As COVID cases climb, the Concord City Council will weigh bringing back an ordinance that would require masks for workers and customers inside retail businesses in early 2022.
Despite agreeing on the importance of COVID vaccines, councilors are not considering mandating vaccines for city workers.
During a Monday night council meeting where city councilors and staff wore masks, Ward 10 Councilor Zandra Rice Hawkins raised the issue of reinstating a city ordinance requiring masks to be worn indoors, citing the pressure on hospitals from rising COVID infections.
Statewide, just 5% of ICU beds and 13% of all hospital beds are available, according to the state dashboard.
“We know universal masking is a policy that works. It’s simple, effective, people have experience with it, it’s the same ordinance we’ve enacted in the past,” Rice Hawkins said. The council allowed the city’s previous mask ordinance to expire on June 1, after vaccines became widely available.
The City of Lebanon reinstated its mask ordinance for businesses in September.
Rice Hawkins’ motion to have City Solicitor Jim Kennedy prepare a revised ordinance based on the previous one failed, and the council instead approved a motion by At-Large Councilor Nathan Fennessy to create a committee that will draft a new ordinance. The council is aiming to hold a public hearing on an ordinance in January.
“In terms of wearing a mask, I think we really need to come up with an ordinance that people can look at, actually respond to, and have a public hearing. It will not be a pleasant experience. It will be a long night, I’d imagine just by guessing,” Mayor Jim Bouley said. “But I think we owe it to the community to do that.”
Some Concord residents wrote to the council before the meeting to ask the city to take action.
Ashley Babladelis wrote in an email that she was working from home while watching her 3-year-old daughter who was home after a COVID exposure shut down her preschool for 10 days. “She’s not old enough for the vaccine, and for parents of kids younger than 5 like myself, this pandemic is far from over,” Babladelis said in her email.
Another Concord resident, Kimberly Kirkland, wrote that she would stop patronizing local businesses and return to online shopping if customers kept entering stores without masks.
Ward 1 Councilor Brent Todd that when he solicited feedback from his constituents on the topic, he received overwhelming support, even more than he had seen the first time the city imposed a mask mandate.
The original mask ordinance explicitly excluded restaurants, which were covered under an Executive Order from Gov. Chris Sununu at the time. Rice Hawkins proposed including restaurants under the new ordinance.
Mask ordinances largely evaporated once vaccines were offered to the public. Some employers, mostly health care organizations, are requiring vaccinations. The city of Concord is recommending, but not requiring, its workers to wear masks but is not tracking how many employees have been vaccinated nor considering a requirement.
At-Large Councilor Byron Champlin suggested that the end date for a new mask ordinance be tied to CDC or state guidelines for COVID community transmission rates instead of a specific calendar date, given the unpredictability of the virus.
Councilors also debated how determining compliance with the mandate might play out in reality.
At-Large Councilor Amanda Grady Sexton said the council should think seriously about what kind of enforcement the ordinance should include. “If we as a city are not enforcing this ordinance, we are putting business owners in a position where they need to,” Grady Sexton said.
Ward 2 Councilor Erle Pierce said in an interview that when the mandate was in place before, he had received calls from constituents and business owners confused about the mandate and who was responsible for enforcing it.
Ward 3 Councilor Jennifer Kretovic was absent from the meeting but said in an interview Monday that she was frustrated by the vagueness of the request for an ordinance. Kretovic said that she had heard concerns from business owners about supply chain delays and understaffing, not issues with masking.
“In all the holiday shopping that I’ve done since Thanksgiving and talking with business owners, not a single one has asked for an ordinance to be put in place in the city of Concord,” she said. “If you talk to actual merchants, their issues are not related to wearing a mask or not wearing a mask.”
“Speaking as a business owner, I think it’s up to individual businesses to require masks or not,” said Councilor Fred Keach. “And on the other side of it, as a customer, if you’re not comfortable entering environments where masks aren’t worn, you don’t patronize that place.”
Throughout the discussion, councilors emphasized the importance of encouraging Concord residents to get vaccinated. Mayor Jim Bouley said he would try to get a mobile vaccination van to come to Concord to increase access to vaccines and booster shots.
“We need to be clear as a community, as a Council, that the number one thing is we need to increase our vaccination rates in the city of Concord,” Bouley said. He said that the overwhelming majority of COVID patients currently occupying beds in hospitals were unvaccinated.
The city does not currently track how many of its own staff have been vaccinated, according to the city’s Public Information Officer Stefanie Breton, with the exception of the Fire Department.
Some other New Hampshire cities, including Lebanon and Portsmouth, maintain vaccine records for employees in their human resources departments to guide COVID-exposure policies or determine whether masks should be worn in offices.
Concord is not considering a vaccine requirement for its employees. “The Federal mandate on vaccinations is pending court review and we were not covered by that mandate as a municipality,” Breton wrote in an email to the Monitor.
Breton also said that Concord encourages COVID vaccination and that the city allows workers paid time off for vaccination appointments and to recover from reactions to the vaccine.“Further, our Human Resources Department is helping employees navigate the vaccine appointment setting process when requested,” she said in an email.
The council also passed changes to parking rules on roads located near the downtown business district that were designated as narrow streets, part of an effort that began in 2017 to review parking issues based on citizen concerns, as well as emergency vehicle access and snow-clearing needs.
The most recently approved changes apply to streets that fall within the Wall Street neighborhood, which falls north of West St. and south of Pleasant Street, and between South State Street and South Spring Street. The Parking Committee worked with city staff to propose recommendations for new parking rules and held community forums for public input this fall.
Parking will be limited to one side of the street on Thorndike and Thompson Streets, and winter parking restrictions will go into effect on Lincoln and Marshall Streets between January and March. A description of the complete list of changes, presented at a public forum on October 25, is available on the city website.