Cities set to end COVID-19 emergency after February

After almost three years, California’s COVID-19 state of emergency is set to end in about a month.

In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he would be ending the state of emergency Feb. 28, and cities are starting to pass resolutions doing the same. This week, the Union City and Newark city councils passed resolutions that will end their local states of emergency on the same day as the state, bringing to an end eviction moratoria, delivery fee caps and other COVID-19 era policies.

Well, not all of them. Outdoor dining, for instance, is here to stay, though restaurants that were previously granted temporary permits may have to make modifications to continue serving outdoors as they transition to more routine, administrative permits.

Newsom declared the COVID-19 state of emergency March 4, 2020, a few months after news of the novel coronavirus began to spread. By the middle of the month, cities and counties across the state had followed suit. Schools and businesses shut down, restaurants transitioned to delivery and outdoor dining, and masks and social distancing became a fact of life.

Those states of emergency are no longer needed, city and state officials have said, now that vaccination rates are high, hospital emergency rooms aren’t swamped and life is beginning to return to normal.

“The State of Emergency was an effective and necessary tool that we utilized to protect our state, and we wouldn’t have gotten to this point without it,” Newsom said in a statement. “With the operational preparedness that we’ve built up and the measures that we’ll continue to employ moving forward, California is ready to phase out this tool.”