Gov rejects splitting prisons, colleges
Frustrated Middleton and North Andover officials vowed to keep pushing the state to rethink its coronavirus risk assessment system after Gov. Charlie Baker on Tuesday rejected their calls to carve out the jail and college campus outbreaks they say are unfairly skewing their town numbers and stalling their reopenings.
“I’m disappointed to say the least,” Middleton Board of Selectmen member Brian Cresta said. “I hope at some point (Baker) and his administration will take a long look at the flaws in this so-called color code and realize one size fits all doesn’t work.”
Middleton has just one active COVID-19 case in town, but surged to the top of the state’s high-risk “red” list last week due to an outbreak at the Middleton Jail that’s infected 133 inmates. North Andover landed in the red over an outbreak at Merrimack College local officials say was primarily linked to a dormitory in Andover on the campus that splits the two towns.
Leaders in both towns implored Baker to consider cutting the “contained” outbreaks out of their caseloads so they would no longer be classified in
the high-risk red zone and their businesses could move on to step two of the third phase of reopening.
But Baker said Tuesday, “I don’t think it makes sense for us to change a program model for 351 cities and towns for one or two outliers.” “With respect to things like jails, long-term care facilities, isolated colleges, isolated spots, I think our view is we’ll put the data out there as it stands and then we’re happy to work with communities around decision making or messaging,” Baker said in Statehouse press conference.
If the state started “making what we consider to be value judgments on the data, on some level I think that would create more confusion than it would create clarity,” Baker added.
But State Sen. Diana DiZoglio, D-Methuen, whose district includes North Andover, where businesses are struggling to regain their footing after the onetwo punch of the 2018 Columbia Gas explosions and the COVID-19 pandemic, said bluntly, “If the governor will not budge on the designation, I hope he is simultaneously preparing to fund a bailout for those local businesses that persevered in the face of the explosions but won’t survive this pandemic.”
House Minority Leader Bradley Jones, R-North Reading, who represents a portion of Middleton, proposed a “bifurcation” of the red zone that would allow “some flexibility” for reopening in communities with contained outbreaks, such as those in jails, versus those dealing with clusters in more porous facilities like nursing homes or college campuses.
North Andover Board of Selectmen Chairman Chris Nobile said the governor’s remarks felt “dismissive.”
“To me this is an opportunity to create clarity and also not to penalize a community that has been doing the right thing,” Nobile said. “This is a plea that we’re going to continue to make.”