to establish,” the union’s statement concluded.

Where are we now?

For all the fury of its public meetings, Placer County boomed during the coronavirus pandemic. It was among only four California counties to add residents in 2020, when the state’s overall population fell.

It attracted record numbers of tourists to its most popular attraction, Lake Tahoe. And Roseville, the county’s largest city, is emerging as a destination in its own right, boasting a growing, vibrant restaurant scene.

Alvord, the Roseville councilman, said the community’s reputation for supporting entrepreneurs during the pandemic was good for business, too.

“Instead of being an obstacle, the city started becoming a cheerleader and ally to new businesses. Now as a city council member, I hear almost weekly how awesome our city is when it comes to helping businesses,” Alvord wrote in an email. “I’ve sat in meetings where a potential new business owner with a great concept is surrounded by staff from multiple departments helping answer questions and prepar(ing) the owner for the next steps. It was beautiful to experience.”

And Oldham, the county’s public health officer, is looking forward to different challenges as the pandemic recedes.

“We’re ready for the pandemic to be over,” he said. “It’s really taking attention off of other things that are important to health equity.”

This story was originally published March 13, 2022 at 5:00 AM.