Despite threats from DeSantis, Orange hasn’t heard how much it will be fined for vax mandate
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings isn’t sure how much his county will be fined — if at all — days after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his administration would levy fines on local governments who mandate vaccines for their employees.
Demings said if a fine is imposed, the county would likely sue.
Demings on July 28 said vaccines would be required for county workers as the delta variant surged with record-high infections, hospitalizations and now deaths.
“The state of Florida [has] not even promulgated rules of how to do the enforcement, and we have not received any correspondence from the Department of Health about violating those rules. We’ll just have to wait and see,” Demings said Friday. “We know that something was wrong with the directive that Gov. DeSantis put out, primarily because there were no rules in place. So we’ll just have to see how that all works out.”
Demings said the county attorney believes his order was made on “solid legal ground” and the mayor said “we’ll likely end up in litigation over it.”
The week began with DeSantis announcing he’d fine cities and counties with vaccine mandates $5,000 per violation, which could result in millions of dollars in fines for offending counties, such as Orange. An Orange County paramedic was among those who spoke at the news conference announcing the fines.
However, since then an executive order outlining rules hasn’t been posted to his website.
Demings said 78% of the county workforce has received at least one shot of vaccine ahead of the Sept. 30 inoculation deadline in his mandate. Employees can be exempted for medical or religious reasons. He said negotiations are ongoing with the union representing about 1,300 firefighters on language related to the mandate.
Meanwhile, county health officials have received reports of 85 more deaths since Monday, bringing the death toll to 372 in August, which was already the pandemic’s deadliest month here.
The previous high came in January when 229 county residents died with the virus.
But in further signs that the delta surge is waning, the county’s positivity is down to 12.32% over the past two weeks. On Sept. 4 it was 15.5%, and in July it peaked at about 21%.