As bars across Wichita ignore COVID curfew, county warns of consequences
If you want to go out and party after the 11 p.m. coronavirus curfew, it’s not hard to find a place to do it in Wichita.
On Friday night, bars and nightclubs across the city were packing in customers between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m., basically ignoring a county health order setting 11 as closing time for places selling alcohol by the drink.
When he issued the order, county Health Officer Dr. Garold Minns said bars and clubs are particularly prone to spread coronavirus because they attract crowds who stay and socialize for hours at a time and/or flit from bar to bar in the course of a night.
And that was exactly the scene in Old Town and clubs scattered around the city Friday.
Bars choosing to flout the health ordinance and stay open late read like a who’s who of Wichita nightlife — Heroes, Rock Island Live, Emerson Biggins, Revolution, 6 Degrees, XY, Tight Ends — to name a few of the better-known clubs.
The clubs were rockin’ and they were packed with people ready to partay despite the threat of COVID-19, a disease that’s infected more than 7,400 county residents so far and caused 63 deaths as of Friday.
Inside the clubs and on patios adjacent, patrons didn’t appear to be paying attention to social distancing advice and masks were seldom seen except on the wait staff.
Beyond the potential health implications, County Manager Tom Stolz said bar and club owners are taking a serious business risk in defying Minns’ order.
In early June, the Legislature granted businesses blanket immunity from lawsuits if their patrons or employees get COVID.
But businesses lose that immunity if they don’t follow health orders, leaving themselves open to potentially costly litigation, Stolz said.
And although the Legislature changed violations of health orders from a criminal to a civil matter, Stolz said the county can still take actions to gain compliance.
The county could file for an injunction against businesses that defy the order and get a court order for them to comply, he said. That action would be at the discretion of the County Commission.
Also, Minns, as the county health officer, has the authority to order a business to shut down as a threat to public health, Stolz said.
So far, the county and the city of Wichita have taken a light hand on enforcing the county’s health order and a similar city ordinance that requires protective facemasks in most public-facing businesses and shared employee workspaces.
On Friday night, a contingent of police officers observed the Old Town revelry, but didn’t try to intervene.
“At this point, we’re just kind of monitoring,” said the officer in charge, Sgt. Matthew Hall.
Hall said the officers were noting which clubs were open after curfew and whether they were complying with other health and safety requirements. That information would be put into a report and passed up the chain of command for city management to decide how to proceed, he said.
Neither the county nor the city have issued any citations or taken official action on violations since the pandemic came to the area.
Both levels of local government have concentrated on education and persuasion to gain compliance.
On Friday, that approach worked with Midnight Rodeo, a cowboy-theme bar on East Kellogg.
The club had posted on its Facebook page that it was returning to its regular hours and would be open until 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
Someone reported that to the county and Minns sent the business a letter warning of the potential consequences of violating his order.
After getting that warning, the bar decided to comply and shut down at 11 p.m.
Alan Hsu, one of the owners, said he wasn’t happy about that and that they felt they’d been singled out for attention.
“Most of the bars are still open late,” he said.
Calls to bars that were open late mostly resulted in no answer, no comment or hang-ups when reporters called from The Eagle.
One of the few owners who did speak at length with The Eagle, Darren Greiving of the Blu Night Club in west Wichita, said staying open late has become a matter of economic survival.
“Our livelihoods have been taken away from us for over half this year,” he said.
In his own case, the club is the only means of support for him, his fiancee and their 2-year-old daughter.
They’ve already had to sell the home they had built four years ago and move into a cheaper house they bought out of foreclosure and Greiving said he’s been spending his days replacing the flooring.
He said his club has been unable to tap into federal emergency relief programs that have propped up other businesses through the pandemic and the county commission didn’t pass a proposal to put aside $5 million of its near $100 million federal COVID grant to help struggling bars and nightclubs.
Blu has enforced other requirements of Minns’ order and the city’s ordinance, including a 50-percent capacity limit, social distancing and the mask mandate, which requires masks except when patrons are actively eating or drinking.
In some cases, they go beyond the requirements, he said. For example, the fruit for drinks is washed with gloved hands when it arrives and then cut up using a new set of gloves. The business also has been serving with disposable cups.
“Nobody wants anyone to get sick or anything,” he said. “If we can do our part, we will,” he said.
County commissioners said they’ve heard about the widespread violations of Minns’ curfew and will probably have to take action if things don’t change.
Commissioner Jim Howell, who has frequently argued for looser restrictions on businesses, said he disagrees with the curfew and would lift it if he could get two other commissioners to agree.
But he said he’s “a law and order guy” and Minns’ order is legally valid.
“It is what it is,” Howell said. “The order does say 11 o’clock and as long as the order is out there, they ought to comply with the order.”
The defiant bars and clubs also are on the city of Wichita’s radar, Mayor Brandon Whipple said. He said he saw posts on social media of large crowds packed inside bars with no social distancing or masks.
The city’s approach for bars violating the curfew so far has been to document what clubs aren’t complying and sending it to the county manager and the Sedgwick County Health Department, Whipple said. He said the city has known about bars operating past the curfew since last weekend.
“I get it that bars and their employees need to make money, and this has been a tough time,” he said. “But we’re not going to beat this virus if we don’t take it serious and follow our health orders and mask ordinance.”
The bars and clubs violating the health order and the mask requirement risk losing their city liquor license, he said. The city also has anti-nuisance laws that could be invoked to close bars that aren’t complying, he said.
“To have a liquor license, they have to show they are going above and beyond from a health and safety standpoint,” he said. “Packing as many people as possible together without a mask or social distancing in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years is basically the opposite of that.”
This story was originally published September 12, 2020 at 1:45 PM with the headline "As bars across Wichita ignore COVID curfew, county warns of consequences."
