Restaurant rescue fund should be replenished
Fifteen years ago, when I told family and friends that my husband and I planned to open a restaurant, people thought we were crazy. Reactions ranged from “most new restaurants fail” to “spouses shouldn’t work together.” Natural entrepreneurs, we knew we could do it and were determined to make our dreams come true.
For more than a decade, things were great. Our successful breakfast and lunch café business pivoted to catering. Before long, we expanded to partner with the Pittsburgh Carpenters Union to provide the food service for their apprentice cafeteria.
With visions of expanding in early 2020, we were dealt the ultimate sucker punch in the form of a global pandemic. After initially closing, we reopened in a limited capacity offering both delivery and catering services for COVIDfriendly events. Anything we could do to stay open and maintain a relationship with our customers and community, we did. With that work and a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), we didn’t have to permanently close our doors.
The proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” came when we applied for and received a grant from the Small Business Administration (SBA) on May 16 through the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF) — a $28.6 billion grant program passed by Congress earlier this year to help rebuild restaurants, bars, and other food and beverage businesses. Overjoyed, we thought the RRF would be the key to making us whole again and that, finally, we could start getting things back to normal.
Instead, we went back-andforth with the SBA for more than six weeks. First, there was a delay, but we were told that we’d receive the money in 10 to 14 days. “Don’t worry; the money is reserved for you,” said an SBA representative. Until it wasn’t.
Suddenly, the SBA was unable to process the grant approved to our business due to pending litigation. A lawsuit had been filed against the SBA for giving priority to certain businesses. Women-, veteran-, and minorityowned businesses were afforded the opportunity to apply for RRF grants in the form of a special priority window — as is often the case with programs administered by the SBA.
The SBA notified us, and thousands of other grant recipients, that it was no longer allowed to distribute funds to these priority groups. Put simply, because of a lawsuit with which we had nothing to do, we were no longer getting what we had been promised.
The RRF is a critical lifeline for restaurants across the country. While life has improved over the past year by many measures, unfortunately bars and restaurants still struggle to remain open. The applications of more than 6,400 Pennsylvania restaurants remain in limbo, despite submitting eligible applications on time.
For us, that PPP loan we received coupled with limited sales only lasted so long. We’d love to bring back and hire more employees, but we have supply and equipment needs that can’t be satisfied (even partially) because the cost of supplies has drastically increased. What once cost $20 now costs $50.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about prioritizing certain businesses, once the government has promised and approved funding requests, it must honor those.
If Congress doesn’t replenish the RRF, more hard-hit food businesses, and possibly ours, will drop like flies. Yet, at this time no plans have been made to do so. Congress must live up to its side of the deal and fulfill the obligation the government made to restaurants, bars and other food and beverage businesses. It’s time to replenish the RRF.