A rural California county allowed nonessential businesses to reopen and diners to eat in restaurants on Friday, becoming the first to defy Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide order barring such moves during the coronavirus pandemic.
The county is “moving forward with our reopening plan,” Modoc County Deputy Director of Emergency Services Heather Hadwick said in an email.
She said the county of about 9,000 people in the state’s far northeast corner near Oregon had no COVID-19 cases.
Hadwick said the county's plan aligns with Newsom’s indicators for reopening. Schools were not opening Friday, she said, but districts now have the option to do so if they can accommodate preventative measures.
“Our residents were moving forward with or without us,” she said. "We really needed to create guidelines for them so that they could do this in the safest way possible.”
Newsom did not say during his daily briefing Thursday whether he would intervene in Modoc County as he did earlier this week in Southern California, when he ordered the shutdown of Orange County beaches.
Read the full story from the Associated Press here.
– Matthew Green (@MGreenKQED)