‘Giant step forward:’ Fresno lifts shelter-in-place next week, sets business reopen plan
Fresno Mayor Lee Brand announced Thursday that he will lift the city’s shelter-in-place order after the Memorial Day holiday weekend and allow businesses to open back up.
The mayor updated his emergency order to end the shelter-in-place for the general public on May 26 and authorize most businesses to reopen with safety measures. The update will mandate that residents wear masks inside businesses and encourage them to wear them in public to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
Previously, Brand had extended the shelter-in-place order to the end of the month.
Restaurants will have to get Fresno County approval to open for dine-in after the county got a green light Thursday on that portion of its reopening plan. Later Thursday, the county signaled that restaurants could begin reopening as soon as paperwork was filed.
The Fresno City Council also planned to vote on allocating $10 million of federal CARES dollars to coordinate with Fresno County to increase COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.
Vulnerable populations are still strongly encouraged to shelter in place.
The updated order also decriminalizes social distancing violations except for flagrant offenders.
The mayor made the announcement during a news conference that was streamed live on Facebook and CMAC along with incoming mayor Jerry Dyer and Councilmembers Miguel Arias, Luis Chavez and Mike Karbassi.
‘Manage the curve’
“Today the city of Fresno is flipping the script and saying we believe we can effectively manage the curve and keep our most vulnerable people and our senior citizens safe,” Brand said. “We’re offering hope, and hope is a powerful word that guides us through the darkest nights to the light of day.
“But we’re also offering more than hope,” Brand said. “We’re using our dimmer switch to control the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.”
Businesses and restaurants
Dyer listed the things the new order does and doesn’t do. He notes that after it is lifted, the state order still applies. It also eliminates the mandate to wear masks in public, and instead strongly encourages people to wear them. Masks are still required inside businesses.
The order removes the requirement that businesses should only allow one person per 500 square feet.
The changes offer a middle ground for those in Fresno who want everything open and others who believe businesses should stay shut down, Dyer said.
“I’m confident that the steps that we’re taking as a city is allowing for the employees, the customers, and the population as a whole to be safe within the city of Fresno,” he said. “Now it’s time for Fresno to get back to work.”
Thursday afternoon, the City Council voted 7-0 to approve a local ordinance to allow outdoor dining at restaurants. Restaurants contribute 16% of Fresno’s sales tax base and thousands of jobs, he said. He acknowledged the new ordinance might not work for all eateries, but city leaders are open to working with owners and operators to find solutions.
“Restaurants have been especially hard hit by the pandemic,” he said. “We’re going to have to be able to embrace different ideas, and look at all of our options so we can help move things forward and secure the jobs in our community that we’ve lost because of COVID.”
What about the curve?
The city’s announcement came one day after Fresno County’s interim health officer declared “Fresno is not flattening the curve.”
But city leaders on Thursday insisted coronavirus case totals are continuing to rise primarily due to increased testing capacity. They also said the metric that’s most important to consider is hospital and intensive care unit capacity.
Chavez said Fresno County took a long time to ramp up testing. That’s why the city is stepping in with money for testing and contact tracing.
“We are behind the ball here,” he said.
Arias said Fresno’s health care system remains stable, and that’s the most important factor to consider.
Constitutional rights
The mayor in his remarks thanked Dyer and every council member except for Garry Bredefeld, who has hammered his colleagues for the pandemic rules, calling them “authoritative,” “tyrannical” and “unconstitutional.”
Much of what Bredefeld called the mayor to do was done on Thursday: the shelter in place will be lifted, businesses will be allowed to reopen and face masks won’t be required in public.
But in a statement to The Bee after the news conference, Bredefeld said the changes still don’t go far enough.
“After we and the community put immense pressure on Brand and the City Council, they finally did the right thing and removed their unconstitutional house arrest orders (shelter in place) and will now stop threatening our citizens with fines and jail,” he said in an email. “Our citizens won today.
“Unfortunately, people have suffered immensely by their tyrannical policies. Unbelievably, they have still kept in place the mandatory wearing of masks in businesses despite no science to support this and so people will continue shopping in neighboring cities. The result of their incredibly stupid actions over the last two months will mean layoffs, furloughs and reduction in services to our community. We’ll keep the pressure on until churches and all other businesses open up,” he said.
During the news conference, Arias directly addressed earlier comments with similar sentiments.
“It’s clear for us that individuals have a constitutional right to have their opinion, and at times to have extreme views, but they don’t have a constitutional right to infect somebody else with the deadly virus,” he said.
“We still have a small and extreme voice of opposition, but we’re not going to heed those loud screams, no matter how loud, how personal and how threatening they become,” Arias said. “Our responsibility is to ensure the public safety of everyone, not just to react to the extreme views of a few.”
This story was originally published May 21, 2020 at 12:31 PM.