At a special meeting of the Wright County Board of
Commissioners this morning (May 15), the board responded to the announced
lifting of Gov. Tim Walz’s stay at home Executive Order – which will expire
Monday, May 18.
The board wrestled with the challenge of fully opening
its public counters while adhering the social distancing guidelines recommended
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Minnesota
Department of Health. After discussing several possible scenarios, the board
approved a structured opening of public counters – requiring the public to make
an appointment for a time specific to conduct business with the county.
The offices scheduled to
have public facing counters available for appointments starting Wednesday, May
27 include Assessor, Recorder, Health & Human Services, Planning &
Zoning, Veteran Services, Auditor/Treasurer and Administration. The License
Bureau (Department of Motor Vehicles) is tentatively scheduled to have public
facing counters available starting Thursday, June 4 – pending remodeling
currently taking place and more time to devise a plan to systematically route
traffic through the most highly congested county offices in the Government
Center.
Commissioner Mark Daleiden said the appointment
approach was the only avenue to take given that safety remains the single
biggest concern in county facilities.
“In order to follow CDC and Minnesota Department of
Health guidelines, I don’t see any other choice,” Daleiden said. “We can’t
control how many people show up at one time. This facility is not set up the
best and there is no way that we can control social distancing guidelines in
many of those areas.”
Commissioner Darek Vetsch explained that there remain
multiple unknowns regarding a “re-opening” of public windows. These include
changes in staffing behind the counters given the social distancing guidelines
as well as ways to keep the public safe from potential community spread of
COVID-19.
“We’ve looked at multiple different plans of how to
safely open public counters that is mindful of the safety of both the public
and our staff,” Vetsch said. “For many of those departments, it won’t be an
issue because they don’t do the kind of volume business that we see at the DMV.
Making appointments for those departments should be relatively smooth and easy
to do. The hope is to not have a flood of people all coming in on May 27 at the
same time. We’re still required to follow social distancing and this is an
approach that can get service requests fulfilled without putting anyone at any
undue risk.”
Board Chair Christine Husom understands the angst felt
by residents who haven’t been able to conduct the business they need with the
county under the current situation. It has been a fluid, morphing situation since
mid-March and, while returning to some sense of normalcy is a positive sign,
the fact remains that the COVID-19 numbers in Wright County have grown at the
fastest rate of any time during the past few days and that caution needs to be
taken.
“This has been a very challenging time,” Husom said.
“It’s frustrating for every citizen that needs to come in and do business with
the county to take care of their business. We recognize that. We had
anticipated that the (stay at home) order would be extended. We weren’t
prepared to open public windows on the 18th to put the safeguards in
place to better protect the public and our staff. If we didn’t have growing
numbers of people contracting COVID, it might have been a different story. But,
we do and we want to take precautions and having an appointment system to start
is a positive step.”
The impact of COVID-19 isn’t going to go away any time
soon, but Wright County Administrator Lee Kelly said that staff and county
leadership have taken as many precautionary, proactive steps as possible for
when the public would be returning in larger numbers to the Government Center
and other county facilities.
“We put a lot of thought into trying to meet the needs
of the public in a safe way,” Kelly said. “We realize that there is a backlog
in some areas and we want to be sensitive to meeting that. We feel that
providing structure to how we open up and using a phased approach is going to
net the best result for everyone involved. I don’t know that there’s a perfect
solution, but we feel we’ve done the best we can to provide the opportunity for
it to go well as we continue to roll out more options.”