Kansas lawmakers Thursday voted to ban unilateral COVID-style closings and gathering bans by health officials.

Henceforth, such orders by health officials at both the state and local level will be considered only recommendations that must be sanctioned by elected officials or judges.

In short, no more church closings by fiat.

The bill, Substitute for Senate Bill 29, which has been some five years in the making, also pointedly prohibits the use of law enforcement officers to enforce health orders on individuals, such as quarantines and mask or vaccine mandates.

The Senate approved the compromise bill by a 31-9 vote Thursday, while the House approved it 88-36 on Wednesday. The bill now goes to Gov. Laura Kelly, albeit with a veto-proof majority in the Legislature.

While COVID-19 is now in the rear-view mirror, questionable health orders are not.

Indeed, The Heartlander reported last month on a healthy central Kansas girl who was banned from Buhler High School and confined to home for 21 days after allegedly having been exposed to someone with chicken pox.

There was no immediate opportunity for the family to challenge the health department’s written order of confinement in court as required by law. The order was delayed more than a week, and was ultimately thrown out by a judge.

The bill was heartily endorsed by the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police, Kansas Sheriffs

Association and Kansas Peace Officers Association. The three organizations sent legislators a joint letter expressing extreme concerns with health officials’ current power to compel them to enforce health orders – often without due process or any evidence to support them.

Such orders are “particularly troubling,” the letter explains, “when the order is based on exposure and the individual has not tested positive for the disease and may never be a risk to anyone. It would be even more troubling if it involved a vaccine mandate or coercion to obtain a vaccine over objection.

“We have been troubled by these provisions since the COVID epidemic began and some of us experienced state and local health officers expecting us to enforce their orders not only for quarantine and isolation, but also for masks and other orders.

“The issue of isolation and quarantine were particularly troubling because it would force our officers to contact potentially infected persons, without knowledge of whether the person had tested positive or was perceived to be exposed and often without the proper protective gear or protective training.”

But all that leaves out the organizations’ chief concern:

“The biggest dilemma we were placed in is what to do with a person who refused such an order. There was nowhere to take them to force compliance,” the letter reads. “We could only cite them if there was a law violation and release them.

“To be expected to place a person in jail for noncompliance who has an infectious disease resulting in exposure to jail staff and other detained people was unfathomable.”

The bill protects Kansans from arbitrary health orders that have no evidence supporting them, says Jacklyn P. Paletta, the attorney representing the healthy high school honors student who was confined to home for three weeks. Both Paletta and the girl’s mother testified March 7 to a House committee about the experience.

“They now have to have probable cause,” Paletta says of health officials under the new bill, “which means they have to have evidence in writing demonstrating why they believe someone to be a danger to public health, such that they should be confined to their home.

“If we’re going to restrict the free movement of people, if we’re going to infringe on people’s fundamental constitutional rights, then there should be constitutional protections for that. It cannot be just on a whim.”

In other words, healthy Kansans merely suspected of being exposed to a communicable disease now have the same constitutional protections as suspected criminals.

“If the health department is trying to take action against you,” Paletta explains, “they have the same sort of responsibilities that law enforcement or the court would in a criminal case – basically, innocent until proven guilty. You’re essentially considered safe for public health until they can prove that you’re a danger to public health.

“Seems rather straightforward and constitutional protections that we’re sort of adding back in. These are just common-sense measures to demonstrate to Kansans that individual liberties and public health absolutely coexist.”