Kemp pulls request to block Atlanta’s mask order

ATLANTA — Georgia’s governor has withdrawn a request for an emergency order to block the state’s largest city from ordering people to wear masks in public or imposing other restrictions related to the covid-19 pandemic while a lawsuit on the matters is pending.

Earlier this month, Gov. Brian Kemp sued Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and the City Council. The Republican governor argues local leaders cannot impose measures that are more or less restrictive than those in his executive orders.

The two sides met for court-ordered mediation Monday. Kemp spokesman Cody Hall announced Monday night that the governor wanted “to continue productive, good faith negotiations.” In a court filing Tuesday morning, lawyers for the state withdrew the request for an emergency order that was to be the subject of a hearing that day.

In response, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Jane Barwick canceled the hearing but ordered the two sides to continue mediation.

Hall claimed a partial victory Monday as part of the justification for standing down from the emergency hearing, saying Bottoms had clarified previous confusing statements.

“The mayor retreated from misleading claims that the city was reverting to phase one by shuttering specific businesses and penalizing law-abiding business owners,” Hall said in a statement. “From the beginning, this overstep by the mayor was our foremost concern and the primary impetus behind the litigation, given the threat of economic harm and immediate backlash from Atlanta’s business community.”

Bottoms, a Democrat, had said those statements are recommendations, not legal orders, and that Kemp did not understand what she was doing.

Atlanta is one of more than a dozen local jurisdictions in the state that has ordered people to wear face coverings in some public places in an effort to halt the spread of the coronavirus.