Austin Mayor Steve Adler, who’s in the middle of a legal fight over his city’s mask mandate, claimed businesses preferred when there was a statewide order mandating the use of facial coverings to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus.
During a CNN broadcast Saturday evening, the Democrat theorized that businesses preferred being able to cite Gov. Greg Abbott’s since-revoked statewide mandate as a reason for denying entry to maskless customers than individual store policy.
“Businesses, when the governor removed the mandate, a lot of them came to me and said that that put them in a really horrible place because they wanted to mandate masks in their businesses to protect their employees, but when the governor took the mandate off, they didn’t want those same employees to have to become the mask police,” he said. “It was better for them when there was a mandate from the state [because] they could say, ‘Hey, it’s not our rule. It’s the law,’ and I think that they like the fact that now, they can say in Austin, ‘It’s the law.'”
JUDGE DENIES TEXAS ATTORNEY GENERAL’S REQUEST FOR AUSTIN-AREA RESTRAINING ORDER OVER MASK MANDATES
Adler is embroiled in a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton over his city’s mask mandate. After Paxton sued Austin and Travis County on Thursday for failing to lift their mandates in accordance with Abbott’s policy, District Judge Lora Livingston denied the temporary restraining order Paxton sought until there is a ruling on the merits of the case, saying, “I don’t know that two more weeks [of wearing masks] is going to matter one way or the other.”
The Austin mayor celebrated the judge’s decision during the CNN broadcast, saying he’s “real thankful” for Livingston’s ruling.
Paxton, who argued in the filing that mandating masks is “expressly reserved to private businesses on their own premises,” had previously threatened to sue Adler over the citywide directive.
“If you continue to flout the law in this manner, we’ll take you to court again, and you will lose,” he warned city officials earlier this month.
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The decision from Livingston, who set a hearing for March 26, means that Austin and Travis County can continue to enforce their mask mandates in the meantime.
