‘I need a haircut.’ Sedgwick County moves to give businesses control over reopening
Sedgwick County took steps Wednesday to encourage a quick end to coronavirus control orders with an eye toward letting businesses make most of their own decisions on how to reopen the economy.
“It’s time for us to move back toward freedom and I need a haircut,“ said Commissioner Jim Howell. “We all need haircuts at this point. It’s time for us to get the businesses back open and if they can do this in a way that mitigates risk, then we ought to let them speak to that and if it makes sense, we ought to let that be our next step.”
Acting as the Board of Health, the County Commission passed a motion by Howell urging Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly not to extend her stay-at-home order — which shuttered thousands of businesses — past its current scheduled expiration date of May 3. Kelly is scheduled to announce details of her plan at 6:30 p.m. Thursday.
The second part of the county commission’s motion encourages county Health Officer Garold Minns to collaborate with the commission on the reopening process, with an eye toward letting businesses develop and implement their own protocols for protecting employees and customers from COVID-19 infection.
That was a compromise from an earlier version that sought to name the commission as the group that would be primarily in charge of reopening the economy.
Commissioner David Dennis said other than broad guidelines — like the well-known recommendation of six feet of separation between people waiting in line — “government just needs to step back from this.”
“I believe that the businesses are the ones that are in the right position to decide what’s right for their employees and their customers,” Dennis said. “I never have believed in big government and for us to try to write a set of rules that apply to every type of business that we have in Sedgwick County, none of us have enough time on the commission to be able to do that.”
The only vote in opposition to Howell’s motion was Commissioner Lacey Cruse, who said “I think it’s important that we take our time and really think through all of this.”
She said in a Friday meeting of the commission and local business leaders, the recurring theme was “reopening in a responsible manner.”
“I think all of us have been working feverishly night and day, we have been reading, we have been trying to understand exactly what we should do,” Cruse said. “I think haphazardly putting a plan together just to have a plan to put in place with people, I don’t believe is the best course of action.”
The commission also argued over the meaning of a statement issued Monday by a panel of doctors assembled by the Sedgwick County Medical Society.
The report suggested that because of uncertainty over whether Sedgwick County has reached its peak of cases in the COVID-19 pandemic, “it would be wise to maintain our current restrictions for at least seven days beyond the current expiration date.”
Prompted by Commissioner Michael O’Donnell, commission Chairman Pete Meitzner appeared to suggest that the county received a retraction of that advice.
“We all received a letter from a group of medical professionals at 11 o’clock . . . Monday,” Meitzner said. “That immediately got the attention of social media and regular media.
“And since then, we’ve received a letter from the same author kind of retracting that they weren’t making a recommendation, they were stating opinions. I don’t have that right in front of me, but it was kind of a retraction we all received.”
Cruse questioned that interpretation.
“It wasn’t a retraction, it was an explanation that it wasn’t a statement put out by the MSSC, it was these physicians (appointed by the medical society),” she said. “They didn’t change what they told us . . . their recommendation is still the same, they were just stating that it didn’t come from the MSSC . . . Let’s not be confused about the actual message of what they were trying to get across.”
Responded O’Donnell: “I’m not confused about the actual message, correct me if I’m wrong Mr. Chairman, is that the Medical Society of Sedgwick County does not take a formal position on reopening the economy, is that how you understand it Mr. Chair?”
Meitzner: “That’s true, yeah.”
Phillip Brownlee, executive director of the medical society, said he accepts responsibility for commissioners’ confusion.
He said he should have been clearer in his letter to the commissioners that he was passing along recommendations of the expert panel, not the full medical society.
He said the medical society didn’t inject itself into the debate, but he assembled the panel at the request of the county Health Department, which sought expert advice on COVID-19.
He said the group includes the leading infectious-disease doctors in the Wichita area and he’s proud of the group’s work.
“These are front-line people,” he said. “I mean these are people walking in the room with the COVID patients. And all 10 of them, even though they are swamped and under great stress, were happy to do it (serve on the panel).”
He said he’s spoken with Meitzner since the meeting to clarify that the panel has not retracted its recommendations.
“It was not really characterized correctly in the meeting that the medical society had retracted anything or that we had changed our position because we were under pressure from doctors,” he said. “None of that was the case because we (the society) never had a position. This was the panel’s position.”
This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 2:05 PM.
