Just outside Kansas City, this county still has no mask mandate. Why did they say no?
Born and raised in Leavenworth County, Staci Vega said she has had enough.
The owner of two businesses blocks from the courthouse, she is irritated, embarrassed and dumbfounded over the county commission’s recent vote not to mandate face masks to combat COVID-19. It was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
She is moving, taking the one business of hers with a storefront, Buckles & Bows, a clothing boutique, and moving it across the river and state line to Platte County, where masks are mandated.
“I just feel like they don’t care about me. I feel like they don’t care about a lot of us,” Vega, who was a nurse for 28 years and also owns a residential cleaning business, Queens of Clean, said of the county. “The most patriotic thing you can do is to wear a face mask to help save someone’s life, to help save your community, to help save your country and to help save your business. It’s just unbelievable to me that people even have to make this a debate.”
But eight months into the pandemic, with daily infections and deaths at their highest levels, the debate has become sharper than ever. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly issued a statewide face covering protocol, Executive Order 20-68, that would go into effect Nov. 25 unless counties opted out.
In a 3 to 1 vote, Leavenworth County opted out on the last day, making it a no-mask-mandate island, surrounded on all sides by counties that now require masks: Johnson, Wyandotte, Douglas, Jefferson and Atchison in Kansas, and by Platte County in Missouri.
Of the state’s 105 counties, 62 now require masks — Miami County, just south of Johnson, is among the latest. Almost all of the remaining counties without mandates are sparsely populated.
Leavenworth is now the largest county in Kansas by population, with some 82,000 residents, without a mandate. Each of the state’s more populous counties — Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee, Wyandotte and Douglas — require masks.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s embarrassing,” said Vega of an issue that has split the residents of this county, which voted 59% for Donald Trump. The president has regularly downplayed the effectiveness of masks. Wearing or not wearing one has, for many, become a political statement.
The Leavenworth County vote
Leavenworth Board of Commissioners Chairman Doug Smith did not vote on the mandate. He was out sick as he had been for several weeks. That day, his 97-year-old mother from Tonganoxie, in western Leavenworth County, died from COVID-19 complications. In a recent text exchange, Smith declined to say how he would have voted, but it would not have changed the outcome either way.
Certainly the threat posed by rising COVID-19 infections is not in question. Vaccines have raised hopes for prevention as the first doses are expected to arrive in mid-December. Meanwhile, cases are hitting record highs.
Leavenworth County health director Jamie Miller laid out the danger at a Nov. 18 commission meeting: From Oct. 18 to Nov. 7, the percentage of positive cases — based on about 1,100 to 1,300 tests per week — rose threefold, from 5.75% to 17.76%.
Deaths were up. At the end of October, the county had logged 14 COVID-19 deaths. Now they are at 32, more than doubling in a month. Miller said the rise in infections is being driven by social gatherings: weddings, birthday parties, neighbors seeing neighbors, sporting events.
“We’re seeing an influx of community spread,” Miller told the officials. “Community spread means it’s unknown exactly where everyone is catching it from. It’s everywhere.”
The only strategies available, he told the board, are the ones they already have: staying home, social distancing, good hygiene, wearing masks.
“We need to do everything and anything we can to push these strategies out into our community to help slow the spread,” he said. “The health department is, for lack of a better term, taxed. We are overwhelmed. … We cannot continue down this path.”
Spurred by that sobering data, the city of Leavenworth, home to about 45% of the county’s population, immediately passed its own mask mandate, requiring them inside restaurants and other public places. Some residents hailed the move. Others called it intrusive government overreach. The city of Lansing, with another 12,000 residents, followed suit with a mandate on Nov. 24.
But one day later, the county commissioners voted no, meaning the county is now split, with some 55% of residents, as well as all personnel at Fort Leavenworth, in areas with mandates and the rest — including the smaller towns of Basehor, Tonganoxie and Linwood — without.
Vicky Kaaz was the lone vote in favor of requiring masks. At the meeting, she sharply criticized the decision to opt out, and posted her statement on her Facebook page.
“Some might claim that my decision to support a mandate makes me a tyrant,” she said in part. “I’m sorry those individuals feel that way. I love freedom as much as the next person, but not when we choose to ignore the public safety and welfare of others.”
An analysis last month, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, showed what mask mandates have accomplished in Kansas: Among counties with an order, new cases dropped on average 6% in the month and a half following the mandate. Meanwhile, cases in counties with no mandate doubled on average.
“We thought this was a prudent step,” Leavenworth city Mayor Myron “Mike” Griswold told The Star of instituting the city mandate. “It wasn’t something that was done, you know, just on a whim. We did what we knew to be right.”
Griswold wants a unified, countywide mandate, but suggests that county officials, at least for now, are wedded to a different philosophy geared toward personal choice.
“I mean the elephant in the room is they keep listening to their public health officer, but they don’t listen to him,” Griswold said. “He’s given them his expert advice. He’s been doing a really, really great job over the last six, seven, eight months telling the county commissioners, I guess, what they don’t want to hear.”
But Mike Stieben, self-described as “a conservative Republican,” said that he and his colleagues on the board are hardly blind to the dangers of COVID-19. The issue, he said, is not masks.
“I think the key word is ‘mandate,’” he told the Star this past week in his office.
“We believe in all of the health recommendations,” Stieben said. “We believe it. But it’s the element of coercion that we don’t believe in. I think that’s a view of a very large number of people in Leavenworth County.”
In voting against a mask mandate, Commissioner Chad Schimke said, “I want people to exercise common sense, do the right thing, recognize your neighbor, be kind, take all the steps we’ve talked about nonstop since this started in March. I don’t need any more government oversight than I already have, personally.”
Commissioner Jeff Culbertson raised the concern of enforcement.
“We’re not saying don’t wear a mask, we’re saying wear a mask,” he said before the vote. “I think it’s to the point if we can’t enforce the rule, we don’t want to make the rule.”
Stieben shuffled through papers showing the state of COVID-19 infections, deaths and hospitalizations in the county.
Right now, he just does not think the numbers are high enough to opt into a law.
“Now, we have lots and lots and lots of cases — lots of cases,” Stieben said, “and my heart goes out to people that have had family members who have been touched by this; it does make people, very, very very ill. But this is not something that can’t be handled. I’m going to get 100 emails that say you’re diminishing it. I’m not diminishing it.”
Residents are divided
The non-mandate view has support. At the commission meetings, a handful of residents spoke about “freedom of choice,” and “the erosion of civil liberties.”
April Cromer, 47, who retired on disability as a paralegal for the federal government, told the officials, “As I see it, there are two camps. There’s a fear camp and there is a freedom camp. Many fear the virus is going to infect them. And I understand that. The virus is dangerous. I know people who contracted it, and I also know people who have passed away. But nothing is more dangerous than freedoms being stripped away from its citizens.”
She said she would begin a petition effort to repeal mask mandates in both Lansing and the city of Leavenworth and push to put a mandate up to a vote.
“I’m not against masks,” Cromer told The Star this past week. “I’m against the government forcing us to wear masks.”
Pat Proctor, a Republican and a former U.S. Army colonel who was elected in November for his first term representing the area in the Kansas House, also spoke. Owner of the local Baan Thai Restaurant, he called the city’s mandate a “draconian” job killer because it promotes “panic and fear, instead of trusting people to do what’s right.”
“The right thing’s not difficult to understand here,” he told the board, “We have inalienable rights. You don’t violate everybody’s rights because you’re scared. You give people information. You trust them to make the right decisions for themselves and their families.”
“That’ just a bunch of horsepucky,” said Vega, a passionate supporter of a mandate. Her father, an uncle, two aunts and three cousins all contracted the virus. A family friend whom she considered an uncle died of it.
“Your liberties stop when it infringes upon mine. If your wearing a mask infringes upon your rights, I apologize, but we’re in the middle of a 100-year pandemic. I say suck it up and put the mask on.”
Duane LaDuron, 62, and a “lifelong Republican” the longtime owner of Gators Games and Hobby in downtown Leavenworth, thinks the county is being willfully and dangerously ignorant.
“I want to say the ignorance — that they don’t know better at the county level — is the reason they are doing that,” he said. “But they do know. They’ve been shared by us and a lot of other people, the facts, the scientific facts, but they choose to ignore them.
“I think it’s fear. I think they’re afraid of constituents. They’re afraid that they’ve gone on for so long that you don’t need to wear masks, to come back now and turn around and say, ‘Oh, I was wrong all that time,’ it’s sort of hard to swallow for them.”
LaDuron said it is true that people should be trusted to make good choices. “But we don’t,” he said. “That’s why we have speed limit laws, why we have (laws against) no shirt, no shoes.”
Renee Lemons, 10-year owner of nearby Karma Cakes, said a mask mandate makes sense for multiple reasons.
“From a business standpoint, I’m for the mandate so we can stay open. We can’t afford to have all the businesses around us close down again. If it takes a mask and people wearing it to keep us open and keep us profitable and our business then that’s what we need to do.”
She knows masks are not a singular panacea, but they work. They help, she said. It frustrates her that hers is the one county in the Kansas City area opting out of Kelly’s order. (The only other county in the metro without a mask mandate is Cass County to the southeast, in Missouri.)
“Did you watch that commission meeting?” Lemons said. “I think it’s ignorant. They had a few people who spoke there who are die-hard …” She interrupted herself. She then said emphatically, “I’m a Republican. It’s not against your constitutional rights. It’s about being smart.
“It’s only your right until it infringes on somebody else.”
This story was originally published December 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
