SW Idaho district health’s ‘circus sideshow’ meeting shows that things need to change
Heading into Thursday’s Southwest District Health board meeting, we already knew that it was going to get interesting.
Even with the anticipation of high drama, the reality of Thursday’s Southwest District Health board meeting exceeded all expectations.
You could tell that the virtual meeting wasn’t going to go well right off the bat.
The Zoom meeting included screen views of all 200 or so people who were calling in to view the meeting — not just the board members and participants, such as St. Luke’s CEO Chris Roth, state epidemiologist Christine Hahn and Nampa Mayor Debbie Kling. There also was a couple at their dining room table, apparently butchering an animal while they listened in on the call.
Once board members connected with the meeting, audio was garbled and barely audible.
As if that weren’t embarrassing enough, the meeting culminated in a temper tantrum by Idaho windmill tilter Ammon Bundy, who shoved an employee and forced his way into the Southwest District Health building like he was storming the Bastille. He and the others gathered could have entered the public meeting with a face covering, but he chose to ignore following the rules of wearing a face covering or getting his temperature taken, precautions against COVID-19. (It’s worth pointing out that visitors were not “getting their foreheads scanned” that day, as one of Bundy’s followers suggested; board members were getting their temperatures taken.)
The disruption from the Bundy crowd perhaps is fitting because of the strange and arcane way Idaho’s seven health districts were formed 50 years ago and still are governed today.
County commissioners from six counties sit on the Southwest District Health board: Canyon, Gem, Owyhee, Payette, Washington and Adams. Note that nearby Ada County is not included in that list. That’s because although Canyon and Ada counties are inextricably linked in many aspects of daily life in the Treasure Valley, Ada falls under Central District Health’s management instead.
The representative from Adams County, commissioner Viki Purdy, has posted anti-mask and conspiracy theory sentiments on her Facebook page, some that were removed and labeled by Facebook as “false information.”
As coronavirus cases spike in Canyon County, the board was scheduled to hear from hospital officials and medical experts, who were going to urge mask mandates, likely for the whole district if not at least all of Canyon County. Those medical leaders have advocated for a statewide mask mandate, recognizing that wearing masks helps slow the spread of the virus. On Tuesday, those hospital officials and medical experts successfully persuaded board members of the Central District Health Department to institute a mandatory mask order for all of Ada County.
The public health districts have been having trouble with virtual meetings and following open meeting laws to begin with. The Central District Health board had to redo its order to move Ada County back to Stage 3 when it realized its June 20 order violated the state’s open meetings law regarding posting an agenda. Even at Tuesday’s board meeting, there were at least a couple of hiccups when a roll call of votes mistakenly left out board member Elt Hasbrouck twice.
We are now five months into these at-home, call-in meetings, and it’s way past time for these agencies to have this figured out.
It’s clear, on a broader scale, things need to change. For starters, people who violently shove their way into a public building need to be arrested and held accountable for their actions, regardless of what constitutional principle they believe they’re standing on. Why were no arrests made or even citations issued?
Next, public health boards making public health decisions need to be populated by public health experts, not politicians who form their positions based on a meme posted randomly on social media.
Finally, we need a Treasure Valley public health district that makes decisions for the entire valley that is becoming more and more interconnected.
These circus sideshows — like we witnessed Thursday — get us nowhere and endangered lives. Viruses do not stop at county lines. It’s time to recognize we are better, and stronger, together.
This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
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