Orange County Tax Collector Scott Randolph is giving his employees two options: the shot or the door.
Randolph sent out a memo declaring that all of his employees would need to receive a COVID-19 vaccination or find a new job. The memo said that vaccination would be a condition for employment in the office for all new hires as well.
Randolph couched the vaccine requirement under the county’s obligation to create a safe working environment for employees.
“This variant’s getting bad. We have a responsibility to the employees to create a safe work environment and to the general public,” Randolph shared in a memo. “We’re an agency that just can’t be closed.”
The tax collector’s office employs 316 people in Orange County. Randolph feels that using their taxpayer-provided health insurance to cover preventable illnesses like COVID-19 would be a disservice to residents. He said it was “fiscally irresponsible to potentially incur high hospital bills for a communicable disease that is easily prevented by vaccination.”
Randolph is allowing for religious and medical exemption, but noted that these employees would be subject to extra restrictions. Exempt employees would be required to wear a face mask at all times when on county property. Randolph also floated the idea of weekly COVID-19 tests for unvaccinated employees, a move similar to the one proposed by Royal Caribbean for unvaccinated customers.
Randolph’s alarm isn’t unfounded. Florida is seeing a statewide spike in coronavirus cases, including massive jumps in county positivity rates throughout Central Florida. Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings reported that the county was in crisis mode on Monday, seeing over 1,000 new cases a day.
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This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2021.