Safety comes first, but try to support small businesses
The Cape May County task force sent a sensible and not overly aggressive proposal to the governor seeking to reopen the local economy in stages.
Officials, including task force leaders Freeholder Vice Director Leonard Desiderio and Freeholder Will Morey, sent the proposal last week, talked with the governor’s office then and were to be working with his office again this week.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Gov. Phil Murphy has been clear – extremely clear – that he believes that public health must come first and when that is secured, economic health will follow. He continued his emergency order that shutters most businesses and continues social distancing mandates through the first week of June.
Although the county proposal seeks some relief ahead of that schedule, we believe it is well thought out. Officials know it is going to be hard to keep visitors out of the county as the weather improves. They want to give smaller businesses a chance to begin operating. As some people have sarcastically noted, the shutdown has allowed giant corporations such as Walmart to keep operating at the expense of the small shops that line our downtowns and beachfronts.
The county plan asks, as Desiderio put it, to help the “little guys.” The proposal, as outlined in this week’s newspaper, would have allowed them to open their stores this week for online shopping – so they could provide merchandise curb-side to customers, but neither retailers nor restaurants would open their interiors to customers until after the Memorial Day Weekend. Similar limits would be in place for hotel and home rentals, but would still not let them operate fully until later in June.
We doubt the governor will clear Cape May County – or Atlantic County, which has a similar economy – before the rest of the state, but perhaps he will see the wisdom in a limited plan and it may coincide with the improving health statistics that he says are necessary before limits are lifted.
The county proposal does make clear that safety is a priority – safety for residents, tourists, second-home owners, businesses, their employees and customers. With that in mind, and knowing that there will likely be an influx of people in the coming weeks, it has to be obvious that containing the further spread of COVID-19 is the priority here and elsewhere.
If the pandemic numbers don’t show that this proposal can be safely done without risking lives, we don’t see it moving forward.
Cape May County has done an impressive job of keeping people safe from the coronavirus and Atlantic County is not that far behind. We can’t jeopardize that.
