Social distancing protocol required at open businesses

Bay Area’s requirement revised 4/29, L.A. County’s requirement continues

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Contributors

With the statewide Covid-19 order remaining in place, it is important for all businesses, in particular those with “essential” functions or otherwise allowed to remain open, to keep up to date with their compliance requirements.

Businesses must comply with both state and local (county/city) orders, with changes happening on a daily basis. Just recently on April 29, seven Bay Area locales (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties, as well as the City of Berkeley) issued a revised shelter-in-place order that is effective May 3, and set to expire May 30. These, as well as existing Los Angeles, Ventura, and San Diego counties’ safer at home orders require open businesses to maintain written social distancing protocols, provide copies of the same to employees, and post signage regarding the same.

Broadly, social distancing protocols address sanitization of surfaces, methods to maintain appropriate distance between persons, controlling the number of customers present at one time, face covering requirement, a notice for persons with symptoms not to enter, and the like. Employees must also be provided or reimbursed for their face coverings.

Although you should contact competent counsel to discuss the specifics of your situation, guidelines and sample protocols are provided by the various counties as “Appendix A” to their orders. For example, see L.A. County’s order and San Francisco’s updated order.

If your dealership is located in any of the following counties or cities, please take the time to carefully read the applicable Social Distancing Protocol and adopt any applicable measure listed in the Protocol. If you have questions about the applicability of a requirement, please do not hesitate to contact us. We anticipate that these requirements will be in place for several weeks or months and that local authorities will inspect for compliance. Please note all Bay Area Counties have adopted the same Social Distancing Protocol form. Joint Press Release re Bay Area Orders

For dealership’s located in jurisdictions that have not adopted formal Social Distancing Protocol requirements, they should move forward with a formal policy nonetheless. These requirements are likely to expand across the state, so now is the time to order new supplies, make any physical changes needed, and help employees adapt to new procedures. In addition, putting such a policy in place now is likely to ease the minds of employees, decrease the risk from exposure, and limit future impacts on your business and liability.

We’re available to draft, review, and help with implementation of these policies.