Council OKs tents for outdoor dining
POTTSTOWN » As coronavirus cases spike and new state restrictions have banned all indoor dining, Pottstown Borough Council acted to offer what lifeline it could — real estate.
Specifically, council voted 6-1 to allow temporary tents with heat to be erected for use by downtown restaurants at Smith Family Plaza, in front of borough hall, and in the parking lot at the corner of East High and South Charlotte streets.
Other tents will be set up at The Alley and the Iron Gate Biergarten on High Street, but because both of those will be on private property, no council action was required.
Last week, Gov. Tom Wolf initiated a sweeping and contested set of new restrictions to try to stem the rising tide of new COVID-19 infections.
They included:
• Limiting outdoor gatherings to no more than 50 people.
• A suspension of indoor dining.
• A shutdown of entertainment venues including concert venues, theaters, movie theaters, casinos, bowling alleys and private clubs.
• A shutdown of gyms and fitness centers.
• All businesses that serve the public, such as retail stores, are capped at 50 percent capacity.
On Wednesday evening, The
“The indoor dining ban caught restaurant owners by surprise and at a holiday time that the hospitality industry is really dependent on.” — Peggy Lee-Clark, Pottstown Area Industrial Development
Center Square reported that “federal data shows pandemic restrictions forced three in 10 businesses statewide to close, at least temporarily, ranking Pennsylvania second only to Michigan in terms of economic lockdown impacts.”
Despite this, “the number of businesses that received federal aid in Pennsylvania for complying with these closures didn’t even crack the top 20, leaving many employees seeking jobless benefits in a system too crowded to handle the influx of workers — more than 1.2 million in March and April alone — witnessed at the onset of the pandemic,” according to the report.
On the same day that report was issued, Adam Burke, proprietor of Pottstown United Brewing, was joined by Bill Rutter, who owns Mom’s Place and the Stonehouse Grill in Phoenixville, sitting in the falling snow.
They had set up an outdoor “blizzard party” and were hoping some brave customers would brave the weather for some holiday cheer.
It is the type of outdoor dining experience the tents council has approved would provide.
“I don’t know if people will come out in the cold. We’ll see,” said Burke. “I hope it helps.”
The council effort was undertaken with coordination with the Pottstown Area Industrial Development agency, which oversees Pottstown’s economic development efforts and has found that many restaurants are suffering from the restrictions being placed on them due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Peggy Lee-Clark, executive director of PAID, said the ban on indoor dining during the surge in COVID-19 cases “caught restaurant owners by surprise and at a holiday time that the hospitality industry is really dependent on.”
Lee-Clark said restaurant owners are also worried about their employees who, because they are paid partially through tips, will only get a small amount from unemployment, a benefit they likely will not be able to access much before
January.
More galling for them, she said, was watching “big box stores” stay open with “huge crowds” inside while their smaller establishments are forced to close by the new state regulations.
Council President Dan Weand said council is “willing to be flexible” to try to help those businesses stay open under difficult circumstances.
Although he offered no comment at the meeting, Councilman Michael Paules cast the only vote against the measure.
He sent an email and wrote “it seems to me that this isn’t a council for the people of the town but it is a council for a few blocks on high street and more for the trees than the people.”
After the meeting, Paules wrote that he voted against the tenting measure because “I guess they think that businesses are more important than the constituents of the town. The reason I voted nay on those 3 ideas is because they don’t help the people at all.”