A county in North Carolina has written a symbolic order declaring support for reopening businesses despite a statewide stay-at-home restriction.
The Gaston County Commission issued a statement that said it supports reopening businesses this week with social distancing limitations in defiance of Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order that is in effect until May 8.
“If we continue the stay-at-home order, it will not have a good effect for Gaston County, and we will maybe not have anything to come back to,” Commissioner Chairman Tracy Philbeck said.
The move comes as some local governments and businesses across the country push to reopen economies and get people back to work after suffering a severe blow from coronavirus shutdowns. Medical experts warn that widespread reopening cannot happen safely without increased coronavirus testing capacity.
In California, mayors around San Diego want to reopen their economies by Friday, despite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s statewide stay-at-home orders that he says won’t be loosened until “a week or two.”
San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond held a press conference this week with mayors from towns such as Carlsbad and Escondido, and said, “We need to crack this door open. We need to start the economy going again.”
“This is about the thousands and thousands of people that are out of work mostly from the service industry, the restaurants, places like that,” Desmond said.
Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall added, “We have over 5,000 room nights here in Carlsbad in our hotel businesses. That supports 20,000 people to make that happen. Right now, all those hotels are closed.”
In New Mexico, the mayor of a small town encouraged business owners to flout the state’s lockdown orders and reopen.
“The governor is killing the state over a little bug,” Grants Mayor Martin “Modey” Hicks said at a rally Monday.
Four states — Alaska, Georgia, Oklahoma, and South Carolina — have already begun opening local economies, and eight other states plan to lift stay-at-home orders later this week.
President Trump has been eager to get people back to their jobs and offered an optimistic look at the future.
“I built the greatest economy. With all of the people that helped me and all of the people in this country, we built the greatest economy the world has ever seen,” Trump said at the White House on Monday. “And we’re going to do it again. And it’s not going to be that long. Okay?”
“We had the greatest economy ever in the history of our world, and I had to turn it off in order to get to a point where we are today. And now we’re making a comeback. And I think we’re going to have, economically — from an economic standpoint, next year — an unbelievable year. And I think that you’re going to see a fantastic fourth quarter, and the third quarter will start to build. But the second quarter, obviously, you’re going to have GDP lack of growth,” he said.
The U.S. economy has contracted at a 4.8% pace from January through March, and the effects of the virus have hit more than 26 million people who lost their jobs in the last five weeks.
The economic impact endured in the past months has business owners setting dates on when they plan or want to reopen their doors.
The United States’ biggest shopping mall owner, for example, Simon Property Group, is reopening 49 of its locations across 10 states beginning Friday.
And in Ohio, the state’s Restaurant Association is pushing for a new way to feed customers by May 15: socially distant dining options.
“As Ohio businesses begin to reopen, restaurants are able to safely offer dine-in service, with appropriate social distancing added to all of the procedures we will follow to keep our employees and our guests safe,” Ohio Restaurant Association President & CEO John Barker said in a news release.
The ORA’s manager of media & communications, Homa Moheimeni, added, “Each day, each hour, each week that this goes on, the restaurants are going to struggle more and more. They are running out of cash essentially.”
In Gaston, the local leaders say a “one-size-fits-all” approach to the coronavirus has killed businesses. Though the area’s leaders say they “can’t tell someone to break the law in an official government document,” “we wanted to also make clear that we support your right to work.”
“We’re not going to stand in the way of people who want to work,” Philbeck said.
