To wear a face mask, or not wear a face mask — that’s the question that Horry County Council will debate yet again.
County Council on Tuesday evening voted to extend a mandate that all residents and visitors in Horry County must wear a face mask in public places like restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses. But in an unusual move Wednesday morning, Chairman Johnny Gardner wrote on Facebook that he’ll place an item on council’s next meeting agenda remove the mandate, a mechanism he said the council can use to have a deeper debate on the issue.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the ordinance extending the mask mandate was placed on a part of the agenda called the consent agenda, a procedural tool that allows council to vote on several noncontroversial pieces of legislation at once. Each meeting, council votes once to approve the whole slate of items on the consent agenda, and voted to approve the extension of the mask mandate as part of that agenda on Tuesday.
Councilman Al Allen, though, who represents a large portion of western Horry County, criticized that move, saying it amounted to “tyranny.” He argued that the mask mandate should be removed from the consent agenda and moved to a later part of the meeting so members could discuss it further. A vote to do that, though, failed 5-7.
In his Facebook post Wednesday morning, Gardner attempted to explain the purpose of the consent agenda and why the extension of the mask mandate was placed on that part of the agenda. He then said that he believed council should debate the issue further.
To bring the issue back up for debate, Gardner said he’ll place an item on the main agenda at council’s next meeting to remove the face mask mandate altogether. That way, he wrote, members can discuss the issue and then hold a vote on whether or not council should extend the mandate.
“This is not about whether the face mask resolution should have passed,” he wrote. “This is about whether council should have been allowed to debate the issue.”
He added: “It is not so much whether [the ordinance to remove the mandate] will pass but the right to debate whether it should pass.”
Allen praised Gardner’s move on Wednesday saying that “open discussion and debate is what allows ‘full transparency’ in our government structure for the people.”
The face mask mandate, he added, is “something we as a council need to look at more seriously instead of rubber stamping it.”
Tuesday’s vote extended the mandate for sixty days, until Halloween. As it stands now, the face mask mandate will be in effect until at least Sept. 15 when council meets again. Information on all upcoming County Council meetings can be found here.
Under the mandate, all residents and visitors in Horry County must wear a medical or cloth face mask, or other face covering, when entering enclosed spaces like restaurants, barber shops, grocery stores and other businesses. People who can’t safely wear a face covering due to age or an underlying health condition, as well as those can’t remove a face covering without assistance of others, are exempt from the mandate. Similarly, people whose religious beliefs prevent them from covering their faces and those who need to communicate with a hearing impaired person also aren’t required to wear a mask. At restaurants and gyms, patrons can remove masks to eat and work out and masks may be temporarily removed when receiving a service, like a hair cut, that requires access to the face.
Those who don’t comply with the mandate could face civil fines from the county of up to $100. So far, no one has been fined.
To date, Horry County has seen 9,422 positive cases of COVID-19 and 186 people have died from the disease. Another 800 people have been hospitalized by the virus. County leaders first enacted the face mask requirement in response to a spike in coronavirus cases here, including a high of 396 on July 3.
