New Sonoma County civil complaint hotline burns up on first day

Sonoma County residents wasted little time in making use of a new hotline to lodge complaints about potential violations of public health orders under a brand new ordinance allowing administrative citations and fines for businesses and individuals who flout state and county restrictions aimed at controlling the coronavirus.

About 40 complaints had been received by the county by 8 a.m. Friday, even though the outgoing hotline message was Spanish-only until around 9 a.m. And the calls and emails continued arriving in quick succession through the day, according to county Communications Manager Paul Gullixson.

By 5 p.m., just more than 24 hours after the ordinance was adopted and went into effect, the county had received at least 189 complaints, he said.

“Most have been about businesses, including complaints about restaurants or businesses not requiring employees to wear face coverings or not practicing safety protocols,” Gullixson said via email. “After that, the biggest category of complaints concerned conduct in parks or other outside public spaces. Complaints about people not wearing masks are the primary ones.”

Some in the first round of citizen reports were less accusations than political commentary, including disapproval of the new penalty system, Gullixson said. About a half-dozen people wanted to see supervisors fined for appearing maskless in a Press Democrat photo taken March 15, before facial coverings were even required.

The new complaint process and attached civil penalties, which range from $100 for individual, personal violations, to $1,000, $5,000 or $10,000 fines for commercial infractions, are part of an expanded effort to bring the county’s COVID-19 infection rate under control after two months of rapidly escalating transmissions and deaths here and around the state.

Even with some delay in receiving full results from some testing labs, due to a data systems glitch at the state level, Sonoma County had posted nearly 3,360 positive cases since March, including 44 deaths, as of Thursday.

About two-thirds of all local cases have occurred since July, during a surge in transmission that landed the county on the state’s COVID watchlist. That designation resulted in renewed restrictions on indoor commercial activity that have yet to abate.

California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly announced Friday that the state had addressed technical problems resulting in delayed test reporting by counties, which should result in corrected data by next week.

In the meantime, although Sonoma County’s case totals may be inexact and the precise 14-day case rate impossible to calculate, new infections reported over each rolling two-week period are well above the state threshold of 100 per 100,000 population.

Sonoma County also has too many COVID-related hospitalizations and too few intensive care beds available for the state to permit it to reopen businesses.

These and other measures used by the state to determine when a county goes on and exits the watchlist must remain within set parameters for 17 consecutive days before the county is released from the more stringent closure under which it has operated since July 13.

County officials hope the new civil enforcement approach authorized through Thursday’s urgency ordinance may offer just the right carrot-and-stick incentive to win compliance from the minority who disregard health orders that limit public gatherings and require facial coverings and social distancing, as well as the closure of certain businesses.

The ordinance gives code enforcement personnel, as well as district attorney investigators, park rangers and sheriff’s deputies, the ability to issue noncriminal citations similar to a traffic ticket. Law enforcement officers can still cite violators for more serious, criminal misdemeanors, but public officials said they hope that outreach and education will prove sufficient to win compliance and limit the virus’s spread.

Gullixson did not say whether any citations had been issued Friday.

“With any orders, whatever laws there, if the community and the public get the message that they’re being enforced, they’re more likely to comply, just because it’s a citation,” Sonoma County Health Officer Sundari Mase said Friday. “Nobody wants to get a citation. Nobody wants go in the carpool lane because nobody wants a $400-plus ticket, right?

“So similarly, I think we’ll see with the smaller group of people that maybe haven’t been following the orders, that maybe because there’s a monetary fine associated with it, there will be more compliance with the orders,” she said.

Law enforcement officials have had the power to issue criminal citations for health order violations since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March, but have elected to approach the matter through education and warnings.

As of mid-July, the Sheriff’s Office has issued 19 warnings and 14 citations, mostly for conduct associated with suspected criminal activity.

Santa Rosa police had issued 11 warnings and 32 citations, two thirds of them to the founder of the now-defunct Crossing the Jordan, a nonprofit organization that operated thrift stores and sheltered people struggling with addictions and other issues and openly defied public shutdown orders. The nonprofit eventually was linked to dozens of coronavirus cases.

Sheriff Mark Essick told supervisors during their discussion of the civil enforcement ordinance that his office had no lingering backlog of complaints but said he did “not know what the call volume will be like when we add this additional tool for enforcement.”

He did not respond to a request for further elaboration on Friday.

County officials also said the civil complaint process, run through Permit Sonoma’s code enforcement office, offers an alternative to citizens who might be reluctant to file a report to police — say, an immigrant worker whose employer is not running a safe workplace, or a person who “isn’t going to pick up the phone and call police on a neighbor,” Supervisor Lynda Hopkins said.

It also offers an alternative to law enforcement, a more graduated step between a warning and a misdemeanor. A civil citation creates no permanent criminal record, Santa Rosa Police Chief Ray Navarro said.

“You’re not going to jail, or at risk of going to jail, on this. It’s just a fine,” he said.

Though Santa Rosa and other municipalities in Sonoma County can implement the county ordinance in their jurisdictions, the Santa Rosa City Council on Tuesday will consider adopting its own urgency ordinance for civil enforcement, one that mirrors what the county just approved.

But all parties say they would just as soon see few citations and, instead, enough outreach and voluntary compliance to solve the issue.

“I’m interested in seeing, you know, how people will respond to that and what impact that’s going to have,” Mase said, “and I hope it will be preventative, in other words, keep people in more compliance with the orders because they know now that there’s some actual teeth to the orders.”

The public can report violations by calling 1-833-SAFE707 (1-833-723-3707) or emailing safe707@sonoma-county.org.

A copy of the ordinance and frequently asked questions are available here.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include the hotline.