With some pushback from the groups and the public to a proposed public health ordinance, Public Health Director AZ Snyder has been working overtime selling the proposal.

In all honesty, she and her overworked department have been working overtime since late winter when COVID-19 hit Pierce County. The second case in the state was in Pierce County and a week or so later, Ellsworth residents who were on a spring break trip to New Orleans represented some of the earlier state cases.

Of late, Public Health has been dealing with outbreaks stemming from workers at bars, a couple weeks ago in Hager City and most recently in River Falls.

With this week’s meeting (it was Tuesday night at the River Falls High School Auditorium) of the Pierce County Board to get public comment on the proposed public health ordinance and to have a first reading, Snyder met virtually with members of the River Falls Chamber of Commerce Thursday and the Ellsworth Chamber of Commerce on Friday morning.

Perhaps a recent uptick in cases locally and statewide has somewhat tempered some of the harsh criticism the county board heard of the proposal at meetings over two recent weeks.

“You’ve read about it in the paper. You’ve seen it on the county board agenda. We need to understand what this ordinance is all about,” said Kim Beebe, one of the Ellsworth Chamber Executive Team in introducing Snyder in a Zoom video meeting.

Snyder started out by showing the Pierce County COVID-19 dashboard,

See ORDINANCE, Page 3 which showed that as of that day, there had been 83 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Pierce County. She said that new indicators have been added to the dashboard and one shows that Pierce County is a “moderately high burden county.” she said St. Croix County to the north is “concerningly at a high burden and at a growth rate that is statistically significant,’ said Snyder.

She said Pierce County is working to do more testing of the virus. The county is testing 282 people weekly and the state target is 430, which the county hit for a short time.

Statistics show that the virus is appearing in the 18-24 age group, which matches a statewide trend to a younger populations getting and transferring the virus in social situations.

One problem is that there’s been some community-acquired infection, meaning that health officials can’t directly attribute where people are getting sick.

“We just don’t know where they got it,” she said.”It’s worrisome for us because there are cases in the community we can’t identify the source of.”

She invited people to check out the public health dashboard, accessible on the Piece County website.

“Our dashboard is updated every single day. It’s a one stop shop of what’s going on in Pierce County with COVID-19,” said Snyder.

S nyder talked about working with businesses on outbreaks and said that situations where public notifications have to be made aren’t taken lightly. An outbreak is considered to be two or more cases that don’t involve the same households.

It’s not to push anyone. It’s not to embarrass anyone. It’s about stopping the spread,” she said.

In any notifications in Pierce County, the businesses have been involved in making the notifications, Snyder said. “Public notification has become a hot topic. I do not do public notification unless members of the public have been exposed, and we can’t do more district contact tracing. We had a number of bars in River Falls that had staff members who have tested positive. Because of the type of interaction and we can’t track who was in bars, we’ve had to do public notification in collaboration with the bars. Every business we’ve worked with so far has been absolutely fantastic.”

The Proposed Ordinance

Snyder defended the ordinance. She said it’s verbatim state statute language already in place. However, it to Pierce County and makes violations subject to a $500 fine rather than being a criminal infraction.

“What many counties are doing is adopting language in state statute for local health officers’ she said. “It’s authority that has existed for decades that local health officers have operated under It’s nothing new. It’s not an expansion of power.” “Local health officers use this authority all the time to do things like close down a swimming pool after an e-coli outbreak. It’s not something new. It’s something we rely on day to day,” she said.

On the big question of who “controls” Public Health, she said. “Absolutely there are checks and balances.”

“I work very closely with our corporation counsel to make sure any orders are legal and enforceable. I do this everyday in my job,” she said.

She also reports to the Board of Health and ultimately to the Pierce County Board of Supervisors.

“I serve at their pleasure. They can fire me at anytime even if I look at them wrong,” she said. “If I wrote an order they didn’t feel was appropriate, they could immediately rescind that order.”

She said any penalty also has to be prosecuted by the corporation counsel and upheld in Pierce County Circuit Court.

“There are indeed checks and balances to any Public health officer’s order,” she said.

Could Masks be Mandated?

A question was asked by a member on whether masks could be mandated.

“We have not discussed mask mandates so far in Pierce County,” she said.

She indicated, though, that outbreaks happening in bars could likely have been avoided if employees were wearing masks.

Public Health and Warrants

“I heard a rumor on Facebook that I could bust into people’s home and that’s absolutely not true,” she said. “I do not have extra authority to bust into people’s homes. The only exception may be places of business that I license. They do need to allow my inspectors to enter for food code license, but we absolutely do not have the power to bust into people’s properties. Absolutely not.”

She noted that businesses that have temporarily closed because of COVID-19 outbreaks closed by management decision, not because unlicensed Health said they had to.

They made the decision on their own,” she said. “Now if we were getting infection after infection and they were not willing to cooperate with us at all, we might have to look at something. I’ve never gotten anywhere near that point with a business.”

Safer at Home at the County Level?

She said such a notion would be “an absolute last resort.”

“That’s not practical for us. We couldn’t likely enforce something like that. My jot is to keep us from getting to the point of having to talk about a Shelter in Place order.”

Both Ellsworth School District Superintendent Barry Cain and Ellsworth Public Library Director Tiffany Meyer commenter Snyder for the work her department is doing through the COVID-19 outbreak.

“They have really worked with us closely in voting ahead,” he said, noting that the district will be meeting with health officials in the coming week with a plan for the next school year.

Matt Anderson, pastor at C-3 Church which also operates the Sunshine Christian Children’s Center commented at the meeting about the importance of taking into effect all aspects of putting restrictions on people’s lives.

“My point is coming from a faith community and from the spiritual and emotional side of people’s lives, it’s very important to work together in a balanced effort to make sure we can keep things rolling along in a safe manner,” he said.

He said that reaction to the virus “has been a little overboard considering state death rates, etc. We have 90 percent of the people wanting to have children back to school.”

Snyder agreed how important mental health is in any decision and that the reason Pierce County hasn’t had any deaths can somewhat be attributed to the work her department is doing. “Some of the measures may have seemed like an extreme burden, but some of the things people have done have worked,” she said.