Saying she and her colleagues have faced threats of violence, Jackson County Legislator Crystal Williams has pulled for now a proposal to establish a new set of public health regulations governing much of eastern Jackson County.

Williams blamed the furor surrounding the proposed rule on Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and his rhetoric on the issue and the steps he’s taken in the courts to challenge the legal authority of public health agencies statewide to manage the spread of infectious diseases of all kinds.

“I lay all of this struggle at his nasty, venal feet,” Williams told The Star. “His unfettered ambition has brought my county to its knees when it comes to public health.”

Schmitt did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Williams decision to pull her public health ordinance or her characterizations of his role in her decision.

The measure that Williams co-sponsored with legislator Jalen Anderson was introduced Monday and was to have come up for discussion before the county legislature’s health and environment committee next week.

But opponents of restrictions such as mask mandates and the like have sent Williams and others angry messages since the proposal was announced. The tone of the rhetoric on social media platforms has also been worrisome throughout the pandemic, she said, whenever the county imposed restrictions meant to curb the spread of COVID-19.

“I have had colleagues say to me they are afraid they are going to be shot,” she said.

Williams and Anderson introduced their proposed ordinance after a Cole County judge last fall struck down state public health regulations that the county relied on to manage disease outbreaks of all kinds. Suddenly, the county health department had no power to enforce quarantines and other restrictions needed to contain infectious diseases beyond COVID-19, such as measles, pertussis, hepatitis and tuberculosis.

Schmitt refused to challenge the judge’s ruling, despite being the legal representative of the state’s public health agency, the Department of Health and Senior Services. He sided with the judge, he said, who ruled that the regulations were an unconstitutional impingement on individual rights.

Schmitt’s critics, on the other hand, said his refusal to challenge the decision was a political move in furtherance of his efforts to gain Republican support for his U.S. Senate campaign.

Among those critics is Williams, a Democrat, who said she will reintroduce a public health ordinance at another time, after she and her colleagues can come to agreement on what should be in it. Several of them voiced concerns about the proposed language at Monday’s meeting, saying it needed to include a hearing process so that people could challenge restrictions on their movements and businesses.

Anderson and Williams were open to amending the ordinance to include that, but they decided to let things cool for awhile because of what she characterized in a written public statement emailed out Wednesday afternoon as “threatened violence directed toward me and some of my colleagues.”

She said the people making such threats should feel “ashamed.“

Williams said in the statement that she regretted that she had to pull the proposal for now, but would not let the matter drop.

“Despite the dangers to our public health presented by the rash and medically ignorant actions of the attorney general,” she said in the statement, “it’s crucial we develop a framework my colleagues understand and are comfortable with.”

In addition to refusing to challenge the Cole County ruling, Schmitt has sued Jackson County and other local governments over mask mandates and has been waging a campaign on social media against government efforts overall to manage the coronavirus pandemic.

“More and more people are seeing through the fear mongering and lies from COVID tyrants, their corporate media allies & ‘public health’ operatives,” he tweeted this week. “Forced masking is ineffective, vaccine mandates are illegal, COVID hospitalization numbers exaggerated and lockdowns don’t work.”