Conservancy District reveals survey on mask-vaccine policies

BY JD LONG (jim@harrisonnewsherald.com)

NEW PHILADELPHIA—Last Friday, Director of Human Resources Mary Burley of the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District revealed a COVID-19 survey she administered to the Tuscarawas County chapter of the Society of Human Resources Management.

And the survey led to a lengthy discussion on how to navigate the District through the COVID minefield. “So, the survey basically asked people, ‘Are you mandating a vaccine? Are you incentivizing people to get vaccines? Are you disincentivizing if they don’t have a vaccine?’” She said the survey was conducted before President Joe Biden’s recent COVID mandate requiring employers with 100 or more employees to get vaccinated or receive weekly testing. But Burley added that the 100-employee mandate does not affect the District because they are not a private entity.

“And it’s gray right now what affects public employers,” she told the board. Then Chief Counsel Jonathan Mizer took over, further explaining where he stated the Biden administration issued the emergency coverage through OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration).

He said it was wait-and-see for the Public Employee Risk Reduction Program and its direction regarding vaccine or mask mandates. He continued that it was still unclear if home testing would be good enough or if a COVID test at a doctor’s office is better. “We don’t know yet how broad that’s going to be,” Mizer stated. But he wasn’t sure if the employee or the employer would have to pay for any testing. He felt that, along with specifics needing clarifying, he would also expect challenges to the mandates.

Board member Joanne Limbaugh noted some mask mandate bills being introduced in the Ohio legislature are facing heavy resistance. And executive director Craig Butler felt the bill would not make it past the Senate but asked if the District should take some kind of action now or wait and see how the issue plays out in the general assembly.

Burley explained that the District was determined to be a low-work environment, contrasted with hospitals or nursing homes. “So, any of the standards for COVID, we’ve not been a high-risk environment,” she told the board. Burley also revealed data they’d been collecting since COVID first hit for cases just within the Conservancy District. Since March 2020, 20 employees have tested positive, with two from the delta variant. Thirty-seven employees have been quarantined “as close contact,” and 28 of the 37 were in close contact with someone outside the workplace.

“So, that’s a pretty high number,” Burley stated. “So what that tells me is that protocols we put in place at work, either because we were teleworking, we were social distance, we were wearing masks. There weren’t a whole lot of situations where employees were [in] close contact with each other with these twenty positive people.”

She said the recent positive COVID cases did not cause anyone to be infected because the people they worked with had been vaccinated. Vaccinated people don’t have to be quarantined, Burley added.