A Minnesota panel on Wednesday approved another 30-day extension of the state’s peacetime emergency, citing concerns about another surge of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
The continuation puts the state into a 14th month of the emergency due to the pandemic. Health officials said the flexibility is critical as they attempt to respond to the growing presence of coronavirus variants in the state. The Minnesota Executive Council unanimously granted the extension, which gives the governor broad authority to issue executive orders without legislative approval.
And while Gov. Tim Walz has previously used the powers to mandate masks, limit business capacity and social gatherings, the first-term Democrat on Tuesday said that he didn’t plan to put in place another round of restraints.
“The way the virus acts, we will respond accordingly. If we start to see numbers go back up, we will see if there’s things that need to happen,” Walz said. “At this point in time, we don’t have plans to do that. We think that the mitigation measures that are in place are working.”
Walz’s push for another extension of the peacetime emergency comes as the state has seen COVID-19 case rates, test positivity rates and hospitalizations climb. Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said the number of Minnesotans hospitalized with the illness has tripled since early March.
While the trends were concerning, Malcolm said the state continued its push to vaccinate Minnesotans against the disease and to encourage mitigation measures like masking, social distancing and testing and quarantine when people developed symptoms.
“We’ve headed back up that curve. What we are very hopeful for is the impact of the vaccines helping to reduce the severity of the illness, particularly among some of our most vulnerable,” Malcolm told the Executive Council. “The challenge is to keep moving as aggressively and quickly and equitably … as we can in getting vaccines to Minnesotans to try to keep pace with, and even stay ahead of, the case growth that we’re seeing and that requires enormous nimbleness.”
Forty-six other states have similar emergency orders in place and have used the flexibility to pull down federal emergency funds, activate state National Guard troops and scale-up testing and vaccination infrastructure. And without them, Walz said the state could lose $35 million in federal assistance for feeding the hungry, see protections for workers and consumers fall away and systems developed to test for COVID-19 and vaccinate against it.
In Minnesota, the governor’s powers have come under fire by Republicans in the divided Legislature. GOP lawmakers who control the Senate have passed several proposals to roll back Walz’s orders or block his authority to issue them.
But with a DFL majority in the House of Representatives, efforts to end the state’s peacetime emergency or to curb emergency orders have so far failed.
Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-East Gull Lake, said Republicans would be open to taking up legislation that would allow testing and vaccination structures to remain in place or allow the state to continue pulling down federal funding for nutrition assistance, but he said his colleagues took issue with the broad scope of Walz’s authority during the peacetime emergency.
