Councilman seeks help for bars, restaurants
A stalled proposal for a program aimed at helping San Antonio bars and restaurants keep their lights on and pay their employees amid the coronavirus pandemic may be gaining steam.
Given the scale of need faced by the food and beverage industry — seriously hurt by occupancy restrictions and diminished dine-in crowds — District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño believes these businesses and their workers need the targeted relief.
“We’ve got to find a way to keep people afloat, to help them survive,” Treviño said.
Treviño’s proposal has been in limbo since he first rolled it out in October, despite the backing of four other City Council members to at least weigh the proposal.
For the idea to move forward, Mayor Ron Nirenberg has to schedule it for a hearing before the council’s governance committee — the agenda-setting panel chaired by the mayor. Treviño has asked Nirenberg to put it on the agenda, the councilman said, but to no avail.
“All I can say is that it just seems to be waiting around,” Treviño said. “I don’t know what the reason is that it hasn’t come up.”
In an attempt to force the mayor’s hand and prove his idea is financially viable, Treviño has identified, with the help of city staff, at least $750,000 he said could potentially pay for the program.
The lack of urgency to pursue more local aid has frustrated bar and restaurant owners — whose receipts have been wiped out since the pandemic began as the virus scared off diners and bar-goers.
Often, the owners feel their businesses are scapegoated as potential public health hazards even after many of them spent a substantial amount on measures designed to prevent the virus’ spread in their establishments — and despite admissions from local leaders that the vast majority of local businesses have been compliant with health rules.
Bars and restaurants haven’t gone entirely without local aid.
Since June, the city has doled out more than 200 grants totaling $8.7 million to dining and drinking establishments as part of a broader $28 million small business grant program. Bexar County has given out at least $5 million in grants to bars and restaurants with plans to hand out another $1.4 million.
Businesses in trouble
But to food and beverage owners, that amounts to pennies given the level of devastation.
“It’s been 10 months now and the city and county have done virtually nothing to help,” San Antonio restaurateur Chad Carey said.
Receipts from food and drink sales at Carey’s businesses are down 20 to 40 percent, he said, making it impossible to “function like that without laying people off, without bleeding cash, having your landlords have to forego money.”
More federal aid is on the way. San Antonio businesses including restaurants and bars will benefit from $284 billion Congress pumped into a second round of the Paycheck Protection Program, which provides businesses with forgivable loans for paying employees and utility bills. The $900 billion pandemic relief bill Congress passed late last year also included a number of tax credits and deductions aimed specifically at restaurants and bars.
There are worries the federal money could come too late. Businesses can begin applying for the new round of PPP loans this week. But given delays in federal distribution of the previous round of loans, Carey has little hope that his businesses will receive assistance through PPP before March — which means he will have to cut hours for employees, some of whom could see their paychecks shrink by nearly half, he said.
“The way that it’s going, it just feels like we’re out here on our own a little bit,” Carey said.
Treviño doesn’t want to wait on
more stimulus from Congress and he says the city hasn’t used enough of its own money to help those hurt by the pandemic.
Without more local assistance — and soon — restaurateurs and bar owners say the city risks a larger wave of restaurant and bar closures, weakening San Antonio’s cultural identity and depriving the city of a quality to lure tourists, new residents and businesses.
“When we’re luring talent from outside of our city, what do we promote?” said Jeret Peña, who owns the recently-opened bar Hello Paradise. “We promote food and beverage. Why? Because the younger talent want good food and beverage. They want a cool place to go to. They want something that’s hip and cool. That’s how you lure people.”
In an initial statement, Nirenberg hinted he feels a separate program geared toward bars and restaurants may be unnecessary.
“The city of San Antonio has been doing the work outlined in (Treviño’s) proposal since last spring,” Nirenberg said.
Any food and beverage establishment that applied for help under that program and met the qualifications got that help, Nirenberg said.
Treviño and others have argued that many bars and restaurants couldn’t qualify because the grant program was too restrictive.
For one, businesses with more than 20 employees didn’t qualify — though many local restaurants have more people than that on their payroll, said Dawn Ann Larios, executive director of the Texas Restaurant Association’s western region. Establishments that received grants also had to be open before August 2019 — excluding any new restaurants that have since opened.
“They couldn’t apply for it,” Larios said.
Separately, Nirenberg noted, the city’s emergency housing assistance program has put $74 million in the hands of 16,000 needy households trying to cover living costs including rent and utilities — and still has about $7 million left in the till.
The city is expected to receive more dollars for housing assistance out of the $900 billion stimulus package President Donald Trump signed into law two weeks ago — though it’s unclear how much.
The mayor also pointed to the city’s workforce development program — and the fact that those who enroll in job training because they’re out of work can get paid while they gain skills for higher-paying jobs.
Carey called that sentiment “tone-deaf.”
“I’m not against that program, but the joke I’ve been telling my friends is that’s like trying to work on somebody’s breaststroke when they’re drowning in the middle of the ocean,” Carey said.
Council members and city staff also put $4.5 million toward helping the food and beverage industry in November and December, said Bruce Davidson, the mayor’s spokesman.
In a follow-up statement, staff said the mayor hasn’t taken Treviño’s idea off the table and noted the governance committee has only met twice since Treviño first submitted it Oct. 15.
But other, newer resolutions have been processed. Nearly two weeks after Treviño put forth his proposal, District 3 Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran proposed a resolution honoring the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That item made it onto the committee’s Nov. 4 agenda. Eight days later, City Council passed the resolution.
To help get his proposal
moving, Treviño worked with Assistant City Manager Lori Houston and City Attorney Andy Segovia to pinpoint dollars the city could use to pay for relief for bars and restaurants.
That $750,000 pot they found would come with some strings attached. Those dollars come from a
trio of tax increment reinvestment zones in the city’s urban core — mechanisms that take increases in property tax revenue from land within the zone and put them into public improvements in the area such as drainage and streets.
Those improvements aren’t being made right now because of the pandemic, so the city might as well put the money to use, Treviño said. But that money could only be used to help businesses within the boundaries of those zones.
Another idea, Treviño said, is to move around some $17 million in city-issued debt that would have paid for a portion of the stalled Alamo Plaza renovation — including the controversial moving of the Cenotaph — toward other capital improvements, potentially freeing up dollars to be spent on assistance for bars and restaurants.
“It shows that there are pots of money that we could be looking at to fund these kinds of support,” Treviño said.
Throughout the pandemic, Nirenberg and Treviño have disagreed on how best to help the city deal with the virus’ economic fallout.
Treviño voted against putting the mayor’s plan to use $154 million in sales tax dollars for job training and college degrees for those put out of work by the pandemic on the November ballot.
The District 1 councilman has criticized the city’s approach to recovery as too focused on long-term efforts such as workforce development and not enough on immediate assistance in the form of small business grants and housing assistance.
Nirenberg, in turn, has seen the pandemic as an opportunity to try to put a dent in the city’s endemic poverty and economic segregation by training people for higher-paying jobs in fields like cybersecurity and health care. Those in the mayor’s circle point to the size of the city’s rental assistance fund as proof the city is providing short-term relief.