San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Trying to clear haze around distributions
These days it seems like any column I write is outdated within days, if not hours, after the government rewrites some rule or another. My June 19 column on required minimum distributions was no different.
In it, a reader who took a required minimum distribution from her individual retirement account in January, before the Cares Act suspended RMDs for 2020,
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wanted to know if she could return it. The IRS had previously issued a notice that said, in a roundabout way, that distributions taken after Jan. 31 could be returned to retirement accounts by July 15, and wouldn’t be subject to tax or penalty. My column gave several convoluted ways a person could return a January distribution, but also recommended being patient.
On June 23, the IRS announced that taxpayers who already took a required
As cases spike and reopening plans stall across California, a few Bay Area restaurants have temporarily closed upon learning workers tested positive for the coronavirus.
These restaurant owners thought they were doing everything right: requiring employees to wear masks, keeping them as far apart as possible, putting hand sanitizer everywhere. Now they are starting to learn that those actions aren’t always enough. The coronavirus doesn’t recognize effort.
Counties don’t require restaurants to close when its employees test positive for the virus. Instead, they advise that those specific employees not be allowed to work until they test negative. On Thursday, Santa Clara County in
stituted a requirement that employers notify health officials within four hours of learning of an employee’s positive test result.
But that doesn’t always feel like enough. When Sergio Monleón, chefowner of La Marcha in Berkeley, heard one of his employees tested positive on a Saturday in June, he thought about financial damage: the canceled orders on a busy night, losing revenue during a precarious time and the possibility of a damaged reputation if people thought La Marcha wasn’t a safe place.
“The initial instinct was to do anything we could do to stay open,” he said. “But the more I thought about it, I thought, ‘What if this wasn’t a contained incident? What if it is spreading here? What if all of us have it?’ ”
He closed the restaurant that day and asked all of his employees to get tested. After two more came back positive, he decided to close for two weeks.
On Wednesday, Andrew Johnstone, owner of the Little Chihuahua restaurants in San Francisco, went through the same thing. An employee at the Divisadero location called in sick and tested positive for the virus. Those who worked in proximity with that employee stayed home even though they had no symptoms. When two of them tested positive as well, Johnstone closed the restaurant — he’s still not sure for how long. He’s now asking his employees at his other restaurant locations to get tested.
“There’s really no playbook here,” he said. “Very few other restaurants have had anything like this happen.”
Two of those restaurants are in Marin County: the Buckeye Roadhouse in Mill Valley, which closed for two weeks until July 6, and Comforts in San Anselmo, which recently reopened after a twoweek closure. Buckeye owner Peter Schumacher suspects there are other restaurants who have dealt with similar outbreaks but haven’t told the public since there’s no requirement to do so. And he thinks this is just the beginning.
“It’s maybe too early to say, but I have a feeling if we got hit ... I bet other restaurants will have similar cases,” he said.
Monleón wishes there were more clear recommendations from city officials as well as an opportunity to learn — if the virus got into La Marcha once, how can he ensure that doesn’t happen again?
“I was really looking for a consultation, somebody to look at our unique situation and kind of give an assessment based on what had happened, and I couldn’t get that,” he said. “I got generic guidelines.”
Monleón determined some of his own changes. When the restaurant reopened at the end of June, he bought a temperature gun and cut back staffing to create more physical distancing. But it’s hard to think of anything else he can do. He can’t control his employees’ actions beyond La Marcha’s walls, though he urged them to be safe and proactive about testing.
“We have a responsibility to each other,” he said. “If we’re going be working here, livelihoods are at stake, so we have to make sure we’re doing everything we can to make sure we’re safe outside of work as well.”
Now, Monleón is reconsidering whether La Marcha should resume indoor dining service whenever Alameda County allows it — the restaurant has been open only for takeout and delivery. It would be unsustainable to close for two weeks again and again.
So far, restaurant owners say customers have praised their transparency around the issue. It’s concerning that you can seemingly do everything right and still deal with an outbreak, Johnstone said, but the public seems to understand the current reality.
“Until there’s a vaccine, I think this is what we’re up against,” Johnstone said. “At the end of this, if it all collapses, it all collapses, but if we’re alive to see it collapse, that’s a success in a sense.”
Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker