ELRICH: ‘I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH STAFF RIGHT NOW TO OPEN UP ALL THE LIBRARIES’

 From MyMCMedia, reporter Deirdre Byrne. Full store here. Our question, were library staff laid off during the Pandemic? Yellow highlight my own.

At his weekly media briefing on Wednesday, County Executive Marc Elrich was asked by a reporter about why libraries, recreation centers, and senior centers still have not reopened.

According to Elrich, there are “different issues” for why these places have not fully reopened. “One is you know we don’t we don’t have everybody vaccinated then unless you’re going to start using passports to determine who comes in we’d like to be at a higher level of vaccination before we generally open things up which is why we’ve set our targets based on the percentage of people vaccinated now,” he said.

Elrich said another issue is that the county has not filled vacant positions for libraries and recreation over the last year, so it requires going through a hiring process. “I don’t have enough staff right now to open up all the libraries,” he said.