While Gov. Pete Ricketts has repeatedly made his position clear on statewide mask mandates, one state senator says that the governor’s stance on local and city mask mandates is incorrect from a legal standpoint.

State Sen. Justin Wayne of Omaha issued a rebuke of Gov. Ricketts’s stance that towns and counties do not have the ability to enact mask mandates, sending out an email to local leaders and members of the press on Monday. The email cited legal statutes that he believes exempt them from the governor’s restrictions on local DHMs.

“There’s two different statutes or two different sections of law,” Wayne told News Channel Nebraska. “There’s the directed health measures, which are public health districts, but then there’s also city jurisdiction…They all have all clear authority to make regulations to prevent the introduction and spread of contagious infectious diseases into their city.”

When asked directly about Sen. Wayne’s declarations on Monday, Gov. Ricketts appeared to dispute the claims.

“I think we’ve addressed this in the past,” Ricketts said at his Monday press conference. “I don’t know that it’s just automatically guaranteed for every city to be able to do that as Sen. Wayne is suggesting.”

Wayne, who serves as the Unicameral’s Urban Affairs Committee Chair, said he has spoken to at least two local governments who intend to take up potential mask mandates with their city councils this week. He said there has been uncertainty from those local officials, with many of them citing Ricketts’s claims that they are not permitted to do so.

“I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he never looked at this section of the law, that he focused on the directed health measures and that area of the law, and that’s where he got his information,” Wayne said. “But I think there’s a bigger issue of the lack of statewide mask mandate as our infectious rate continues to go up and our total disease or those infected continue to go up. We know what works. The science tells us what works, and Governor Ricketts refuses to do anything about it. So, I am reaching out to the local mayors underneath the city authority and telling them here’s what the plain language says. You have the authority to do so.”

When asked if local health authorities will be allowed to set their own directed health measures, Gov. Ricketts gave a one-word answer on Monday.

“No.”

Ricketts said earlier this year that he would withhold federal funds from courthouses that require masks. He said last week that he would look into the issue as more county courthouses begin to require mask usage.

“We allowed local health departments to roll out individual type DHMs earlier this year when the virus was spreading asynchronously. Now the virus is spread pretty much uniformly across the state, so we’re going to have a statewide approach and local departments will not be allowed to do their own local DHMs.”

Wayne said that such policy puts local governments at risk.

“You know, I always thought Gov. Ricketts believed in local control,” Wayne said. “If those counties or cities feel that they need a mask mandate in there to protect not only the public but also their employees they should have the right and the ability to do so. To withhold federal funds that are deeply needed in these communities is reckless.”