Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon reacted to the state's new mask mandate on Friday, and said the county will be unable to begin enforcing the rule when it becomes effective Monday.

“I’m frustrated that we learned Friday morning, the same time you learned, and the expectation, when I asked the question of who will enforce this, the expectation was we would enforce it," McMahon said. "That’s déjà vu from what we went through at the beginning of the pandemic.”

New York's new mask-or-vaccination mandate for public buildings and private businesses takes effect on Monday. 

McMahon said he would not begin enforcing the mandate on the state’s deadline.

“We'll have to look at what our capacity is to enforce noncompliance once there is evidence that there is noncompliance. We’re going to start off with the assumption that people will comply,” he said. 

McMahon says adapting to the mandate — businesses figuring out how to enforce either option — will be a learning curve and require more time, thus the county will not punish businesses for lack of enforcement on Monday.

How the county will enforce the mandate remains is not determined. 

McMahon said on a Friday morning call with state representatives that he discussed the possibility of taking probation officers and paying them overtime to act as an enforcement team.

“There’s just not an easy solution through this," McMahon said. "My hope is that this all works and this all helps, but you can look at what we lived through and our past experiences and you can see how some things may be good with this policy and how some things could be lacking. And we could have a bit of a yo-yo effect here.” said McMahon.

He said the county was likely to implement a testing mandate for large gatherings of 100 people or more next week, but with the state’s mandate, the county won’t go that direction.

The county executive argued testing for the virus is more proactive form of mitigation than mask-wearing.