Confusion abounds after Horry County drops mask ordinance, but McMaster won’t step in
Horry County’s decision earlier this week to let its face mask requirement expire Oct. 30 has sparked backlash from local city leaders, who say the decision will create confusion throughout the county about where masks are required for both residents and visitors.
But some elected officials say there wouldn’t be an issue at all if S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster would simply hand down a uniform requirement across the state. Nevertheless, McMaster said in a press conference Friday that it’s still best for local jurisdictions, rather than the state, to create and enforce mask rules.
“No one rule fits every situation,” McMaster said at a press conference in Myrtle Beach. Mask rules “need to be tailored to the community. They need to respond to the wishes of the citizens, in light of the data (and) what we know about the spread of this highly dangerous, too many times fatal virus.”
McMaster said one of his biggest issues with creating a statewide mask requirement is that there is not enough state police to enforce it.
North Myrtle Beach City Council member Nikki Fontana said in an interview Friday that part of her concern comes from the meandering and at times strange boundaries between incorporated cities in the Grand Strand and unincorporated Horry County. These boundaries make it difficult for people to know where face masks are required and where they aren’t, some say.
Throughout the county, cities like North Myrtle Beach and Myrtle Beach have “doughnut holes” — pockets of county land completely encircled by the neighboring city.
“That’s confusing for people, because who’s going to know where the unincorporated areas of Horry County are, where the exact lines of North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach are,” Fontana said. “I’ve got pockets of county here in my in my city. People don’t know that. They don’t realize that.”
Deciding to implement a mask ordinance in North Myrtle Beach wasn’t easy, Fontana said. She and other city officials knew it wouldn’t be popular, but they did it anyway to protect the safety of their residents, especially older retirees who are immunocompromised.
But when Horry County’s decision threw a wrench into the region’s cohesion around mask compliance, Fontana said she wished the governor had stepped in long before to make the rules more uniform, preventing discrepancies like this from happening at all.
“I wish that it would have been done as a whole, as a state thing. I think it would have been less confusing ... for the general public,” Fontana said. “The governor asked us to do this, to think about doing this, and that’s what we did. I just I can’t wrap my head around why the county did not do this. I mean, we still have visitors coming in. Our residents are here.”
Myrtle Beach alone has 50 doughnut holes. The city’s mayor, Brenda Bethune, was among those who expressed frustration at the county’s decision because many residents, let alone visitors, will not know what jurisdiction they are in 100% of the time.
Geographical boundaries aside, however, both Fontana and Bethune said Horry County’s decision could lead to more lax mask compliance everywhere, even if a person or business knows what jurisdiction they are in.
Bethune said she hopes the county will revisit the decision.
“I don’t think this is the time to take our foot off the brake. We need to keep going,” Bethune said. “I think it’s what’s best for everyone — our entire county, for our residents, for our visitors, and I think we do need to be consistent.”
In the meantime, both cities still have mask requirements. North Myrtle Beach renewed its rule Monday, the day before Horry County voted to let its rule expire, and made it permanent so long as the city is still under an emergency declaration.
This story was originally published October 23, 2020 at 5:27 PM.
