County Council delays decision on withdrawing Phase 3 application

— by Minor Lile, Orcas Issues reporter —

Both the County Council and the Board of Health met yesterday (July 15) to consider a recommendation from County Health officer Dr. Frank James to withdraw the County’s application to move to Phase 3 of the State’s Safe Start Washington plan. Following a vote by the Board of Health in favor of withdrawing the application, the Council opted to seek more information from the State before making a final decision.

The Council’s decision grew out of a perception that there was a need to better understand the impact of Governor Jay Inslee’s July 14 order extending the pause on Safe Start applications to July 28. The Governor’s order was issued after the Council’s regular meeting on the 14th, during which Mark Tompkins, the County’s Director of Health and Community Services had reported on recent discussions with the State about the status of the Phase 3 application. Tompkins said that with the issuance of the new order, it was uncertain whether the information that had been provided earlier was still valid.

Board of Health recommendation

The Board of Health is composed of seven members. These are the three elected county council members as well as four appointed members. The Board vote was 5 to 1 in favor of withdrawing the Phase 3 application, with one abstention.

All the appointed members (Chair Dale Heisinger, Noel Monin, Kyle Davies, and John Geyman) voted in favor of withdrawing the application. In sharing his reasoning for an affirmative vote, Geyman noted that 20 of the 24 public comments that had been received prior to the meeting were in favor of remaining in Phase 2 at this time. Rick Hughes also voted in favor of withdrawing the application. Jamie Stevens voted against and Bill Watson abstained.

Prior to the vote, Dr James shared his reasoning for recommending that the County withdraw its application. These include uncertainty about the source of the most recent cases in the county and the possibility that there has been community spread of the virus; the challenge of receiving timely testing results because national laboratories are currently overwhelmed by the dramatic increase in the number of cases around the country; and the local response team, including Dr. James himself, is overextended and needs to be able to have breaks to recoup from a workload that has been unceasing for several months. He also said that the current application was clearly out of date and would have to be revised in any case.

County Council decision

The County Council meeting began shortly after the Board of Health meeting adjourned. During the Council meeting, Bill Watson said that although he had chosen to abstain during the Board of Health meeting, he was ‘leaning towards’ a vote in support of withdrawing the application. He said that his decision to abstain was based on not wanting to vote on what would have essentially been a recommendation to himself as a Council member.

Jamie Stevens said that he preferred to let the application stand and have the State ‘tell us what needs to be updated or changed’ when the pause order is eventually lifted. He expressed his view that the current ending date of July 28 will probably be extended again. He added that in the same way that things have changed since the application was originally submitted, they are almost certainly going to change again before the pause order is lifted. In Stevens’s view, there ‘doesn’t seem to be any downside to letting it (the application) sit there.’

Rick Hughes was the last of the three to share his view. When Hughes voted in favor of withdrawing the application during the Board of Health meeting, he framed his vote as being ‘in favor of either withdrawing or pausing’ the application. The significance of this somewhat nuanced position became clearer during the Council meeting when Hughes raised the question of whether pausing the application was an option that the other Council members were willing to consider. Only two options had been considered by the Board of Health. Those were to either withdraw the application or to let it remain in place, pending future action by the State. After some consideration, both Stevens and Watson said that they supported waiting until next Tuesday to continue the discussion.

The Council asked Mark Tompkins to contact the State to seek clarification on what the County’s options are regarding the current application and provide a report at next Tuesday’s regular Council meeting.

Hughes later added that while he had voted in favor of withdrawing the application at the Board of Health meeting, the viewpoint expressed by Stevens had ‘given him pause’. He said that with the Governor’s order forestalling movement from one phase to the next until at least July 28, he felt there was no need to make an immediate decision and that the County was ‘in an okay place to see how the situation on the ground changes over the next couple of weeks.’