Vaccine mandates shake out few employees locally

Some workers in Washington state, faced with the ultimatum to get the jab or lose their jobs, have chosen to quit or retire instead of receiving a COVID-19 vaccination.

With employees in various fields, including school, health care, and state government required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine as a requirement for their employment by Oct. 18, many workers in the state have opted to retire early or simply quit their jobs. 

Locally, council members for the city of Grand Coulee, as well as the mayor, expressed support for city employees to make their own personal choice regarding the vaccine, while Coulee Dam is considering mandating the vaccines with city council members believing the death of a city employee was covid related. 

In Grand Coulee, at the Oct. 19 council meeting, Mayor Paul Townsend said regarding the vaccines, “I don’t want someone to do something they don’t want to do.” 

“People are leaving their jobs in droves, it’s ridiculous,” said Councilmember Tamara Byers, who added that she is a firm believer in people doing what they feel is best for themselves. 

“Let’s take a stance so our employees know we support their choices to vaccinate or not,” Councilmember Tom Poplawski said. “I think it’s flat out wrong that people are losing their retirement and jobs over a personal choice.”

The council discussed whether they needed an actual policy expressing this view, or if having no policy was, in effect, that policy.

In Coulee Dam, the city council will meet tonight. One item on the agenda is a discussion about a “COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate.”

The council, in a meeting two weeks ago, discussed the subject, with most seeming to favor the idea but wanting to wait for legal and expert advice until the next meeting.

Coulee Medical Center ended up parting ways with three employees over the mandate and making accommodations for 12 others, about 5% of the total staff of some 240, CEO Ramona Hicks told hospital district commissioners Monday night. “It’s been very challenging and difficult,” she said.

Those difficulties come at a time when hiring in health care is a huge challenge even without a state mandate. CMC currently has about 40 job openings.

Hicks said she understood a small hospital in Newport, Washington had lost about 60 employees who were either denied exemptions or resigned over the mandate.

“We can be thankful that it’s not to that degree,” CMC’s hospital district chair Jerry Kennedy said.

In the Grand Coulee Dam School District, 89% of the staff is vaccinated, and 11% have approved medical or religious exemptions, Superintendent Paul Turner said. “We had zero quit or retire because of the vaccine mandate.”

In the Washington State Department of Transportation, 402 out of 6,813 total workers (6%) have left their jobs due to the mandate, including 28 of 254 (11%) employees in the North Central region. 

WSDOT additionally approved 455 religious exemptions out of 572 sought, 51 religious accommodations, 83 medical exemptions out of 88 sought, and 43 medical accommodations. 

“We know at a high level that these departures will affect our general staffing, Washington State Ferries, maintenance, winter operations, the staff that maintain the equipment we use for maintenance operations and our construction projects,” WSDOT Communications Director Kris Rietmann Abrudan told The Star in an email.

Abrudan didn’t have numbers specific to the local DOT facility in Electric City.

The Washington State Patrol announced in a press release last week that it had lost a total of 74 officers, including 10 out of its District 4 based in Spokane and five from the Wenatchee-based District 6.

The Patrol lost a total of 127 employees, of about 2,200, the Spokesman Review reported last week, while the state government as a whole had lost nearly 1,900 employees, about 3% of its workforce by the Oct. 18 deadline.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was more tightlipped over the situation, with Public Affairs Specialist Erika A. Lopez saying in an email to The Star that she is “unable to share staffing information.”

Lopez did say, however, that “operations have not been impacted.”

“We continue to ensure that our mission to provide clean, renewable, economical, and reliable power to the Pacific Northwest proceeds accordingly,” she said. “The White House has provided guidance related to the vaccine, and we are abiding by that guidance.”

That guidance states that “agencies must work expeditiously so that their employees are fully vaccinated as quickly as possible and by no later than November 22, 2021,” as stated in the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force’s “COVID-19 Workplace Safety: Agency Model Safety Principles.”

President Joe Biden issued an executive order Sept. 9 requiring federal employees and contractors to be vaccinated, with limited exceptions.