CALDWELL, Idaho — Update, Monday, July 20: The meeting set for Tuesday, July 21 at 8:30 a.m. was canceled on Monday afternoon. The meeting has not been rescheduled.
Early Thursday, a confrontation at Southwest District Health in Caldwell lead to the cancellation of a board meeting. Now, SWDH is explaining what they saw on their end.
Nikki Zogg, the director of Southwest District Health, said they expected people at their building early Thursday to make their voices heard.
“Probably around 8:15 to 8:20 we started getting messages in the board room that there were escalating issues outside of the building,” Zogg said.
By 9 a.m. Thursday, the scheduled meeting was postponed because of safety concerns.
READ MORE: SWDH meeting on mask mandate canceled after Ammon Bundy, protesters force way into building
“We hadn’t anticipated any escalation of protests, we really expected to have peaceful protests with people present,” said Zogg.
Other health districts have seen similar situations with members of the public gathering outside during health board meetings.
As videos across social media show, however, things early Thursday were much different.
“At some point, some of the members of the public tried to force their way into our clinic area where we were seeing patients to gain access to our meeting room which is further inside the building,” she said.
A lot has been made out of the crowd coming into the lobby, but the concerns were actually more centered on the clinic inside the building.
“We offer clinical services such as immunizations, women’s, infants and children’s or WIC programs, we have a medical clinic,” said Zogg. “Certainly our staff were frightened by the event as well as clients and patients that we had in the clinic.”
Videos of the morning events show shoving and yelling inside, but Zogg says a vast majority of people were respectful.
Staff wanted the public to be able to watch the meeting, so on the fly they set up a video feed in the community room for people to watch.
“So that was available and those individuals, from my understanding, that came in and sat in that room were, again, very respectful and kind to our staff and we very much appreciated that,” said Zogg.
Of course, the meeting never got started after the board chair called of the meeting after consulting with Caldwell Police on-scene.
Southwest District Health will hold a re-scheduled meeting Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. Board members will be meeting remotely, but the public will be allowed to come to watch a video feed at their office.
There is an expectation that people wear face coverings if they choose to go inside the building. Staff is working to set up a video feed outside if people do not want to wear a mask inside.
Again, Tuesday is a public meeting, not a public hearing. There will be no public comment at the meeting, but SWDH wants the community to know they see and hear feedback from the community loud and clear.
It is not a foregone conclusion the board will even vote on a possible mask mandate, Zogg said one of the goals of the original meeting was to discuss health information with medical leaders and to get an idea of where they could go.
“Not necessarily implement public health orders that day, rather they will probably direct the district to draft orders for them to consider and vote on later,” said Zogg.
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