Santa Rosa to pay reduced fine of $10,000 after workplace COVID-19 outbreak, detective’s death

Santa Rosa reached a settlement with state regulators to pay nearly $10,000 for violations of health and safety protocol by the city’s police department, where last spring a COVID-19 outbreak infected at least nine officers and killed one veteran detective.

The $9,750 fine, reduced from an original amount of $32,000, comes at the end of a nearly yearlong negotiation since the city appealed the citations issued by Cal/OSHA, the state’s occupational health agency, last September.

The settlement order the agency sent to the police department Sept. 7 shows that the four citations — for one procedural violation and three serious health violations — were all withdrawn, waived or reduced. All that remained were a $3,000 fine for neglecting to report the outbreak in a timely manner, which the state agency found was a violation made “in good faith,” and a $6,750 fine for violating mask fit-testing requirements.

Cal/OSHA-SRPD Settlement Order

The settlement amount is about 0.01% of the police department’s $67 million general fund.

“When we’re talking about a multimillion dollar budget, that’s not a lot,” said Police Chief Ray Navarro. “It doesn’t matter how much it is; we take it seriously.”

Cal/OSHA launched an investigation into the department following the death of Santa Rosa detective Marylou Armer on March 31, 2020. The 43-year-old contracted the coronavirus at work from a colleague.

According to its notification of penalty, Cal/OSHA initially determined that in March and April 2020, the police department did not effectively screen its employees for the coronavirus, implement a procedure for handling employees with COVID-19 symptoms, fit employees for protective respiratory equipment and report multiple cases of serious illness, including Armer’s.

Santa Rosa appealed the citations last year. One of its main objections to the findings was that Cal/OSHA’s timeline didn’t add up — that the alleged infractions happened before the department had received any guidance on COVID-19 from the Sonoma County Health Officer or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first county health order was issued March 31, eight days after the first police department employee tested positive and the same day Armer died in a Vallejo hospital. In the interim, the department had started cleaning and staffing changes to mitigate the spread of the virus.

“In the case of the September 2020 citations, the City took action to appeal the citations as they were based mainly on events in late February and March 2020, before information about the nature and extent of COVID-19 was known,” the city said in its Tuesday statement on the settlement.

But the department should have enacted a full and specific set of safeguards against COVID-19 long before the county or federal government’s health orders, regardless of early uncertainty about the pandemic, according to Garrett Brown, a veteran Cal/OSHA field inspector and Oakland headquarters staffer who retired in 2014 after more than 20 years with the agency.

Brown came out of retirement and rejoined Cal/OSHA between September 2020 and May 2021 and was not involved in the Santa Rosa case but worked on dozens of similar COVID-19 cases.

Cal/OSHA found the department to have violated Title 8, Section 5199 of the state code of regulations, a lengthy outline of standards institutions must immediately implement to protect certain staff from aerosol transmissible diseases. Last week’s settlement order changed the citations — originally totaling $27,000 — to a “notice in lieu,” which waived all the fines but required the agency to immediately correct the issues.

Santa Rosa has argued against these Section 5199 violations that it was unaware COVID-19 was aerosol transmissible, or airborne, at the time of the department’s March 2020 outbreak.

However, included in the state law’s definition of “aerosol transmissible pathogen” is “any novel or unknown pathogen,” which SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was before the county or CDC determined it could be spread through the air.

“Santa Rosa Police Department or city government has no leg to stand on when they say, ‘We didn’t know what to do,’ because this regulation and all the requirements under which they were cited had been in effect for more than a decade,” Brown said. “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, which you think the police department would know.”

The city did not respond to follow-up questions about aerosol transmissible disease policies by Friday.

To Brown, the ultimate $9,750 fine is less than a slap on the wrist for a violation of protocol the department was meant to review and update yearly. The penalty “doesn’t represent the worth of the detective who died any way, shape or form.” Even the original penalty of $32,000 is not a real deterrent to Santa Rosa or other law enforcement agencies from transgressing regulations in the future, he said.

Armer’s sister, who has previously spoken on behalf of her family, could not be reached for comment.

In an email Friday, Cal/OSHA said the appeals process and settlement of citations is standard procedure. It’s not uncommon for Cal/OSHA cases to settle for less than the original penalty.

"Among many reasons, settlements may occur when the Division receives additional information or evidence from an employer that was not available or provided to Cal/OSHA before citations were issued,” said spokesperson Luke Brown.

Cal/OSHA did not explain why it settled with Santa Rosa or what new information or evidence, if any, Santa Rosa provided.

Chief Navarro on Thursday reiterated that Armer’s death was tragic and that the department had done everything it knew how to protect the community. He could not say whether proper COVID-19 standards were in place at the time she was infected. His spokesperson, Sgt. Chris Mahurin, neither could confirm the exact date the department started aerosol transmissible disease protocol.

“(Section 5199) is one of them we clearly should have known, but it isn’t something we have dealt with on a regular basis,” Mahurin said. “But we still jumped on other measures to protect our staff.”

These measures, which he said began in April, included an emergency staffing model, which had officers on 14-day rotations between which they would quarantine at home for a full two weeks. Employees were also referred to Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa for testing and urged not to come in if they were experiencing flu-like symptoms.

A year and a half later, many safety protocol are still in place in the department, and it has fixed the violation over annually fitting employees with masks. Mahurin said that about 67% of the police department staff has submitted paperwork showing they’ve been vaccinated. That is slightly lower than both the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office’s vaccination rate and the county’s rate at large, which is between 70 to 76%.

Navarro said weekly testing for unvaccinated employees will begin Sept. 24.

You can reach Staff Writer Emily Wilder at 602-736-5270 or emily.wilder@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @vv1lder.