LEBANON — The Lebanon City Council on Wednesday voted unanimously to hold a public hearing to discuss dropping the city’s face mask requirement on March 16.
“I feel like it’s time for us to have this discussion,” Mayor Tim McNamara said in a recording of the meeting.
Some councilors, however, said their support for holding the hearing should not be interpreted as support for dropping the mandate.
Councilor Karen Liot Hill said that Grafton County was among some 30% of counties in the country where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends masks indoors.
Elsewhere in the Upper Valley, the CDC also continued to recommend masks in neighboring Sullivan County and in Vermont’s Orange County until Thursday, when the CDC updated its data. Now all four counties in the Upper Valley have sufficiently low community levels of COVID-19 that the agency no longer recommends masks for most people.
“I think that our efforts in the city of Lebanon in support of public health have resulted in positive outcomes,” she said. “This is a decision we should not take lightly.”
Hill also said she thought the Lebanon School District, which is set to drop its mask requirement on March 14, was “entirely premature” in doing so.
The School Board voted to drop its mask mandate at a meeting last week, after Gov. Chris Sununu and state health officials announced that the Department of Health and Human Services no longer recommends masks indoors statewide. Schools that maintain mask requirements are in conflict with the state Department of Education’s rules, the department has said.
The March 16 City Council meeting is scheduled to take place at 7 p.m. Agendas for City Council meetings are posted to the city’s website: lebanonnh.gov/1422/Agendas-Minutes-and-Meetings.