Missouri AG Eric Schmitt issues threat as Jackson County considers new health regulations
Jackson County is mulling whether to enact its own set of rules for managing health emergencies after a court ruling last fall negated the state regulations that the county was relying on to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
The county has the authority to do so under its constitutional home rule charter. But some members of the county legislature on Monday expressed concerns about the proposal as presently written, and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt took to Twitter as legislators met and threatened a court challenge in a series of tweets.
“This ordinance proposal that I just read out of Jackson County, MO is truly insane,” Schmitt posted from his personal Twitter account. “It essentially grants unilateral authority to the Jackson County Health Department. It would basically create a public health dictatorship.”
County legislators Tony Miller and Jeanie Lauer said they worried that the ordinance would give too much power to the county health director to order businesses closed and enforce quarantines.
But the county administration and the sponsors of the proposed regulatory framework, legislators Jalen Anderson and Crystal Williams, said the ordinance is not an overreach. It borrows liberally from the health regulations that Kansas City, which also has home rule powers, has on its books and were not affected by the Cole County court ruling.
Much of the proposal’s requirements are also no different than the ones Jackson County followed prior to the court decision, said acting health director Ray Dlugolecki.
“There’s no new authority,” he said.
The legislature’s health and environment committee will discuss the ordinance Jan. 18. To clear a path for possible passage, Williams and Anderson said they were open to amending the ordinance before that meeting, addressing concerns raised by several of their colleagues at Monday’s meeting of the entire nine-member governing body.
Miller voiced the most detailed list of concerns about the proposal’s lack of provisions giving people a way to challenge decisions that would impede their freedom or movement, or ability to conduct their businesses in areas of the county where the regulations would apply. All but Kansas City and Independence, which have their own health departments, would be affected.
“The ordinary person who is going to read this, uh, it sounds kind of onerous,” he said.
The lack of those rights of due process also concerned Lauer and legislator Theresa Galvin. They agreed with Miller that, perhaps, it would be a good idea to create a health advisory board that might be a check on the decisions of the director of public health in the future.
“This is a lot of authority to give to one person,” Galvin said.
Dlugolecki said doing nothing could put the public at risk down the road. Thanks to the Cole County ruling, the county health department is now powerless to isolate someone who could infect others with deadly diseases like Ebola or tuberculosis, should they refuse to quarantine, he said.
Anderson urged his colleagues to look beyond the current concerns about COVID-19 and the highly politicized environment that has poisoned discourse about public health policies.
“I think what’s key as we move forward,” Anderson said, “is that we don’t just tie this legislation to the idea of masks, and we don’t just tie this to what we face today. This is a discussion about what the powers are of our health department and our health directors and this government as a whole in the area of public health.”
Separately, the county is appealing a procedural ruling last month that forbid it from pressing an appeal of the Cole County court decision. Judge Daniel Green would not allow Jackson County and four other local health departments o intervene because he said they were not direct parties to the lawsuit that effectively stripped many local jurisdictions from imposing health restrictions.
This story was originally published January 10, 2022 at 4:38 PM with the headline "Missouri AG Eric Schmitt issues threat as Jackson County considers new health regulations."
