Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
The New Mexico Environment Department fined O’Reilly Auto Parts for the second time in less than a month for violating coronavirus safety regulations, this time at a Lovington store where one employee died of the disease.
O’Reilly Auto Parts, based in Springfield, Missouri, is slated to build a store in Tucumcari later this year. The corporation last month leveled the remnants of the closed Cactus RV Park along east Route 66 to make way for the development.
NMED cited the O’Reilly Auto Parts store at 525 West Ave. in Lovington for allowing employees with COVID-19 symptoms — who ultimately tested positive for COVID-19 — to continue to work, failing to properly screen employees for COVID-19 and not following proper cleaning and disinfection protocols. Those actions violated state law, public health orders and COVID-Safe Practices, as well as O’Reilly’s internal policies.
Three employees at the store became COVID-positive, and one worker, a 46-year-old woman, died from it.
The NMED on Feb. 2 stated that O’Reilly Auto Parts’ violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act resulted in an unsafe workplace. Citations were issued for violations by management to protect employees from exposure to COVID-19. The agency assessed penalties of $242,827.20 for the violations.
“Providing employees with a false sense of protection from COVID-19 by putting policies in place to comply with state law and then not following them is unconscionable. Had O’Reilly management complied with corporate policies, it’s possible this tragic situation could have been avoided,” NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney said. “Every employee deserves to come home from work safe and healthy, and fortunately many New Mexico businesses are doing all they can to protect their workers.”
NMED also settled two citations to O’Reilly Auto Parts for violations of the public health order at a Santa Fe store in early January. In that case, O’Reilly paid $79,200 in penalties that go to the state’s general fund.
O’Reilly has 15 business days from the date the citations were issued to pay the assessed penalties or contest the citations before the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Commission. Any penalties collected will go to the state general fund, the primary state fund from which the ongoing expenses of state government are paid.
An email to O’Reilly’s corporate office requesting comment was not answered.
The Cactus RV Park was the site of the long-closed Cactus Motor Lodge built in the 1930s. The motel once was listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual publication that compiled businesses friendly to African Americans during the Jim Crow era. At least three other Green Book sites still exist in Tucumcari.
The Negro Motorist Green Book has received more attention in recent years because of the 2018 film “Green Book,” which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and a book by Candacy Taylor, “Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America,” published last year.
The Cactus also was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, though such a designation offers little protection.
O’Reilly Auto Parts, founded in 1957, operates more than 5,000 stores in 47 states, including several in the Texas Panhandle. The next-closest store in New Mexico exists in Clovis or Las Vegas.