Easing limits

The Taylor County Executive Committee at its meeting on May 13 approved making masks optional for employees and visitors and to open all Taylor County facilities to full capacity, beginning June 1.

Committee member Chuck Zenner said it was time to drop the mask mandate since many people weren’t following it anyway. Committee member Scott Mildbrand added his measure of when it was time to drop the mandate was when everyone had the opportunity to receive the vaccine and if a person didn’t want to get vaccinated, that was fine.

The committee also approved opening all county facilities to full capacity.

Zenner said right now it was at 25 percent and recommended going back to full capacity and leave it up to the group renting or using the facility to decide how many people they felt comfortable allowing in.

County clerk Andria Farrand asked if that would include the meeting rooms in the courthouse. She said right now everyone was using the county board meeting room for meetings so they could social distance and it was hard to coordinate meetings for all the different county committees.

Zenner said if people felt uncomfortable using the smaller conference rooms and wanted to still meet in the county board room so they could social distance, he didn’t have a problem with that. He felt it should be left up to the committee to decide whether it wants to use the county board room or meet in one of the smaller conference rooms, adding if COVID-19 started back up again, the county can always go back to the restrictions. Mildbrand agreed.