Mayor sees ‘new normal’ in reopenings
Over the next few days, Gov. Asa Hutchinson will announce whether restrictions on certain businesses will be lifted, beginning today with restaurants, and Hot Springs Mayor Pat McCabe said he also expects the governor to announce stipulations that will become the “new normal.”
Hutchinson announced on April 22 that he had established target dates to decide whether the state will lift restrictions on certain services and businesses if Arkansas continues its trend of reducing the spread of COVID-19.
The governor is expected to announce decisions regarding lifting restaurant restrictions today, fitness center restrictions on Thursday and beauty salons and barbershop restrictions on Friday.
“I think they’re targeting May 4 as a reopening date, so if May 4 was to be the day, (today) they’ll announce how that will occur,” he said. “So they’re going to give some guidelines as to what the expectations would be of restaurants to keep people safe, keep them socially distant, things along those lines; what the expectation for wearing masks would be. A whole host of things that they’ve already thought out, they just haven’t necessarily announced those yet.”
McCabe said even when everything is reopened, practices of hand-washing, social distancing and not touching your face need to continue.
“We’re going to be involved in this for some time to come,” he said. “Hopefully we can all adjust to that, but the new normal is here and now and so we have to practice that on those best practices in this current environment, and that’s here to stay.”
McCabe said he anticipates that if restaurants are able to be open, the seating capacities will drop 30-40% capacity.
The percentage may drop even lower, he said, depending on the “footprint” of the restaurant, since some are narrow, making it difficult to have as many tables occupied while maintaining social distances.
“Another major challenge,” McCabe said, “is there’s very narrow margins in the restaurant business, and they base those margins on a much higher level of meals served and if you reduce the occupancy or the seating say 70% down to 30% or even 40% the restaurant numbers don’t flow the same way, so they will be challenged in that area, so we have a lot of fixed cost that are still there, they’ll have some operating costs, but they won’t have enough people dining that they might not be able to cover all the expenses, so they may actually be going backwards by opening.”
As for lodging, he said he expects restrictions to remain for a while, which, as a hotel owner himself, will be tough on business, but worth it in the “long-term game plan.”
“You’re in business to serve, and you’d like to have as many people as you can, but at the same time you have health risks involved here, and I think if we swallow the pill, as hard as it is to swallow, if we keep that type of restriction in place, I think it will prove to be a better, longterm game plan for us, than us opening ourselves up to everybody, have everybody come in, we have a reversal in our downward trend, we now have a significant outbreak here in Arkansas that shuts us down again,” McCabe said. “We’ve got to prevent the shutdown again, we can’t have that.”
He said Arkansas is doing “very well compared to most states” in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to relax on lodging restrictions, allowing individuals in other states who aren’t performing as well come to Hot Springs, or to Arkansas, is a “surefire way” of having the state’s trend reverse and see an uptick in positive cases.