Use money to rescue restaurants

Pizza is recession proof, they said. Everybody loves pizza, they said. Pizza never goes out of style, they said. And yet here we are more than two years into the COVID pandemic and my 30-year-old pizza business is hanging on by a gooey strand of cheese.

I started a pizza company in San Francisco in 1994 that has fed hundreds of thousands of customers over the years. And it has sustained my own family as well as hundreds of employees and their families.

And yet even as pandemic restrictions have finally relaxed, we’re still just barely able to make ends meet.

Mandated lockdowns, the seemingly endless cycle of viral mutations that we have to navigate, a labor shortage and supply chain issues, and let’s not forget inflation that has increased costs by 25% — the hits just keep coming for those in the restaurant business.

But I have hope.

California has an astronomical surplus — roughly $100 billion. What if California did something revolutionary?

Something that showed the rest of the country how a financially healthy state takes care of its people and small businesses? What if we took some of that surplus and created a California Restaurant Revitalization Fund?

For background, last year’s federal Restaurant Revitalization Fund burned through its $28.5 billion in less than a month, having funded only a third of the businesses who applied for it. Just recently, Congress shot down the opportunity to put more money into this fund, leaving more than 150,000 restaurants like mine high and dry.

There were over 36,000 California restaurants that applied for the fund. And yet more than half of these businesses received nothing, according to the California Restaurant Association. Not because their application was rejected, necessarily. More often than not, it was because the $28.5 billion fund to help restaurants had an $80 billion demand; it was never going to work for everyone.

But here’s the deal — California can come to the rescue.

Using just 7% of its surplus (that’s $7.3 billion for anyone who’s counting), California can help the restaurants who applied for emergency funds but didn’t receive anything. Approximately 20,000 California restaurants, representing hundreds of thousands of employees, would be able to get the money they need to dig themselves out of the hole this pandemic has nearly buried them in.

On behalf of all of my fellow restaurateurs, I am asking our state leaders and politicians to create a California Restaurant Revitalization Fund. The budgeting process is nearing completion, so time is of the essence.

I love California. I have lived and worked here in San Francisco for nearly 30 years. I have no desire to leave. California restaurants have been taking care of Californians for years. And I can’t help thinking, wouldn’t it be great if California took care of us in our continued hour of need?