On March 16, 2020, LaVera Scott, the director for the Lucas County Board of Elections, remembers working at One Government Center until 10 p.m. the night before the primary election.

Although she usually works late nights leading up to elections, this one was different, because she wasn’t sure if there was going to be an election.

“We were here, preparing that if [an election] was not going to [happen], we had to go put out signage at all the polling locations, things of that nature to make sure people knew that the polls would not be open, which is, of course, what happened,” she said.

Earlier that day, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said the state would not open polling locations due to the coronavirus outbreak, but he technically didn’t have the power to make that decision, and a Franklin County judge declined the governor’s request to postpone the election.

“Basically we [were going to] run the Early Vote Center as our absolute last-minute Hail Mary,” said Kurt Young, a Democrat board member with the board of elections. “We were going to have everybody come to the Early Vote Center who wanted to vote in-person on Election Day if the primary went on as scheduled.”

Mr. Young, who joined the board in 2019, said they are trained that “the show must go on,” but that night, former Ohio Health Department Director Amy Acton ordered the polls to close as a health emergency.

The primary election was extended to April 28, 2020, and the deadline to receive applications for absentee ballots was moved to April 25, 2020.

Just one week before, the governor ordered a state of emergency after three Ohioans tested positive for the coronavirus. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic. Slowly, the state banned mass gatherings and closed schools and restaurants. Personal protective equipment was in high demand.

An uncertain response

On March 22, 2020, the Ohio Department of Health issued a stay-at-home order, requiring all nonessential businesses and employees to cease operations until April 6, 2020.

Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz said Governor DeWine and Dr. Acton held daily meetings with the mayors of Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, and Akron to provide updates on Ohio’s status.

“I think it was that Friday [March, 13, 2020], so our third call with Governor DeWine, and he said, ‘However bad you think this is, it’s going to be 10 times worse,’” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said. “That was the moment I realized, this is bad.”

Mr. Kapszukiewicz said in that same meeting, the governor went on to talk about body bags and MASH units. Mr. Kapszukiewicz said the city prepared for the worst, and on the other side of One Government Center, the Lucas County commissioners were doing the same. 

“Immediately we thought we’d have to lay off like a quarter of our staff, we couldn’t spend money anymore,” Commissioner Pete Gerken said. “We thought we’d be financially devastated.”

Mr. Gerken and his wife planned a trip to Miami Beach for that week, but his friend Dr. Jon Ross warned him not to get on the flight. Mr. Gerken canceled his plans, and, instead of sitting on a sunny beach in Florida, he sat on the 18th floor of One Government Center with his fellow commissioners and staff asking “What do we do?”

“I’ve been around for hurricanes, I’ve been around for tornadoes as an elected official, floods,” he said. “I’ve been around for the water crisis, so we had some sense of being in emergencies before, but this was so new and raw and unmanageable that we were confused, and I think, at first, like everybody was, we planned for the worst.”

Eric Zgodzinski was the county health commissioner at the time, and he said the most frustrating part was the confusion surrounding the virus.

“We would be told one thing in the morning, and then by the afternoon, it changed,” he said.

On March 18, 2020, Mr. Kapszukiewicz declared a state of emergency in Toledo. The declaration mirrored cities across the country as the virus continued to spread. Just two days later, local health officials confirmed that Mark Wagoner, Sr., of Springfield Township, was the first person in the state to die of the virus. Mr. Wagoner was a well-respected attorney and an active member of the Ohio Republican Party.

“My dad and I were very close,” Mark Wagoner, Jr., said. “My dad was a lawyer in town, and my dad was my hero growing up, and still is today. Personally, it was very, very hard, but I had my own family too ... and certainly I wanted to protect my kids who had just lost their grandfather.”

In 2021, Governor DeWine invited Mr. Wagoner and his family to the Great Seal State Park in Chillicothe to a plant a tree in his dad’s honor. The sugar maple tree is just one of many in the COVID-19 Pandemic Memorial Grove. 

“I think we experienced [the pandemic] more intimately than most places,” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said of Mr. Wagoner’s death.

Financial uncertainty and adapting to the new normal

On April 14, 2020, The Blade reported that the commissioners projected a $30 million shortfall from the pandemic. But Mr. Gerken said the shortfall never occurred.

“I remember being in the room saying, ‘Let’s not project that yet, let’s not put any more fear into the public until we know for sure,’” he said.

In the first six months of the pandemic, Mr. Gerken said the county actually saw an economic boom from out-of-state residents.

“Here’s what helped us,” he said. “Michigan shut down quicker and harder than we did, and we’re right on the border, so we saw an uptick of sales tax where we thought we’d lose a lot.”

Mr. Kapszukiewicz was also concerned about the financial future of the city.

“I was worried because in April, 2020, a national article came out that ranked cities that would be hit the hardest economically by COVID, and the top four of the five cities were in Ohio,” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said. “I think Toledo was number four.”

Mr. Kapszukiewicz explained that Ohio is rare in that cities are primarily funded by income tax. Since businesses and offices were closed, most residents weren’t working. Mr. Kapszukiewicz said the city had to furlough employees as part of its preparation for the worst.

Councilman Sam Melden had just been sworn in to Toledo City Council two months before the world shut down. He only sat in the District 5 seat a handful of times before he was casting votes through a computer screen.

“I barely knew where the bathrooms were in One Government,” he joked. “And we switched to Zoom meetings, and I think we ended up doing meetings on Zoom for 18 or so months.”

Being a district councilman means answering to a specific group of constituents, but Mr. Melden said it was challenging to connect face to face with them, especially since most in-person events were suspended.

“Public engagement was hard,” he said. “I remember I held a neighborhood meeting at a park and socially distanced, but we had very limited ability to get out into the neighborhoods.”

Although Mr. Gerken had been a county commissioner for 15 years at the time, even he had to learn a few new things.

“I remember my first Zoom commissioners meeting, and we got hacked by a pornography hack,” he laughed. “So the middle of meeting pornography came on, and we had to just shut down and restart.”

After navigating through a primary election, Ms. Scott’s department was tasked with conducting a safe general election. Voting booths were set six feet apart, and so were residents waiting in line to vote. Masks were supplied for employees and poll workers, and each voting station was cleaned after it was used. Ms. Scott said the board enlisted additional poll workers that were safety coordinators and were stationed at each polling location.

Trying to get poll workers for every election is a task itself, but Tim Monaco, the deputy director for the Lucas County Board of Elections, said that year, it was surprisingly easy.

“That was the most poll workers we’ve ever had,” he laughed. “It helped since the schools were closed because we had quite a few teachers and even some students working.”

The night the board met to certify the November election results, current Chairman Fritz Schoen tested positive for the virus. The board can meet if there are only three members present, so Mr. Young, Brenda Hill, and David Karmol met to certify the results.

“Dave came into that meeting wearing gloves, a set of goggles, and a mask, and basically said, ‘I don’t feel quite right, but I’m not positive yet. I am going to push through,’” Mr. Young said. “He literally got word in the meeting that he was positive, so he was exposing all of us, but again, he took every precaution he could to get the job done.”

Returning to normal

A year later, the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan into law, which allocated $3 billion in supplemental funding to communities throughout the country. Toledo received more than $180 million from the act.

“Without the ARPA funds, I don’t even want to think about what would’ve happened to Toledo,” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said.

The same day that the Biden administration signed the ARPA law, it announced plans to get all Americans vaccinated by May 1, 2021.

“There was not one minute [of hesitation],” Tina Butts, founder of the Movement, said. “I couldn’t wait to get vaccinated. I trusted the doctors.”

Ms. Butts wanted to help others get vaccinated so she worked with area hospitals and the Toledo Lucas County Health Department to distribute them.

Vaccines were free of charge. She set up shop at the county health department and the United Auto Workers Local 12 hall and went door to door to get people vaccinated.

She said the hardest part was fighting uncertainty and misinformation surrounding the vaccine. Despite hesitancy from people to get vaccinated, the Movement reached more than 74,000 people.

“We were out there to save lives,” Ms. Butts said. “It doesn’t matter the ZIP code, if you’re black, pink, purple. We wanted to save lives.”

Looking back five years later, Mr. Zgodzinski said it’s easy to point at things the county could have done differently.

“It’s really easy to play armchair quarterback right now,” he said. “You know, I could sit and tell you multiple things that, ‘Boy, I wish I would have said this differently or done this differently, or if we would have put staff over here’ ... but that’s what we’re supposed to do in public health when we’re working on something like this, we should be looking at those things that we need to change, so the next time that it happens, and it will happen again, how do we learn from the things that we wanted to do differently?”

Although bans on mass gathering are a thing of the past, restaurants are reopened, and masks are no longer mandated, Mr. Zgodzinski said the coronavirus is still impacting people, and now, there is a different issue.

“I think the crisis that we have now is, are we prepared for that next massive event like COVID-19?” he said.

When asked if he thought the country was, he said no.

“Not to my liking,” he said with the disclaimer that he is “out of the loop” a little bit.

Mr. Zgodzinski is now an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, but, for a year, he and his staff worked 20-hour days. They came in on the weekends. Mr. Zgodzinski said he was called names, mocked, and even received death threats, but he never quit.

“A fireman, they want to go into a fire and put it out, right?” he said. “I mean that’s what they do, that’s what they are trained for, but also, they know that they don’t want to have a fire because somebody is now impacted ... same thing here. This is what I’ve been training for, what everyone in public health has been training for for so long.”

Mr. Zgodzinski said he knows the county’s response wasn’t perfect, but he and his staff did the best they could with the information they had.

“I think the bigger takeaway is, even though the response was nowhere near perfect, the event itself front-loaded a lot of issues for us, but public health was able to respond,” he said. “It was able to do what it was set up to do, and you know, if it’s given the ability and resources, it can do a lot of good things.”

First Published March 16, 2025, 11:30 a.m.