Weld County to allow all businesses to restart Monday, placing county against state policies
This story has been updated with comments from Jared Polis.
WELD COUNTY — The Weld County Board of Commissioners plans to allow any business to reopen beginning Monday in defiance of Gov. Jared Polis’ tiered approach to restarting economic life in the state during the coronavirus pandemic, setting up a potential conflict between the county and state officials.
Weld County’s “Safer At Work” policy would allow any business in the county to reopen and place the onus on owners and customers to make sure they comply with social distancing and safety rules beginning Monday, the day after the statewide stay-at-home order is expected to expire.
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The title is a play on the Polis Administration’s “Safer At Home” guidelines that would allow certain individualized services such as tattoo parlors and hair salons to reopen, but continue to ban sit-down restaurant service and bars from operating.
Cities in Weld County are allowed to continue to restrict certain types of businesses from reopening within their own limits.
The guidelines generally follow other safety protocols at Colorado businesses that have remained open during the past several weeks: limiting how many customers can be in a store at one time, installing plexiglass in front of cash registers, designating specific times for high-risk populations to shop and regularly cleaning surfaces.
In a statement Friday, County commissioners said business owners aren’t compelled by the guidelines to reopen their companies, and the point of the policy is to free residents to do what they wish, whether that’s staying at home or engaging in open commerce.
“What we aren’t going to do is pick winners and losers as to who gets to restart their livelihoods,” the board said.
Anxious to reopen
Some local governments are in the beginning phases of restarting economic activity as people continue to face dire financial circumstances from the loss of jobs and, in many cases across the country, slow responses from state unemployment benefit agencies that weren’t designed to handle hundreds of thousands of claims in a manner of weeks.
While local leaders across the U.S. and President Donald Trump continue to argue that the economy has been put on ice for too long, other government leaders and public health officials say allowing commerce to restart would severely increase the risk of spreading coronavirus and overloading local health-care capacity.
Polis is taking an approach akin to dipping his toe in the water, while Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Thursday they plan to continue stay-at-home orders through late May.
On Friday, Boulder County health officials extended its local stay-at-home order to May 8.
Earlier this week, Eagle County received an exemption from the stay-at-home order from state health officials after showing two straight weeks of declining cases and setting up a full-scale testing and monitoring operation.
However, Eagle County officials petitioned the state for more-lax rules, while Weld County officials appear to be claiming that the state doesn’t have the authority to say which businesses are allowed to reopen and which ones aren’t.
Meanwhile, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp allowed a wide swath of service-based leisure businesses to reopen beginning today, a plan that has been called reckless by local health officials and by the Trump Administration.
A challenge to state authority
Weld County has long played challenger to statewide authority, particularly within Polis’ inaugural term as governor.
After the Democratically controlled state Legislature passed sweeping oil and gas reforms last year through Senate Bill 181, Weld County asserted that the clause expanding the power of local governments to regulate operations within their borders allowed the county to have laxer rules than the rest of the state.
At the time, University of Denver law professor Kevin Lynch told BizWest that assertion goes against case law allowing the state to supersede local rules in matters that aren’t specifically local matters, such as public health.
“The state regulations still exist as a backdrop and a minimum floor, and that’s what Weld County can’t do; they can’t say state regulations don’t apply to them,” he said of the county’s efforts to have lighter oil regulations.
On Thursday, Weld County commissioners chairman Mike Freeman told local radio station 1310 KFKA that Polis already abdicated that power when he said weeks ago that he expected voluntary compliance with stay-at-home orders and wouldn’t push law enforcement to vigorously uphold it.
“I think he made it very clear he expected local health departments and local counties to figure this out,” he said.
But in a Friday press conference, Polis said the widespread reopening of businesses would cause a public health threat and state officials will use “every mechanism we have” to stop Weld’s move, including withholding state funding and revoking licenses of businesses that reopen.
